From en.rattibha.com:
Ella Fitzgerald found herself in a jail cell in 1955 for singing to an integrated audience. When American jazz producer and concert promoter Norman Gran rented Houston’s Music Hall, he included a non-segregation clause. He removed all signs designating “white” or “Black” in the bathrooms and refused to pre-sell tickets to prevent segregation. He recalls an incident: “A person approached me early at the concert hall, wanting to change seats because they were sitting next to a black person. I said, ‘No, you can have your money back, but we’re not changing your seat.’ The customer took the refund. We did everything we could to ensure integration.”
Despite no disturbances in the integrated crowd, the police showed up to arrest the performers between sets. They arrested the group on gambling charges because some jazz musicians were playing craps, while Fitzgerald was sipping coffee. The group was taken to the police station, where one officer asked Fitzgerald for her autograph. After paying a fine, they were released and able to perform their second set for an unsuspecting audience.
In a 1963 interview, Fitzgerald discussed her frustration with dealing with racism in the South: “Maybe I’m stepping out of line, but I have to say it because it’s in my heart. It’s disheartening that we can’t perform in certain parts of the South like we do overseas, where everyone comes to enjoy the music without prejudice. I used to stay silent because people would say, ‘Showbiz folks should stay out of politics,’ but we’ve been embarrassed so much. Fans can’t understand why we don’t play in Alabama or why we can’t have a concert. Music is music.”
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The Emancipation Proclamation – Presidential Proclamation 95 – was drafted on or around September 22nd 1862, and the actual Proclamation made, by US President Abraham Lincoln on January 1st 1863. The slaves were emancipated. Who was liberated?
One hundred years later, during the 1954-1968 Civil Rights Movement, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place, on August 28th 1963. The leaders eventually met with President John F Kennedy, who promised to pass the Civil Rights Act. He was assassinated later in the same year, and the Act was eventually passed in 1964 Under the Presidency of Lyndon B Johnson. Who was liberated?
Fifty years after the March on Washington, in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement came together. And I ask this rhetorical question: in the one-hundred-and-sixty-plus years since the Emancipation Proclamation, who has been liberated? I answer: no one. Emancipation is not liberation, civil rights are not liberation, whose lives matter is not liberation. Liberation is total, universal, and no matter what and where the oppression is, the oppressed and the oppressor need liberating – possibly the oppressor more so, being trapped in a mind-set. It is precisely the ignorance of this that perpetuates oppression, makes the apparent progress of the intervening years almost superficial. Not true? Then look at the resurgence of reactionary politics and policies in the USA, and in the rest of the world, for when America sneezes, the military enforcer of worldwide capitalism gives the rest of us a cold. Tell me, if you dare, that there is not the burden of a mind-set that needs lifting.
I remember Alexander Dubček saying, after the USSR-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, “No oppression can stand the test of time.” This may well be true, in fact I know it to be true. But it is no excuse for the rest of us to keep our heads down and wait for it to pass. Dubček also reminded us that “the power of the people is greater than the people in power.” That means we have to stand up to be counted.
Which brings a profound and necessary question, which I will not attempt to answer today. The liberation of the oppressor means a profound metanoia. How on earth is that to happen? Even if the oppressed throw off oppression, how is that metanoia to happen?
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