Beyond Ideology

Whole Earth, Summer, 2000 by Julius Lester

FROM "WE SHALL OVERCOME" TO "BLACK POWER" AND BEYOND: AN INSIDE ACCOUNT OF ONE MAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH RADICAL POLITICS

The Movement. It was a special time, a time when idealism was as palpable and delicious as a gentle rain, a time when freedom and love and justice seemed as immediate and seemed as ripe as oranges shining seductively from a tree in one's backyard. It was a time when we believed that the ideals of democracy would, at long last, gleam like endless amber waving fields of grain from the hearts and souls of every American. It was a time when we believed that love was too wonderful and too important to be confined to our small circles of family and friends because love was a mighty stream that could purify the soul of the nation, and once purified, the nation would study war no more, and everyone would sing "no more auction block" because we were all slaves of one kind or another. We had a vision of a new world about to be born and that vision burned us with a burning heat.

In its beginnings, in the latter half of the fifties, The Movement challenged us to sing the Lord's song in a strange land, a land in which we all sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept, though only a few of us knew we were weeping. In Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr. was saying that yes, segregation was wrong, but that one was not justified in destroying it by any means necessary. "All life is interrelated," he said. "All humanity is involved in a single process, and to the degree that I harm my brother, to that extent I am harming myself." We must be careful, he admonished, not to do those things that will "intensify the existence of evil in the universe."

From a monastery in Kentucky, a monk named Thomas Merton was writing essay's and books imbued with a clarity and authenticity unlike anything any of us had ever read:

   ... our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not
   they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's
   business. What we are asked to do is to love; and this love itself will
   render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.

And on the West Coast, in a place with the romantic name of North Beach, there came the voices of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, and Gary Snyder stripping the Eisenhower and McCarthy years of their gray-flanneled fear, and through their words we were invited to live life in its fullness and blinding complexity. Henry Miller, the elder statesman of the Beat Generation, put it this way:

   I am not interested in what a man actualizes--or realizes--of his potential
   being. And what is potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that
   is human? Divine, in other words? You think I am searching for God. I am
   not. God is. The world is. Man is. We are. The full reality, that's
   God--and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnamable.

The Movement was not born from the desire to change the system. We wanted to move far beyond systems; we wanted to create community, and in the words of one of the earliest white members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Jane Sternbridge, that community was to be "the beloved community."

What made The Movement such a compelling force in its early years was that political action was merely the vehicle for spiritual expression. The values by which we lived were what really mattered--the quality of who we were and the subsequent quality of our relationships. Ending segregation was not sufficient as a goal. (Anyone who really thinks that the aim of the early Civil Rights Movement was to sit down at a lunch counter next to a white person and eat a hamburger and drink a cup of coffee insults not only the intelligence of black people but also our tastebuds. We had always known that the food was better on our side of the tracks.) We wanted to create a new society based on feelings of community, and to do that, The Movement itself had to be the paradigm of that New Community.

Spring, 1960. I stood in the Student Union Building at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, staring at the bulletin board. The sit-in movement had begun in February of that year in Greensboro, North Carolina. And it had spread quickly to Nashville and other cities in the South and become national news. That spring afternoon of my senior year, I stared at the bulletin board reading the telegrams tacked up on it. They were telegrams from schools all over the country expressing support for the sit-in movement: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oberlin, and on and on and on.

I was bewildered. I didn't understand their what or their why. I had lived my twenty-one years shuddering within the lingering shadow of slavery--segregation. I had learned to walk great distances rather than sit in the back of segregated buses, to control my bodily functions so that I would not have to use segregated bathrooms, to go for many hours without water in the southern heat rather than drink from the Colored Fountains, and to choose hunger rather than buy food from a segregated eating place. I was fourteen before I ever spoke to a white person. Although I had encountered whites during a semester at San Diego State the previous year, and although there were white instructors and a few white students at Fisk, white people had no reality as persons. They were an implacable force as massive and undifferentiated as an iceberg, and somehow I would have to find the way to steer the fragile craft of my life around it or be thrown into the icy waters, another victim of that hard and blinding whiteness.