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White folks should probably stay out of internal disputes in the African American community, but the latest controversy over the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s opinions about blogs reminded me so much of another dispute from the past that I had to comment.
Here is what Jackson said to Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune
Internet bloggers can serve the meal better than they can farm. Farming requires tilling the soil, removing the debris, planting, being patient, letting it germinate. That’s the strength of labor unions and churches and civil rights organizations.
The white media love Jesse Jackson because he still fulfills their fantasy that certain African Americans serve as the voices of their community. The history of the symbiotic relationship between Jackson and the white media would take many pages to describe, but to coin an analogy, just as white sports casters keep searching for the next Michael Jordan; white reporters have been looking for the next Dr. King for four decades.
If they can designate someone as the voice of African Americans it makes their lives easier. They just pick up the phone and get a quote, without having to build up real sources in the community. They don’t even have to go into the community. It’s just like the old South [and North] where every community had an invisible line and folks were supposed to stay on their side of the line.
That line is still there. Just look at the issue of inner city crime. As long as it stays on its side of the line, white folks say, “It ain’t my problem.” But when crime does cross the line retribution can be as swift and nasty as it was a century ago when someone crossed the line.
What Jesse Jackson’s remarks remind us is that the line has now come to blogdom. Check of the blog rolls of so-called progressive whites and how many African American sites do you find. Note how many white bloggers quote black ones. In a bizarre way, even in the ether there is a line. The Democratic Convention reinforced this when it first issued credentials to mostly white bloggers. Only after some protest were credentials issued to members of the AfroSpear.
As many of you know, I am admirer of the Fannie Lou Hamer. Jackson’s remarks sound a lot like the stuff Hamer was hearing back when she and many others were organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The MFDP was a grassroots movement organized by and for African Americans. Even the paid spies of the Mississippi Gestapo could not find any white folks involved, even though they loved to blame attempts to thwart segregation on “outside agitators.”
Many people know about the MFDP’s delegate fight at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, when the MFDP elected and sent an alternate slate of delegates to Atlantic City and demanded the Democrats throw out the segregationists. People also know Lyndon Johnson and the regular Democratic big shots tried every tactic they could to co-opt the MFDP, from LBJ trying to call an impromptu press conference when Hamer was speaking to attempting to force the MFDP to agree to a “compromise” that would have given them a token two delegates.
During the lengthy discussions that went on between the MFDP, the national Civil Rights leadership and members of the Democratic Party, a rift emerged between “liberal” whites, mainline civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King and the grassroots tenant farmers and other poor blacks that formed the heart of the MFDP. This rift would widen over the days of negotiations and persist over the coming years.
Essentially it was a matter of policy and leadership styles. Hamer and others believed the time for compromise was over and that all the delegates should be involved in decision-making, rejecting backroom deals made by leaders who as Hamer put it, “ain’t been in Mississippi two weeks and don’t know nothing about the problem.” At one point Bayard Rustin asked if Hamer could serve as one of the two delegates, causing vice-presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey to shoot back, “The president will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention.”
Jackson’s blogging remarks resonate too much with what the Jackson’s of their time tried to do to Hamer and the MFDP. There is a larger lesson in this, for the MFDP struggled without the support of nation African American leaders. In 1968 those national leaders elected a “proper” Mississippi delegation of more middle and upper-class African Americans, which made Hamer even madder, but this time her protests would not even make the news. Eventually the MFDP starved to death and Hamer herself died in poverty. After her death she was resurrected by those who didn’t have the courage to associate with her while she was alive.
I have said before the AfroSpear is one of the best things going in blogdom, but folks like Jackson don’t get it. In this way they only show the same prejudices as those leaders did it Atlantic City almost half a century ago. I like to think of the AfroSpear as the MFDP and Fannie Lou Hamers of our times. Let us hope we don’t make the same mistake twice.
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