We're Much the Better for It

It happened fifty years ago tonight.

A man who spent his first 26 years in Washington (beginning in 1937) sticking up for Jim Crow had a change of heart...and stuck his neck out for America.

Not his own political legacy. Not his Democratic Party.

Lyndon Baines Johnson stuck his neck out for his country when, on 7-2-1964, he signed into law the first really meaningful civil rights legislation in this country's history. 

It happened thirteen months after Johnson's predecessor and old boss (that's right- John Fitzgerald Kennedy) made the initial pitch to get this bill put together and put before Congress. And to even make that pitch required Kennedy to show his own change of heart.

On 1-20-1961, JFK gave one of the most famous and most memorable inaugural addresses in American annals. In it, the youngest chief executive ever elected called for the United States to spread democracy all over the globe. 

Too bad he didn't call for the spread of democracy throughout these fifty states. 

Yeah, I know...if Kennedy had mentioned just one domestic issue during his inaugural speech (including That One), those Southern Democrats in the Senate [like Georgia's Richard Russell, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond (that's right- Thurmond was still a Donkey back then), and the Mississippi duo of John Stennis and James Eastland] would've torn the new president to pieces. 

Maybe at the Inaugural Ball.  

It took lots of events- before and after JFK got in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue- before he could understand that a country whose name supposedly means freedom and wants to expand it all over the planet ought to ensure freedom for all its citizens.  

That understanding was probably one of the reasons Lee Harvey Oswald ended the presidency of a man born in Brookline, MA 1,036 days after that term of office began.  

And so, from the time LBJ raised his right hand, he decided to make the passage of the Civil Rights Act a top priority. 

The man from near Stonewall, TX was going to finish JFK's unfinished business.  

To do all that, Johnson had to pull out all the tricks that served him in good stead as the Senate Democratic leader (LBJ was minority leader from 1953-1955, then majority leader from 1955-1961). He knew what the US senators he left behind when he joined Kennedy's administration wanted...and he knew how to appeal to that.

Yes, it got coarse...but Johnson got it done.

And when it was all over, 27 of the 34 Senate Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, 46 of the 66 Democrats then in this country's Senate went all in.  

With the Voting Rights Act passing in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act getting signed into law three years later, America began to open up...at long last.

And that even with so many Democrats who didn't want the new legislation to get on the books switching over to the GOP.

Thurmond was one of the defectors...and he helped shape the current Republican tone. (That's right...that angry, blustery, obstructionist tone that keeps making headlines.)

What today's Republicans- the ones the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential nominee left behind when he passed away in 2003- don't accept and don't understand is this:

A nation works best when ALL its citizens get to have their say...whether it's at a polling place during an election or someplace else where people can get their opinions noticed. 

I'm glad the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got the ball rolling.

It's Everything They Said It Is...and More

I finally got a chance to see a movie that could very well net some hardware a week from tomorrow...one of last year's best-loved theatrical movies, "The Help."

Got to see it this afternoon because of this afternoon's second annual Black History Movie and Potluck get-together at Omaha's Clair Memorial United Methodist Church...and, let me tell you, "The Help" is everything the critics (and a lot of other moviegoers) said it is.

And more.

In this movie, set in 1963-64 and based on Kathryn Stockett's novel (a book I haven't read yet), recent University of Mississippi grad Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone) returned to her home town of Jackson, MS wanting to be a journalist. First gig she got was with the city's paper, The Journal. And Skeeter ended up writing an advice column centering on how to be a better domestic.

Next thing you knew, Skeeter started kicking around the idea of a book telling what a maid's life was like in mid-1960s Mississippi...from the maid's point of view. (Remember: The Magnolia State's laws wouldn't allow anything like that back then.)

At first, only two maids- Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson (Viola Davis and fellow Oscar nominee Octavia Spencer)- were willing to open up to Skeeter. (And for Minny and Aibileen to even open up like this was playing with a raging fire in America's hotbed of hatred and intolerance and racism.)

All through the movie (all 140 minutes of it), I kept thinking about the four remaining Republican challengers for the party's 2012 presidential nomination and how the teachers of hatred in those four men's lives were working to mold those candidates at the very moment in which "The Help" was set.

And all I could do was cringe at the thought.

Hilly Holbrook (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) really made me cringe; so did the cronies she hung around with as they helped to keep racism alive in Jackson. And Skeeter's mom (Allison Janney of West Wing fame) made me cringe, too...especially when she clammed up every time Skeeter asked about the maid (Cicely Tyson as Constantine) who raised our recent Ole Miss grad.

I even cringed when Minny was offered a domestic's job for the rest of her life by her employers, Celia and Johnny Foote.

Minny was the first maid Celia (Jessica Chastain) ever hired...and, the way I took Celia, she was under a ton of pressure to hire a maid. It was...well, Expected. But all through the movie, Minny, among other things, showed Celia how to cook. (And guess who was there when Celia gave birth?)

Let me tell you, I cheered for BOTH Aibileen and Skeeter...and I also liked it when other maids finally decided to contribute stories to the book Eugenia was trying to put together.

One message I thought "The Help" kept shouting out was one about courage.

It takes courage to speak up when people are constantly trying to fit you into one social straitjacket after another. It also takes courage to listen to people who've been forced into those social straitjackets.

The result of that speaking up (as well as of that listening) feels empowering.

And that's the biggest lesson "The Help" can teach us...especially at a time when this country's Republicans would like nothing better than to take America back to 1612...let alone 1912 or 1963.

When "The Help" came out, some reviewers took a look at its predominantly female cast and immediately labeled it a "chick flick." (And yep, the offending journalists made a huge mistake in doing so.)

At a time when Willard Romney runs around saying his birth city (Detroit, MI) should go bankrupt and has repeatedly said that America's auto industry- the very profession that enabled his father George (a 1968 presidential hopeful and, later, HUD secretary) to put food on the table- should crash and burn; at a time when Newton Gingrich keeps questioning inner-city children's work ethic; at a time when Rick Santorum still questions Barack Obama's religion, among other things; and at a time when Ron Paul and his son Rand want to see the private sector go back to discriminating against people on the basis of skin color, we need to take a look at the time in which a movie like "The Help" was set and say, loud and clear: "NEVER AGAIN!"

Maybe...Just MAYBE...She'll Understand

I felt stung over a question that was posed of me this past Tuesday.

As I was getting ready to leave the apartment building I live in to go off to my factory job, a young woman who came to visit the family living in the apartment across from mine saw me head out the door.

After I said "Hi" and asked her how she was doing, the visitor asked me: "One bedroom or two?"

She was a young mother; her infant child was in her arms. And I thought she wanted to ask about renting one of these apartments.

So I answered: "Two."

I wasn't ready for the next question: "And only one living there?"

"Yes. I live here."

"A two-bedroom apartment, and only you living there."

I just wasn't very happy about where this was going...and I realized that if the conversation continued, I'd be late for work.

So I told the young visitor: "I'm okay with it."

As I hurried out to my car and drove off to my job, I felt stung. (Let's face it...I felt insulted.)

In fourteen years of living where I presently do, I'd never been asked to defend living single in a two-bedroom apartment.

Until 10-18-2011, that is.

I feel comfortable living in an apartment of that size. (Why shouldn't a person feel comfortable where he or she lives?) What's more, this two-bedroomer gives me all the space I need at the present time.

For the next nine hours, I couldn't help thinking about whether the questioner came from a country where housing laws- if housing laws exist in that kind of a nation- are harsher than they are here in the United States.

And then I got to thinking about the millions of Americans who put their lives on the line so that the nation could finally, in 1968, put a fair-housing act on the books.

I thought about how some of those millions of Americans were forced to face firehoses and barking dogs...firehoses and barking dogs unleashed by officials bent on keeping apartheid (okay, segregation) alive and legal in this country.

In addition, I remembered how some people were put to death because they wanted these Jim Crow laws overturned for good.

To top it all off, I thought about a 1965 headline in The Omaha Star (the legendary newspaper started in the 1930s by Mildred Brown): "Omaha and Birmingham Run Neck and Neck in Housing Discrimination."

That's right. Birmingham, AL...where, two years before that headline, police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor ordered barking dogs and powerful firehoses to be trained on people seeking their BASIC human rights.

Thinking about all these things made a young mother's question hard for me to take.

You see, as long as I'm still able to get my rent paid (and paid on time), and as long as I enjoy living where I do, what's the problem?

I don't know if that visitor has access to a computer; don't know if she's ever come across this blog (or anybody else's blog) before.

But if she EVER reads this post, I sincerely hope she understands why I feel uncomfortable having to explain and defend living single in a two-bedroom apartment.

Either the United States of America is a free country or it isn't.

No ifs...no maybes...no buts.

And I'd like to ask this young mom- if I ever see her again- this: "Which country is this- a free one or not? WHICH??"