Civil Rights Tour Reveals Poverty Replaced the Lynching Noose

Was the civil rights movement a success? A group of Western Carolina University students led by Dr. Elizabeth McRae set out on a civil rights tour encompassing many of the battle sites and incorporating many of the soldiers involved in the civil rights movement. The metaphor of battle is appropriate given the amount of bloodshed and lives lost during the movement. From Emmitt Louis Till to Reverend Martin Luther King, the movement lost many innocent victims we know and many more who will never be found, possibly lying in graves both on land and in the rivers and lakes throughout the south.

The civil rights movement did not begin with Brown v. Board in 1954 or with the murder of the 14 year old Emmitt Louis Till in 1955, so brutally beaten as to be unrecognizable. The civil rights movement began around 1619 when the first human beings were brought against their will to the colonies of the British Crown. These human beings suffered immense physical and psychological pain on their forced voyage in croweded ships from their homeland to a place as alien as Mars. Once in the colonies, the human beings were subjugated to separation from family, rape, torture and the dehumanizing undignified nature of being enslaved. Just as Till was not viewed as a human being, enslaved Africans were viewed not as people but chattel, property, nothing more than domesticated animals to serve and produce for the economic elite.

Yet, these human beings persevered and fought back in ways subtle and not so subtle. The Stono Slave Revolt was instance where the slaves, under an extremely repressive regime, managed to scare the economic elite during and after this rebellion. Slaves would also lower their productivity and output by sabotaging equipment and feigning illness as subtle forms of protest. Following nearly 250 years of physical enslavement, a war was fought to destroy this chattel system of slavery and these repressed people were set free.

Being free was only part of the battle, as these people were forced into a labor market controlled by the same owners who recently enslaved them. These recently freed people had few resources, other than kinship networks, to compete in an economic environment designed to protect and serve the status quo. Emancipation and the subsequent right to control one's labor was met with resistance by the economic power structure in the form of Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow was more than a racial hierarchy, this system of segregation was just that-a system to keep poor whites and blacks separated and from challenging the economic elite. Jim Crow prevented a challenge to the low wage system and perpetual poverty experienced by both groups of white and black people that continues to this day.

The Civil Rights movement represented a reaction to Jim Crow and action against the slow pace of change so promising during the Reconstruction era and the legislative and judicial decisions passed by the federal government following World War II. Promises by the federal government usually were met with resistance from southern elite intransigence followed by southern forms of extralegal actions, such as lynching.

What we saw as a class wear the repercussions of nearly four hundred years of repression upon a group of human beings. These repercussions are manifested in the harsh conditions of poverty in the present. Our first stop in Atlanta, touring the magnificent monument to a monumental human being-the Rev. Martin Luther King, exhibited the effects of this repression in the poverty stricken area immediately surrounding this national monument. Consistently, our classmates' view of the marginalization and poverty on the civil rights tour was repeated in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee as African-Americans remained economically oppressed by a system began in 1619. Especially in the Delta region of Mississippi, blacks were marginalized to the poorest areas of every Delta burg, received the lowest per pupil expenditures leading to a school to prison pipeline, endured the highest rates of unemployment, the least amount of health care and proper nutrition, and the list goes on ad nauseum.

While Mississippi represents the worst case scenario, these conditions exist not only throughout the south but also throughout the country as presented by quantitative analysis in the form of statistics and by qualitative analysis in the form observance. Look around you-where are these poor people marginalized, the projects? Where are these people forced to live because of system designed to perpetuate the status quo? How often do we blame these victims for their plight?

Was the civil rights movement a success? Of course it was. African-Americans were again given the right to vote, could attend better-funded schools and move around around without fear of overt violence and murder. Yet, violence in the form of poverty has replaced the lynching noose. Resegregation of schools today and white flight are a few of the reactions against the legislative and judicial achievements of the 1960's. Fighting the good fight, the civil rights movement continues today through the efforts of aging soldiers such as Hollis Watkins' Southern Echo Society and Morris Dees' Southern Poverty Law Center. These and other courageous organizations continue to fight for justice, economic equality and against the long-term effects of poverty.

The tour showed our class we still have a very long way to go to achieve what the elegant Rev. Martin Luther King designed to achieve with the Poor People's Campaign, a more equitable system for all human beings, especially those laborers who built this great country of ours. Yet, is it not ironic that King's death coincided with this Poor People's Campaign and advocating better working conditions for sanitation workers in Memphis? The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow will not go away quickly or without a fight unless we recognize the reality of this legacy and system of economic inequality.