Madison, Wisconsin—Some summers back, a busload of activists left the University of Wisconsin at Madison campus on a trip south to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Riders of the 1960's civil rights movement, a group of people drawn to justice and non-violence.
Among the stops were locales etched into the liberal American consciousness such as Selma and Birmingham, Alabama and Oxford, Mississippi, all sites of deadly racist violence.
Unlike in the 1960's, murder and cracked skulls did not await these bus riders traveling to the sunnier new south, a racial climate that is an incomplete monument to civil rights workers.
What these modern freedom riders did meet is a climate of obsession of the civil rights movement to seek vengeance against racist killers, the "... American expiation drama ... of last-chance prosecutions of old civil rights crimes" (New York Times, July 29, 2001).
The expiation drama lives on.
Last month, the “Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act” was passed by the U.S. House.
The act “would authorize up to $13.5 million a year in new federal spending for investigations into ‘cold case’ killings like that of Till, a black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after supposedly whistling at a white woman,” as noted by David J. Garrow, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
But I see in this effort of today's civil rights movement a saddened grim reaper—doggedly, even fanatically, chasing racists, seeking their incarceration for the decades-old despicable acts of deadly violence.
After the conviction in 1994 of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP field director Medgar Evers, a national television news broadcast showed Myrlie Evers-Williams in seeming ecstasy, as she "broke into a smile, shouted a cheer and raised a clenched fist to the sky in triumph," as the New York Times reported.
I watched Evers-Williams, who had long campaigned for the Beckwith prosecution, live on CNN on that day in 1994. I remember thinking, frankly: "What is she so happy about? Now, the 73 year-old racist, murdering man of her husband can spend the rest of his life in an American prison."
In 2001, a jury convicted 62-year-old former Klansman Thomas Blanton, co-conspirator in the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing, of murdering four children.
Other prosecutions and convictions of murdering racists continue with the approval of today's civil rights establishment whose apparent sentiment is that the killers be "brought to justice".
What ludicrous conception of justice is being subscribed to? Not the ideal of justice that animated the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Dissent from this liberty-destroying campaign of retribution is absent in the mass media.
Lest this gauntlet thrown at the feet of the civil rights movement be mistaken for a David Horowitz-type sop to the right-wing, avowed enemies of civil rights, let the reader regard this challenge as issued from the pacifist-inclined left.
In a younger day, I idealized the American civil rights movement of the 1960's.
As a child, my Georgia-raised, formerly black-taxi-riding mother used to tell me about Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney who were killed in the early summer of the year that I was born. (One of their murderers was convicted on June 21, 2005.)
My Fond du Lac, Wisconsin preadolescence (where "nigger jokes" were prevalent during recess at the lily-white Elizabeth Waters elementary school) at home included numerous tales of the deeds of such figures as Carmichael (Kwame Ture), King and the Freedom Riders in response to questions about the jokes heard.
So racist and lily-white was Fond du Lac that the elementary school used to bus over black kids from Milwaukee for a day in the hope that Fond du Lac children could experience ethnic diversity.
The point in this personal digression is to challenge the violence of these prosecutions.
A civilized and consistent response of the civil rights movement would be to acclaim to these murdering racists nearing the ends of their lives: "We forgive you. Please go in peace. We wish you well."
The civil rights movement occupies an exalted place in American history.
It is the triumph of a morally superior, rational belief system, rooted in the classical liberal notions of liberty, autonomy and egalitarianism, and the religious precepts of forgiveness, tolerance, compassion and pacifism. (Even today, the Republican Party lives in dreadful fear of these values, ever ready to appeal to racists and other assorted bigots to squeak out victories in close elections.) But the moral victories of the civil rights movement are undeniable.
So why the resort to retribution, judicial violence and the denial of liberty?
Am I the only 1960's civil rights movement admirer who feels this way?
It is not a matter of establishing truth or confronting the past through legal prosecutions.
The truth of past murderous violence is clear in these matters. And it is nothing short of ridiculous to contend that judicial violence is a necessary precursor to setting the historical record straight.
After the 1994 conviction of her husband's killer, Mrs. Evers later wrote in "About ... Time" magazine: "Finally, after 30 years, justice was served!"
Justice. I wonder how A.J. Muste, Erwin Knoll, King and 10,000's of other civil rights workers would feel about seeking justice through state-imposed imprisonment for decades-past horror. How about the surviving civil rights workers today?
Hey Coleman McCarthy, where is your voice?
How about you, Ms. Evers-Williams? You have felt the horror of racist violence as intimately and as cruelly as possible, which way does your heart now draw you?
As we near the end of the most divisive, hate-mongering administration in American history, I propose an acknowledgement of murder and racism through the transcendent vision of non-violence and recognition of humanity that animated the civil rights movement.
"There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."
- Abraham Johannes Muste (1885-1967)
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