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If Your Back's Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement - Hardcover

Cotton, Dorothy F.

 
9780743296830: If Your Back's Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0743296834 ISBN 13: 9780743296830
Verlag: Atria Books, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

The only female in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle of leadership, for the first time, offers her account of the Civil Rights Movement and what it means to us now.

“Nobody can ride your back if your back’s not bent,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said at the end of a Citizenship Education Program (CEP), an adult grassroots training program directed by Dorothy Cotton. This program, called the best-kept secret of the twentieth century’s civil rights movement, was critical in preparing legions of disenfranchised people across the South to work with existing systems of local government to gain access to services and resources they were entitled to as citizens. They learned to demonstrate peacefully against injustice, even when they were met with violence and hatred. The CEP was born out of the work of the Tennessee Highlander Folk School and was fully developed and expanded by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King until that fateful day in Memphis in April 1968. Cotton was checked into the Lorraine Motel at that time as well, but she’d left to do the work of the CEP before the assassin’s bullet was fired.

If Your Back’s Not Bent recounts the accomplishments and the drama of this training that was largely ignored by the media, which had focused its attention on marches and demonstrations. This book describes who participated and how they were transformed—men and women alike—from victims to active citizens, and how they transformed their communities and ultimately the country into a place of greater freedom and justice for all. Cotton, the only woman in Dr. King’s inner circle of leadership, for the first time offers her account of the movement, correcting the historical impression that “we only marched and sang.” She shows how the CEP was key to the movement’s success, and how the lessons of the program can serve our democracy now. People, and therefore systems, can indeed change “if your back’s not bent.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy Cotton, a lifelong activist and visionary dedicated to social justice. She lives in Ithaca, New York, where the Dorothy Cotton Institute of Cornell University was recently launched as a tribute to her legacy.

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Chapter 1

SHARING THE PRIZE

Going to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize

SITTING ON A transatlantic jet airplane with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. en route to Oslo, Norway, where he would receive the Nobel Prize for Peace, is an experience I can’t help but juxtapose with my years growing up poor on Greenleaf Street in Goldsboro, North Carolina. How could I have come so far from that small town, one of four motherless daughters of a tobacco factory worker who made nine and sometimes twelve dollars a week? When the news came on the radio that Martin had won, I fairly danced out the front door of our Auburn Avenue office excitedly exclaiming to some of our organizers standing there, “We won! We won! Dr. King is the winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize!” I shared the news with people we knew in the shops and eateries, all the little business establishments along “Sweet Auburn.” I’m not sure all of them even understood the enormity of this incredible honor. But the excitement escalated. I walked around in a state of high exhilaration as well as in sort of a daze. I’m aware still of having felt vindicated—even more justified in the rightness of our cause. There were smiles and there were tears of joy.

Dr. King’s entourage on the trip to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

My title at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was Director of Education. Though we all had rather impressive titles, most of us were fully involved in every direct action and voter education campaign. My main responsibility was directing the Citizenship Education Program (CEP). When I found out that I would be accompanying Dr. King, along with almost thirty other friends and team members, transformation truly occurred in my life. The once poor little girl from Goldsboro would be among those honored to be with Martin Luther King Jr. as he and all of us were feted in Norway’s capital by Norwegian royalty and other European dignitaries.

When the news came, Martin was in the hospital, where he was spending a few days for a thorough physical examination and much-needed rest from our hectic schedule. He was exhausted. Not surprisingly, he was now under even more stress as he bore the heaviest burden of our struggle to end segregation and the abuse that was inherent in such a system. It seemed the whole burgeoning civil rights movement structure was begging for his input, his guidance, and his opinion about what to do next and how to do it. Everyone wanted him in their town. They wanted to experience his powerful oratory, his guidance, and the confident spirit of hope he projected. And Martin wanted to respond even as the passage of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 generated even more requests for his presence.

President Lyndon Johnson had signed the historic bill, and Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president, had opposed it. Our choice was very clear. And there was our own organizational commitment to urge people not only to vote but to continue to work to change the unjust segregation system.

Even though he was exhausted he wanted to respond. His ability to encourage and energize people was unmatched and he had accepted the calling to help “set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

At the same time there were the rumbling noises of a few who, I believe out of jealousy of his leadership, were beginning to criticize his nonviolent approach and strategies, and, most important, the spirit and philosophy we held on to to tear down the walls of injustice. Our organization was committed to the struggle to “redeem the soul of America.”

The exhaustion and this emerging negativity from others contributed to Dr. King’s need to take a break, to rest and recharge. What a propitious moment for the news of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize to come to him.

Dr. King was my best friend and I wanted to share with him this moment, of his getting the wondrous news of this prestigious prize. So I soon made my way to St. Joseph’s Hospital and had a long visit with him. Though we interacted regularly, sitting alone by his bed in that hospital room as he reflected is one of my most memorable times with him. He took my hand for a moment. No words. He knew why I was there. I pulled up a chair. He began to reflect on his days as a college student, in a slow, almost sad sort of way. One observation he shared I’ll never forget. He talked about seeing tall, handsome “football player type” guys around the campus. He said, “I would consciously determine that I could pursue the girlfriends of such guys until I won their girlfriends away.” He spoke as though he felt great guilt for this habit and others in the context of his feeling of unworthiness for such a prize. I wondered if he was questioning whether he deserved such an honor.

Though this was not to be the first time I experienced him in such a pensive mood, it was probably the time when he was most self-reflective—on his calling, his life and work. Coupled with these deep and mixed emotions was what seemed almost a sense of sadness. I was with Dr. King at an event in New York when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel introduced him for the speech he was about to give. Somewhere in that introduction Rabbi Heschel referred to him as a saint. Afterward, as we were preparing to go to dinner, I asked him, “What’s the matter? You seem so dejected, sad. The response to your speech was great. What are you feeling?” His response to me: “Rabbi Heschel called me a saint, and I know I’m no saint.”

I told him that I had shared this exchange with Andy Young and what Andy’s reply was. I’ve never forgotten it. Andy said, “The saints weren’t saints, either!” That pretty much captured my own sense of the matter. I had read of babies found buried under nunneries. The saints weren’t saints, either!

Dr. King was in a mood seldom seen by most of the staff, and even few of his friends were privy to this kind of sharing—the intimacy of it, and the unvarnished, total honesty. His decision to share the prize with other organizations whose goals were the same as ours at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference may have eased this guilt somewhat.

I listened to him quietly for a long time, feeling his need to reflect. If I could talk with him now I know I would remind him of something he knew at a very deep level, and that is that the God he loved uses many who are not thought of as perfect human beings. Indeed, he knew the biblical example of Paul. After all, he was a Baptist preacher.

Of course, Dr. King not only accepted the award but rose to the occasion, delivering a magnificent, incisive speech giving generous credit to all people who were struggling for basic social change and human rights—not only workers at SCLC, but people struggling for freedom everywhere.

Since that December in 1964 in Oslo, I’ve spent a good deal of time observing what we do with and to our leaders, and the impact that has on them—how we respond to them, our expectations of them, and the burden sometimes laid on leaders by how we respond to them. Our expectations of them can be a burden.

I knew that Martin’s mood during his hospital stay would pass and that he would get back to focusing on the work that was waiting for us back in Alabama, including our continuing challenge to the segregation system we were determined to dismantle.

Preparation for the Oslo trip would soon begin. It was an organizing project in itself, given the number of people traveling. My attention went to what I would wear at the ceremony. I located a woman with...

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Verlag
Atria Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743296834
ISBN 13 
9780743296830
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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Verantwortliche Person
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