Every once in a while I stop and look around and marvel a little bit at how far this country has come on race relations. It’s hard to predict when it will hit me. Last night I was feeling the warm-afterglow of the New York Giants upset victory over the Green Bay Packers, and I wanted to watch some highlights of the game. I turned on the NFL Network, and I watched the analysts discuss the game. Two of those analysts were Hall of Fame players well-known for their ability to make Giants’ fans miserable. Deion Sanders was born in Fort Myers, Florida. Michael Irvin was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Both of them were born in the late sixties, just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and just before passage of the Fair Housing Act. I was watching them interact with their white counterparts, Rich Eisen and Steve Mariucci. And there wasn’t any hint that race made any difference to how they interacted with each other or how they analyzed the players on the field. If today was not Martin Luther King Day, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed, because what was I noticing was something that was absent. But race-relations were on my mind, and it struck me it’s not just normal these days for retired black athletes to have analyst jobs, but that fewer and fewer people notice. I’ve noticed this in cable news, too, especially since Obama’s election. Maybe you think I’m making kind of a small point, but let me cite something that will help you understand where I’m coming from when I think about two black kids from Florida who grew up to be Hall of Fame athletes and then seamlessly moved into the traditionally white jobs of sports analysts. This comes from an old Daily Kos diary that is being promoted by Angry Black Lady today. It’s about learning what Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished beyond winning political support for the end of Jim Crow laws. It’s about a son learning something from his father.
So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.
I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”
Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”
Please let this sink in and take my word and the word of my late father on this.
For a fuller picture of my thinking about the normalcy of Deion Sanders and Michael Irvin, two kids born in the South right at the end of the Jim Crow era, being analysts on the official NFL Network, I need to quote more. How did MLK and the other great Civil Rights Era leaders end the terror of living in the South?
They told us: — whatever you are most afraid of doing vis a vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.
Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.
If we do it all together, we’ll be OK.
They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating — from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.
And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn’t that bad.
Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicked on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?
These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.
That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song.
We have this whitewashed view of the Jim Crow Era. When I was taught about the Civil Rights Era, there wasn’t any question about who was right and who was wrong. But the debate was about whether or not it was wrong to deny people the right to vote or to force them to sit at the back of the bus or to bar them from public facilities. We didn’t really talk about whether or not it was wrong to terrorize them.
As I said at the top, these ideas come to me at unpredictable times. But watching the NFL Network last night, the idea that Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders might live in terror was so far removed from their present reality that I couldn’t help thinking about how their mothers and fathers lived.
And, yet, what have we seen from the Republican field of candidates? They’re still tapping into those Jim Crow sentiments, wherever they lurk and fester. Those sentiments haven’t disappeared. But when the country elected Barack Obama, we proved that most of us have moved on.
Most of us have moved on, but the Republicans are trying to do everything they can to limit the black vote.
Think about that.
