Kenneth NiemeyerThe Center for the Study of Southern Culture hosted Anthony Siracusa for the first event of its SouthTalks series this semester. Siracusa’s first book, “Nonviolence Before King: The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle,” will be released by the University of North Carolina Press in June.
Siracusa, the UM director of community engagement, talked about the “politics of being” and the nonviolence movements largely started by Black college students during the civil rights movement in the mid 1960s. He said that the narrative around the Freedom Movement and nonviolence has been about “converting the other” and that those in the movement wanted to shame the nation into making amends for racial atrocities through legislation.
“The goal was not conversion of the other,” Siracusa said. “There may have been hope for that, but the animating impulse of nonviolent action was fundamentally about making a public claim on the right to be free.”
Much of the nonviolence of the Freedom Movement was based on the ideas of Howard Thurman, a religious leader and former dean at Howard University. Thurman became one of the most important leaders for a generation of activists during the Freedom Movement through his religious teachings.
“Thurman made the case that change comes from within and goes out into the world,” Siracusa said.
Siracusa also covered figures like Bayard Rustin, a gay civil rights leader, and Pauli Murray, another civil rights leader who struggled with her sexual and gender identity. Ruston and Murray faced individual struggles because of their identities and sometimes faced resistance from others in the nonviolence movement that they were helping to move forward.
“Both of these figures believed deeply in the full and free expression of the right to be for Black people,” Siracusa said. “But they also believed that sexism and homophobia were getting in the way of folks being fully who they were, too.”
In 1940, Murray was arrested for breaking segregation laws on a bus in Virginia, though she did not believe she had broken the law. She argued with the police officers before they arrested her. Murray approached the NAACP because she wanted their help in challenging the idea that interstate bus travel should be segregated, but the NAACP did not pick up the case, in part, because of Murray’s sexual and gender identity.
Rustin was a leader of the nonviolent movement in the 1940s but had clashed with some of its leaders over his identity as a gay man. AJ Muste, a political leader and pacifist activist, told Rustin that his sexuality would jeopardize their movement.
“Just as with Murray, Rustin faced marginalization within the movement,” Siracusa said. “This forced these figures to think beyond just using the law, the sort of standard practice of segregation at that time. This pushed them to think more deeply about who they were as individuals.”
Ultimately the nonviolence and freedom movements were about showing a demonstration of the world as it should be, according to Siracusa.
“They were about African American people claiming the fundamental right to be,” he said.
