Mississippi was not the first site of Civil Rights Movement sit-in protests. Greensboro experienced the first on February 1, 1960, followed by others in North Carolina, the following week: Durham, Fayetteville, and Winston-Salem on the 8th, Charlotte, Concord, Elizabeth City, Henderson, and High Point on the 9th, and Raleigh on the 10th. Sit-ins rapidly spread to other Southern states. (https://en.m.wikipedia.-org/wiki/Sit-in_movement.)
Dr. Gilbert Mason protested the segregation of beaches in Biloxi on May 14, 1959, April 17, 1960, April 24, 1960, and June 23, 1963. A sit-in commenced in Starkville on April 23, 1960. Lunch counter sit-ins did not occur in Jackson for three years, beginning at Woolworth’s Capital Street location, on May 28, 1963.
Efforts to desegregate churches in Jackson — pray-ins — commenced on Sunday June 9, 1963, continuing into May of the following year, although most churches in the city did not integrate immediately. The first such protests in the city were the read-ins at the main Jackson Public Library, on North State Street, on March 27, 1961.
These activities are accepted as admirable, over sixty years later — necessary and appropriate to allow disadvantaged, disenfranchised, dispossessed people to assert themselves; have their voices heard in times and places in which they could not otherwise effectively petition for redress.
Too much of a good thing is not necessarily for the better. Today people organize protests in situations not deserving civil disobedience. Public discourse and the body politic are coarsened, corrupted, when those empowered to engage in dialogue elsewhere become the equivalent of brownshirts on the streets of Nazi Germany.
Peaceful protest is one thing — nonviolence was the hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement’s halcyon days (Satyāgraha conceived during Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to end Great Britain’s colonial occupation of India) — and absolutism suggestive of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union is another altogether.
When people refuse to disagree respectfully — tolerate different opinions — “the canary in the coal mine” warns that American democracy is endangered; common humanity is eclipsed by condescension; and self-righteousness erodes First Amendment freedoms that protesters assert protects their presence.
Recent confrontations at American colleges and universities demonstrate deplorable displays of what the United States ought not be.
I am not a Zionist. I have never approved of Benjamin Netanyahu. I believe that militarizating Israel has done more harm than good. I am convinced that mixing politics and religion reaches no desirable end. The two are incompatible: Politicians tend to amass power — overreaching in the fullness of time, compromising the Word of the Lord, and leading reasonable people to abandon organized religion.
Heartbreaking is the reality that Israel was created in 1948 as a refuge for Holocaust victims. Annihilating Israel would deprive families who made a new life for themselves there of that safe harbor.
Nonetheless what happens to the Palestinians is unacceptable. News and photographs from Gaza are heartrending. Yet two wrongs do not make a right. A two state solution seems the only optimal outcome; whatever form that takes; whenever it happens.
Young people who intimidate — disrupting those amidst ivory towers prioritizing academic pursuit over politic diatribe — and hubris that despises disagreement miss the mark.
Although I am fascinated by international relations and sympathize with the Palestinians, I recognize wisdom in the adage that “All politics is local,” caring more for American democracy — open inquiry and respectful disagreement — than the latest chapter in generations of Middle Eastern discord.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
