In an earlier post, I'd mentioned that Kelley wants to explore how individual and collective behavior that isn't typically understood as political contributes, nonetheless, to more organized, conventionally political social movements. Which would be another reason why we might not want to flush culture and history down the toilet as WBM want to do. Kelley offers many examples, but one of the areas I was most interested in was something I've never read before. As leftists, we're all keenly aware that Rosa Parks didn't just get pissed one day. She'd had a long history in organized politics already. We like that story because it supports our agenda: organized collective action.
But Kelley shows how in Birmingham, AL there were plenty of people who, on a daily basis, did ride buses, did get pissed off, and did spontaneously decide they weren't going to take it any more: people giving bus drivers a hard time if they didn't give the right change, people refusing to move to the back of the bus, people letting other passengers on the bus without paying fare. He recounts instances when these actions came to violence: bus drivers would pull guns and bludgeon people with them, and sometimes shoot them. At other times, they'd arbitrarily refuse to stop at the stops passengers called, or would just drive by a stop filled with blacks waiting for their ride. Sometimes, the driver would close the door on black passengers hands.
Over the course of a year in 1941, there were 88 incidences of black passengers occupying "white space" refusing to budge. There were 176 incidences of conflict in all that year, but the occupation of "white space" comprised half. Other types of incidences were fights between blacks and white, whether between riders and operators or between black and white riders.
There were confrontations with passengers generally over some perceived irritation such as talking too loudly, sitting too close to a white woman, swearing. These alteractions generally ended when white male passengers threw black men off the bus, hit black women, and drew guns on them.
What's interesting, as Kelley points out, is that some of this had to do with the fact that they were consumers. It was a different terrain than the workplace, and resentment at not being treated the same for the same fare was a sentiment that fueled their actions.
Also, while I'd read glosses on the issue, I'd never had any concrete elucidation of just how much service in WWII changed attitudes. Here, Kelley gives concrete examples of the number of former servicemen who engaged in acts of resistance on the bus. He also points out smoething else I didn't know: a number of the lynchings in 1919 had targeted WWI vets: "In Georgia alone, where 22 African Americans were lynched in 1919, it was clear that black soldiers were singled out. One veteran was beaten to death by a mob in Blakeley GA, 'for wearing his uniform too long.'"
Kelley takes care to point out that he doesn't want to make the mistake of assuming some good v. evil, where every act of violence was necessarily an act of resistance. Sometimes, kids were just pulling pranks -- such as ringing the bell for every stop and not getting off.
Still, Kelley thinks that these increasing acts of resistance are important because they make us "rethink the meaning of public space as a terrain of class, race, and gender conflict. Although the workplace and struggles to improve working conditions are certainly important, for Southern black workers the most embattled sites of conflict were public spaces.Part of the reason has to do with the fact that policing proved far more difficult in public spaces than in places of work. Not only were employees constantly under the watchful eye of foreman, managers, and employers, but workers could be dismissed, suspended, or have their pay docked. In the public spaces of the city, the anonymity ond sheer numbers of the crows, whose movement was not directed by the discipline of work..., required more vigilance and violence to maintain order. Although arrests and beatings were always a possibility, so was escape. Thus, for black workers, public spaces both embodied the most repressive violence aspects of race and gender oppression, and ironically, afforded more opportunities than the workplace is itself to engage in acts of resistance."
In a chapter on Birmingham's poor, Kelley also explore intra-racial class differences and what that meant for the SCLC demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963. Again, I have never seen anyone make the distinction between SCLC movement participants and the people "on the sidelines" who engaged in violence as a a difference marked by class.
"Civil rights leaders treated the uprising as an impediment to the progress of the "real" movement and variously described the rioters as "wineheads" or "riffraff." While the epithets were uncalled for, this was not an unreasonable posture of mainstream black leaders to assume. On the eve of the uprising, white liberals, the Chamber of Commerce, along with the silent support of moderate black political figures, barely won a battle to scrap Birmingham's city commission system ...Black leaders who supported SCLC's civil disobedience campaign feared that the rioters would jeopardize both the movement's gains as well as the new administration's stability.
But the rioters felt their own lives had been in jeopardy far too long. Despite the protestations of black leaders, the people of Birmingham's slums and segregated pool halls resisted injustice and oppression on their own terms, which included attacking police officers and taking advantage of the crisis to appropriate much needed or desired commodities. The irony is that they very movement which sought to control or channel the aggressive, violence behavior of the poor was the catalyst for their participation."
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)