That’s a wonderful piece and the deep connection you have is amazing. We as a society have come to think “white people” were somehow ancillary or “extra” to the Civil Rights Movement, and that this was a “special time” when the movement happened. Both of those things are nonsense and repeated so often they look like truth. I’ve been reading historical texts since that cop murdered George Floyd and found countless examples where black American fought by themselves or with whites for equality and justice, every year and every decades.
We need to ask ourselves why do we have this limited perception of “civil rights” being confined to this one time period. For example, I read about the one of the five black lawyers in South Carolina who from the 1890s to the 1910s fought numerous legal cases for civil rights. The other four helped that steep uphill climb, but by the early 1900s he was the only one left until finally the NAACP that had opened a chapter in SC after being founded sent two young lawyers he trained. He died broke but unbroken. Thanks to his and hist colleagues what must have been lonely and terrifying struggle, the first black American Republican (still the civil rights party) got registered to run for Congress in 1914. Two more followed in 1918, then in 1924. Finally a black American man got registered to run for the Senate in 1940 (or 44). None of them won; South Carolina was basically a one-party state of white ultra-conservative confederate Democrats (until May 1964). But their persistence to struggle against a white male run one-party system that made the rules and laws every more complicated to register to vote and worse to run for federal elected office showed a dedication to civil rights that is overwhelming brave.
That problem is such a story makes us wonder if these handful of black American legal and political activists fought for the 6 decades before the ‘official’ civil rights movement, who were they fight against and why and who were so many white conservative politicians and lawyers in that state fighting against them? Put in relief, their story points to a different issue: the mass well-funded white machine in South Carolina fighting against them was not fighting for Freedom and Democracy but against it. That machine had with open intent rewrote their state constitution in 1895 with the “sole intent” as the governor said in the convention to vote for it, to disenfranchise all black American voters in that state. He and his white machine did pass it and as a result tens and tens of thousands of black male voters were disenfranchised. This group succeeded in repressing not just tens of thousands of registered black voters from the rolls after 1895 but in democracy and the Constitutional rights of voting given to black Americans decades ago. That white political machine and its governor insurrected successfully the Constitution and the fundamental rights of humans to vote, effectively eliminating their political opponents in all elections, ensuring they would win automatically for the next 7 decades.
As a result, in the 1960 election, Richard Nixon didn’t even appear on the ballot in that state. He was hated because as VP he urged his boss the President to sign the first civil rights bill in 1957 into law, even though the white conservative MAGA opposition gutted a good part of it in the Senate; the second civil rights bill passed in 1960, THEN the third in 1964, the fourth in 1965. That story of these few brave black Americans reveals a history not just of extreme black American bravery that joined with others in other states to eventually put pressure on a civil rights minded Vice President to insist the president in 1957 sign the first civil rights bill of the 20th century, but it shows how whites in that state and its neighboring ones endlessly fought against those black Americans, their white allies, and against American democracy and the Constitution itself to steal power, keep it by any means necessary, and eliminate the other party from voting.
That true life story shows an overthrow of democracy that actually happened and paints all those white male conservative Senators and Congressmen, governors and state elected officials as cheaters, anti-civil rights activists who block the way for not just black Americans from voting and participating in America, but used the police to block the bridge on the other side in Selma lying in wait to club and jail the black men and women and their white allies, like your Unitarian reverend. He would not have been clubbed to death had it not been for the very long, very deliberately planned white violence that turned in to Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina state sanctioned violence use one-party cities, towns and states to order the police out there to do the clubbing, and their confederate white voters who whacked him to death. We don’t see the anti-democracy narrative opposing these black Americans in those states and pictures even though it is there, because they actively eliminate it.
In 1870, three of the four congressmen who one elections in South Carolina were black American men, and only one white man won in the opposing conservative Democrat party. It took decades of anti-civil rights activism to change that result, anti-democracy white proponents and politicians who planned and organized against King, Lewis, and the good reverend who married your parents. Where is that story, that narrative?