Fifty years ago I was a young student getting my political feet wet in civil rights protests. At the University of Wisconsin, these were still kind of low-key, but I remember the first time I picketed anything--an appearance by George Wallace at the Loraine Hotel. Just a couple of years later I would be right slap in the middle of the first big sit-in on campus, when students occupied the administration building over the release of male students' grades to local draft boards. (That's where I got my FBI file, of which I'm quite proud, thank you very much!) I continued actively involved in non-violent protests up until I got pregnant in 1970 and my husband made me stop for fear of danger to the baby. I missed the famous "Dow War" only because I had to work that day, and I was involved in the welfare rights protest in 1969 where we marched into the Capitol building with Fr. Groppi. That one did turn nasty, but like many of them, and just like Ferguson, it was a police riot. We had a police chief in Madison back then who was bad enough….his name was Wilbur Emery and I remember him well…but the sheriff of Dane County in those days would stand right next to Chief Jackson of Ferguson and call him "brother". His name was Jack Leslie and I really kind of hate to say too much about him for fear of libel laws, but anyone who was on the protest scene in Madison in the late 60s and early 70s will remember him a little too well. He was the first to militarize his department, and the welfare rights demonstration, IIRC, was the first appearance of that department in their brand-new spiffy black nylon "riot suits". I remember looking down the line of them standing outside the Capitol building; I happened to have a profile view, and all I could see was bellies in these tight-fitting, uncomfortable looking one-piece black suits. I started to giggle and nudged my neighbor, and before too long our whole section was laughing, which did not make the deputies happy at all. Later on it did turn nasty and people were hit with nightsticks and dragged for no reason and tear gassed and arrested. Then, in 1970, came the Sterling Hall bombing, and later some violent anti-war demonstrations, but by that time I was occupied with marriage, the birth and subsequent death of my firstborn, and later my second pregnancy and birth. And then we moved to Tennessee, where things were different. But all of this is prelude, and there is more below the orange thingy.
It isn't that we didn't try. My late ex and I tried our best to politicize our kids, but east Tennessee is not Madison, Wisconsin, and it's a very hard place to even be a Democrat, let alone (horrors!) a liberal. We did manage to do one thing successfully, and that was to instill the meme, "If you don't vote, you forfeit your right to bitch." From the time they were little, we took our kids with us when we went to vote, and we always told them how important it was to vote in every election, even local ones. It didn't hurt that for a long time we were pretty good friends with the mayor of our small town. But there wasn't very much on a large scale to get political about, and no way to really get involved there. And police? Well, they were just there, you know? They treated everybody pretty much the same, and a couple of guys my kids went to school with actually became cops with the local department. Even in Knoxville the cops weren't too awful, at least around us white folks. Only my daughter, whose majority-white parochial high school was in mostly black east Knoxville, ever saw any kind of police-on-civilian action, and that rarely. As far as I know, all my children vote. None has been particularly politically active, although my son the Iraq vet has begun, at my urging, to look into the activities of IAVA.
So this week my daughter has called me several times, very distressed about what is going on in Ferguson, MO. She was somewhat politicized by the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, but the entire business in Ferguson, starting with the killing of Michael Brown and going on from there, is something she's looking to me, her mother, for information and guidance about "because you've been through it, Mom." (Well, yes I have, but I can't tell you how to think or feel, that you have to figure out for yourself. But it doesn't look like much has changed.) It's interesting also because when she was in high school she had an assignment for one class which was to interview a parent or grandparent about something in their life that you knew nothing about, and she chose to interview me about my activities in the 1960s. This time, more than previously with Occupy, she is seeing how peaceful protests are handled with anything-but-peaceful responses from those in power. She also feels the situation very personally because she is the mother of two beautiful brown sons and this makes her fear for them even more than any of us mothers already fears for our sons. I tell her that the solution, or at least part of it, is to get political and stay that way, but here I am looking back over my life, seeing the same thing happening again, and wondering if anyone learned anything and if anything we did, anything we fought for and worked for, has had any effect whatever. And can my daughter's generation, or her children's generation, change anything if they are still having to fight the same battles we were fighting in the 1960s?
"We're captive on a carousel of time/ We can't stop, we can only look behind from where we came/ And go round and round and round in the circle game." - Joni Mitchell