It would be remiss of me not to mention that throughout the turbulent times in history that African Americans have fought and died for the right to be free and treated like human beings in this country, we were not alone. Alongside of the African American heroes of activism were white people who also had the courage of their conviction to believe in the spiritual righteousness to act. Despite the very real threat of being ostracize, alienated, beaten and even killed; they stood up and challenged white supremacy and the hatred of their own people. Some white people would call them traitors, I would call it humanity. Although, these people are rarely mentioned in the struggles of African Americans in history by mainstream media and academia, the movement of freedom and equality was strengthen by their support. It is these compassionate people who maintain and balance the reality that not all white people are racist. Although as African Americans we struggle to keep the anger of our plight in society at bay towards those who are guilty of racism, it is a redeeming quality we welcome and appreciate...and I say, thank you to all those who stand/stood up to the injustices and wickedness of racism and systemic oppression!
These are some of the names and faces of the unsung white heroes.
"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the
world are put in peril."
A quote by...
William Lloyd Garrison
1. (December 12, 1805 – May
24, 1879) was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and
social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper
The Liberator, which he founded with Isaac Knapp in 1831 and published in
Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the
American Civil War. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery
Society. He promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United
States.
The Quakers
William Wells Brown, who had freed himself from
enslavement by escape and later worked on the Underground Railroad as well as
becoming a noted lecture and writer for the abolitionist cause, testified that
the reputation of Quakers for anti-slavery was well known among the enslaved.
No fugitive, Brown wrote, was ever betrayed by a Quaker.
*****
2. Thomas Garrett
(1789-1871) was a Quaker and a known conductor of the Underground
Railroad. In 1848 he and fellow Quaker John Hunn were brought to trial by
two slave-owners on charges of harboring and aiding fugitive slaves. The
defendants were found guilty by the U.S. Circuit Court in Delaware,
presided over by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who ten years later would
deliver the landmark 'Dred Scott Decision.' Harriet Beecher Stowe cites
Garrett's 1848 trial as inspiration for some scenes in her influential
anti-slavery novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.
3. Elijah F. Pennypacker (1804-1888) a convinced Quaker, was originally
of Mennonite descent. He was a politician and activist who labored
tirelessly in the anti-masonic, temperance, and anti-slavery movements.
Pennypacker's home in Chester County, Pa., was a vital station on the
underground railroad. He was a member of Radnor Monthly Meeting and a
minister until his death in 1888.
4. John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was a white American
abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow
the institution of slavery in the United States.
Brown's attempt in 1859 to start a liberation
movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later
part of West Virginia), electrified the nation. He was tried for treason
against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men and inciting a
slave insurrection. He was found guilty on all counts and was hanged.
Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg
and represented the wishes of the Republican Party to end slavery. Historians
agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that, a year
later, led to secession and the American Civil War.
5. Robert Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois, the first child of Mable
Arbutus (Bushnell), a secretary, and Timothy Aloysius Ryan, who was from a
wealthy family that owned a real estate firm. Ryan was a liberal Democrat
who tirelessly supported civil rights issues. Despite his military
service, he also came to share the pacifist views of his wife Jessica, who
was a Quaker. By the mid-1960s, Ryan's political activities included
efforts to fight racial discrimination. He served in the cultural division
of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and, with Bill Cosby, Robert
Culp, Sidney Poitier, and other actors, helped organize the short-lived
Artists Help All Blacks.
Ryan's film work often ran counter to the
political causes he embraced. He was a pacifist who starred in war movies,
westerns, and violent thrillers.
6. Juliette Morgan was the
only child of Frank and Lila Morgan of Montgomery, Alabama. She was a
seventh-generation Southerner and a third-generation Alabamian born into a
white family with high status in the community. In 1939, 16 years before the famous
Montgomery Bus Boycott, Morgan began writing letters to the Montgomery
Advertiser, the city's local newspaper, denouncing the horrible injustices
she witnessed on the city buses. In these letters, she said segregation
was un-Christian and wrong, and the citizens of Montgomery should do
something about it. The response was immediate: Morgan lost her job at a
local bookstore.
One morning as she rode the bus, Morgan watched a black woman pay her fare
and then leave the front door of the bus to re-enter through the back door, as
was the custom. As soon as the black woman stepped off, the white bus driver
pulled away, leaving the woman behind even though she'd already paid her fare.
Incensed, Morgan jumped up and pulled the emergency cord. She demanded the bus
driver open the door and let the black woman come on board. No one on the bus,
black or white, could believe what they were seeing. In the days that followed,
Morgan pulled the emergency cord every time she witnessed such injustices.
Morgan was bombarded by obscene phone calls and hate mail. White people
boycotted the library where she worked. They called her an extremist. Teenage
boys taunted and humiliated her in public and in front of her staff at the
library. A cross was burned in her front yard. Some of Morgan's friends said
she was mentally ill and demanded she be fired. Morgan's personal campaign
against racism and injustice eventually caused her to become estranged from
friends, former students, colleagues, neighbors and even her own mother.
Because the library superintendent and trustees still refused to fire her from
her job, the mayor withheld municipal funding to the library so her job would
be cut. Anxiety and depression overwhelmed her until, on July 15, 1957, she
resigned her position at the library.
The next morning, Morgan's mother found her dead in her bed with an empty
bottle of sleeping pills by her side. Morgan had left a note that simply said,
"I am not going to cause any more trouble to anybody." The toll of
feeling alone in her work against racism had been too much for her.
7. In 1961, the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began to organize Freedom Rides. The
first departed from Washington, D.C. and involved 13 black and white
riders who rode into the South challenging white only lunch counters and
restaurants. When they reached Anniston, Alabama one of the buses was
ambushed and attacked. Meanwhile, at an SNCC meeting in Tennessee, Lewis,
Zwerg and 11 other volunteers decided to be reinforcements. Zwerg was the
only white male in the group. Although scared for his life, Zwerg never
had second thoughts. He recalled, "My faith was never so strong as
during that time. I knew I was doing what I should be doing.
The group traveled by bus to
Birmingham, where
Zwerg was first arrested for not moving to the back of the bus with his black
seating companion, Paul Brooks. Three days later, the riders regrouped and
headed to Montgomery. At first the terminal there was quiet and eerie, but the
scene turned into an ambush, with the riders attacked from all directions. .
"Mr. Zwerg was hit with his own suitcase in the face. Then he was knocked
down and a group pummeled him". The prostrate activist was beaten into
unconsciousness somewhere around the time a man took Zwerg's head between his
knees while others took turns pounding and clawing at his face. At one point
while Zwerg was unconscious, three men held him up while a woman kicked him in
the groin. He recently did a speech on May 18, 2011 at Troy University Rosa
Parks Museum. Hespoke about the effect the Freedom Rides had on his life. In a
recent interview with Lisa Simeone Jim talked about how blessed he was to have
been a part of the Movement.
8. Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo (April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was a
Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Michigan. In March 1965
Liuzzo, then a housewife and mother of 5 with a history of local activism,
heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr and traveled from Detroit,
Michigan to Selma, Alabama in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at
marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the
successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and
logistics. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the
Montgomery airport, she was shot dead by members of the Ku Klux Klan. She
was 39 years old.
9. Michael Francis Moore (born April 23, 1954) is an American documentary
filmmaker, screenwriter, author, journalist, actor, and left-wing
political activist. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11
(2004), a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush and the War on
Terror, which is the highest-grossing documentary at the American
boxoffice of all time and winner of the Palme d'Or. His film Bowling for
Columbine (2002), which examines the causes of the Columbine High School
massacre, won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Both Fahrenheit
9/11 and Sicko (2007), which examines health care in the United States,
are among the top ten highest-grossing documentaries. In September 2008,
he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, which
documented his personal quest to encourage more Americans to vote in
presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV
Nation, a satirical news magazine television series and The Awful Truth, a
satirical show.
Moore's written and cinematic works criticize
topics such as globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership,
U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the Iraq War, the American
health care system, and capitalism. In 2005 Time magazine named Moore one of
the world's 100 most influential people.
Michael Moore is the example of a man who views
the world in realistic terms, not just in black and white, but as a whole
connective picture. With all the social, racial and immoral problems that occur
in this society, as a white man, he doesn't stick his head in the sand and
pretend the problems do not exist. We do not expect white people to be
pro-black, as diverse cultures; everyone has the right to embrace their own heritage
with pride and celebration including African Americans.
A white person just need to understand what it
means to be African American in a racist construct, all that is required is to
empathize, recognize and acknowledge that racism still exists, how it operates to keep a people
oppressed and finally, to take responsibility for it as an individual and
group. Then make the effort to be educated to other cultures outside of the
comfort zone of white supremacy and privilege and change how this system affects
minorities. If white people could just do this, it could change the world. I
truly believe that it is winding down to the time that “The Most High” is
giving each of us a choice to do the right thing, to turn towards Him and
repent and put the effort forward to care for our fellow man regardless of
ethnicity, to stand up for injustices and evil that occurs everywhere. If not,
well the scriptures tell us in these last days what will happen to the people
who do not.
Former President Jimmy Carter said it best when asked
in an interview:
Is there more racism in the country now than when you were
president?
Jimmy Carter
Carter: “I think there is. After the civil-rights
movement was successful—about a hundred years after the end of the War Between
the States, the Civil War—there was a general feeling in this country that the
main elements of racism, of white superiority, had finally been overcome. With
the news media showing the police abuse toward black people in some places, and
the terrible events in Charleston, South Carolina, maybe we’ve been awakened to
say that we’ve still got a long way to go. The burgeoning of obvious, extreme
racism has been a sobering factor for us.”
In 2002, Former President Jimmy Carter was awarded the Noble Peace Prize,
at the end of his speech he said some very valuable and poignant words that we
as human beings should take in to consideration and implement them in our
lives.
“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is
always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace
by killing each other's children.
The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our
fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to
alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make
these changes - and we must.”
Matthew 25:40-46
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you,
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have
done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye
cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave
me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not:
sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an
hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did
not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye
did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous
into life eternal.
