You Must Remember This

James Farmer, 1920-1999

Farmer, who led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was the last of the “Big Four,” which had included King (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), Whitney Young (Urban League), and Roy Wilkins (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The Washington Post explained their roles: “Mr. Farmer used to say that ‘the NAACP is the Justice Department, the Urban League is the State Department and we are the nonviolent Marines’” (Smith, 1999). King’s SCLC is presumed to need no introduction.

The obituaries, which showed Farmer’s disappointment at fading from the spotlight after what the Washington Post called the “peak years” of the movement, struggled to place him at the movement’s most memorable episodes—many of which he helped organize but did not actually witness. Yet all the articles cite CORE’s organization of the Freedom Rides, to desegregate interstate bus travel, with almost immediate mention of the three rights workers killed in Mississippi.

According to the AP obituary, which ran in the Chicago and Atlanta papers, “Mr. Farmer helped recruit CORE members James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, all of whom were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 during the Freedom Rides. The slayings were the subject of the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning” (Tolme, 1999). The New York Times turned to Claude Sitton, its legendary southern reporter, for elaboration:

It was to CORE that the four Greensboro, N.C., students turned after staging the first in the series of sit-ins that swept the South in 1960. It was CORE that forced the issue of desegregation in interstate transportation with the Freedom Rides of 1961. It was CORE’s James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—a black and two whites—who became the first fatalities of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. (Severo, 1999)

Providing more details, the Times wrote that the three “were murdered by a gang of Klansmen and buried beneath an earthen dam” (Severo, 1999). The Post emphasized the “unforgettable images of the Freedom Rides” from Washington to Mississippi: “Television carried unforgettable images of a burning bus and of racist mobs attacking peaceful demonstrators. . . . Unable to remain on the sidelines, the Kennedy administration joined the struggle, and ultimately the infamous ‘white’ and ‘colored’ signs that labeled terminal facilities went down” (Smith, 1999).

The Post wrote that even though Farmer was a northerner, most of his work came on the “mean and dangerous streets of segregated America,” and the obituaries reported his narrow escape in a hearse from cattle-prod wielding police in Louisiana. The New York Times also reported that Farmer “risked his life in several demonstrations.” But it also included a rare reference to northern injustice not usually remembered from the March on Washington:

Mr. Farmer went to jail for “disturbing the peace” in Plaquemine [LA], and was behind bars on Aug. 28, 1963, the day that Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech as the climax of the March on Washington. Mr. Farmer sent his own speech . . . which was read by Floyd McKissick, an aide in CORE. “We will not stop,” Mr. Farmer wrote, “until the dogs stop biting us in the South and the rats stop biting us in the North.” (Severo, 1999)

All the obituaries contained a variation of a Farmer quotation about violence, either citing his autobiography or a 1991 interview: “If any man says that he had no fear in the action of the sixties, he is a liar. Or without imagination.”

His calling was traced to a childhood moment. Even though he is a professor’s son and “shielded from the worst aspects of racism,” the New York Times recalled an incident when he was 3 or 4 and wanted a cold drink on a hot day:

He saw a white child go into a drug store, and it was not until he got home that his mother explained to him why he could not do the same thing. “Until then, I had not realized that I was colored” . . . “I had lived a sheltered life on campus. My mother fell across the bed and cried.” Mr. Farmer said it did not make him bitter, but, over the years, he became “determined to do something about it.” (Severo, 1999)

From the mid-1960s until his death, Farmer was disheartened by what he considered the movement’s ill-advised shift to radicalism; the tone of his obituaries seems to sympathize with him and the fate of the freedom struggle. The Post wrote that “CORE, like other civil rights groups, was increasingly under the sway of younger Black separatists, and whites were being purged from CORE chapters despite its tradition of inclusion” (Smith, 1999). While the New York Times also pointed to his marriage to a White woman and an ill-fated alliance with Richard Nixon, the Post wrote that Mr. Farmer “believed his views cost him a place as a leading spokesman for African American concerns, but he never lost his faith in a color-blind society” (Smith, 1999).

Daisy Bates, 1914-1999

The Bates obituaries were especially elegiac because of bruising events of her life and the easily recalled imagery of the vitriol hurled at the Little Rock Nine. As head of the NAACP’s Arkansas chapter, Bates organized the strategy and legal maneuverings to get the nine African Americans enrolled at Central High, then used her house as the base camp for the students and the federal troops who escorted them during their school day.

Accounts of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus’s actions diverged in telling ways. According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Faubus was trying to maintain “peace” rather than disregarding federal law (Young, 1999). But the Post wrote in its lede that Bates “shepherded the black students known as the Little Rock Nine to integrate Central High School over the objection and obstruction of Gov. Orval E. Faubus and throngs of their white neighbors.” The New York Times supplied an emotional summation of events:

Rocks were thrown through her window, a burning cross was placed on her roof and the newspaper published by her and her husband, L.C. Bates, was ultimately destroyed financially. But she nurtured the nine black children who faced vicious insults and physical intimidation. She encouraged them to be courageous, while striving to guard them against howling white mobs. (Martin, 1999)

The Post added, “Mrs. Bates would say in later years that any portrait of her as fearless was less than accurate. ‘Who said I wasn’t afraid? You acted because you believed, you were committed’” (Bernstein, 1999).

Scholars and journalists agree that the Little Rock integration was the made-for-television event that cemented the movement’s place on the nightly news (Rhodes, 2007; Roberts & Klibanoff, 2006). The Post noted that Bates “fed and prayed with the Little Rock teenagers and counseled them not to retaliate against the spitting and rock-throwing mob as the war between federal and state authority was captured on television” (Bernstein, 1999).

Not as publicized was the mechanism of Black self-defense (Walker, 2001). The Los Angeles Times, in a staff and wire account, quoted her autobiography: “She grew accustomed to seeing revolvers lying on tables inside her home ‘and shotguns, loaded with buckshot, standing ready near the doors’” (“Daisy Bates,” 1999). But the Post offered a redemptive anecdote:

For one period during the . . . integration crisis, Mrs. Bates carried a gun. One day, after she had received empty gun cartridges in an envelope, she fired a shot from her home—purposely missing. “They can’t make a murderer out of me.” (Bernstein, 1999)

The childhood trauma propelling Bates to action, told slightly differently depending on the publication, is rendered as a personal and racial tragedy. The Arkansas paper wrote that her “struggle for equal rights” began when she was a baby, after “her mother was raped and murdered by three white men. She was raised by adoptive parents” (Young, 1999). The New York Times cited her autobiography, where she wrote of

learning at 8 that her mother had been killed in a rape attempt by three white men. After she had heard rumors, her father told her the truth in simple and straightforward terms. “So happy once,” she wrote, “now I was like a little sapling which, after a violent storm, puts out only gnarled and twisted branches.” (Martin, 1999)

In the Los Angeles Times, she swore “to herself that she would ‘find the men who had done this horrible thing to my mother” and “was instilled with a rage that would carry her through decades of struggle” (“Daisy Bates,” 1999).

Most obituaries concluded with a Faubus quotation, signifying interracial reconciliation. “That there were those who disagreed and disagree, that the dream is not yet realized, need not detract from her or her accomplishments,” he said at a 1989 Bates benefit (Bernstein, 1999). But the AP let Bates, not Faubus, have the last word: “I told him once, ‘Yeah, we did have a good fight, didn’t we? But I won’” (Jefferson, 1999a).

Ossie Davis, 1917-2005

Civil rights and popular culture intersected on A1 with the obituaries of Ossie Davis, the writer, actor, and activist who spoke at the funerals of Malcolm X and King. “Davis was able to combine art and politics, advancing the causes that mattered to him while creating memorable characters on stage and in film and television,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. “And he did it, from all accounts, with grace and humility” (Keller, 2005). USA Today let the actor–writer–activist say it in his own words: “The struggle and the arts are connected almost by definition” (Jones, 2005). The Post opened by declaring that his “uncompromising character was the hallmark of a distinguished career as an actor, playwright and director,” and that he stood “at the vanguard of the nation’s civil rights movement for more than five decades” (Schudel, 2005). Roger Ebert (2005), the esteemed Chicago Sun-Times film critic, called Davis “an actor and activist beloved and revered for his contributions to theater, film, television and the civil rights movement” who “combined militancy with grace and humor.”

The New York Times declared him an “imposing, deep-voiced actor who with his wife and acting partner, Ruby Dee, helped widen horizons for Blacks on stage and screen while fighting zealously for civil rights from Washington to Hollywood” (Severo & Martin, 2005). That Davis acted literally until the day he died might explain the exuberance of these obituaries. Every paper referred to his work with film director Spike Lee, who cast him in six films including Jungle Fever, Do the Right Thing, and School Daze and launched him in a second career “at a time when most of his contemporaries were retiring” (Gillespie, 2005). Lee told Ebert (2005),

“They were strong and brave at a time when many Negro entertainers stood on the sidelines. Ruby and Ossie were by Malcolm’s side, they were with Dr. King in Birmingham, Selma and the March on Washington, and never worried about the negative impact it might have on their careers.”

There are different explanations for Davis’s inspiration. USA Today and the Washington Post pointed to his hearing Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after she had been banned from singing at Washington’s Constitution Hall: “I was handed my spiritual assignment that night” (Schudel, 2005). The Post also noted that he had grown up in “a verbal culture in which he heard stories of African American life marked by humor, danger and sorrow. From an early age, Davis knew he wanted to be a writer and to improve the lot of his people” (Schudel, 2005).

The childhood anecdotes vary greatly. The Atlanta Constitution-Journal, emphasizing his local roots, wrote that Davis “never forgot his humble beginnings as the son of a South Georgia railroad worker who could not write his name.” His name came about because “his mother’s pronunciation of his initials ‘R.C.’ was heard as ‘Ossie’” (Brock, 2005). Atlanta’s use of the passive voice contrasts with the Los Angeles Times version:

When his mother registered his birth, the county clerk misunderstood her and thought she said “Ossie” instead of “R.C.” . . . “The man was white. Mama and I were black and down in deepest Georgia. So the matter of identification was settled. Ossie it was, and Ossie it is till this very day.” (Woo, 2005a)

The New York Times wrote that one of Davis’s earliest memories

was bigots’ harassing his father because his occupation was considered a bit sophisticated for Blacks at that time. His father planned and supervised the building of railroads. A member of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to shoot his father “like a dog.” Ossie said that thinking about this inspired him to become a writer. (Severo & Martin, 2005)

Also note the disparity between the Times and Atlanta description of Davis’s father.

The Los Angeles Times cited another humiliating motivation. At age 6 or 7, Davis was held by two White policemen, who teased and harassed him before pouring syrup over his head. Young Ossie and the cops then shared a laugh: “They gave me several hunks of peanut brittle and let me go.” The incident “left a deep psychological scar that pervaded his sense of purpose when he grew into an artist and activist” (Woo, 2005a).

The obituaries all note that Davis spoke at Malcolm X’s funeral. The Los Angeles Times emphasized Malcolm’s shift toward racial tolerance and away from the Black Nation of Islam. Malcolm, who had “begun to soften his views of whites, was in the midst of a speech explaining his ideas for reaching out to the mainstream of the civil rights movement when he was shot dead by three gunmen, all Muslims” (Woo, 2005a). Davis’s characterization of Malcolm as a “black shining prince” “shook whites as well as blacks,” the Los Angeles paper declared, “and is cited today in discussions of the slain orator’s importance” (Woo, 2005a).

Rosa Parks, 1913-2005

Whether presented with gravitas (in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles) or as a long story with a happy ending (in Atlanta, Montgomery, and Detroit), the Parks obituaries each conveyed the sense of right triumphing over wrong. Montgomery’s 2,394-word obituary begins, “Rosa Parks, the world’s beloved mother of the civil rights movement, is dead but her spirit lives on. The woman whose quiet strength broke the back of Jim Crow law will never be forgotten” (McGrew, 2005). And while obituaries across the country did not agree on who had “demanded” that Parks move from the middle to the back of the bus—the confrontational White bus driver sometimes identified as James Blake or an unnamed White male passenger—the bigger, true villain is the South.

Parks presumably did not suffer physically during her historic evening in jail, but these obituaries used different anecdotes from her life to remind readers of long-standing southern terrorism and oppression. Readers in Washington learned that Parks “recalled watching her grandfather guard the front door with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan paraded down their road” (Sullivan, 2005). Parks’s grandmother, according to the Los Angeles Times, warned her that she would be lynched before turning 20 if she kept “standing up to whites” (Woo, 2005b). The New York Times reported that Parks’s willful arrest was a “dangerous, even reckless move in 1950s Alabama,” saying that she “perhaps risked even physical harm” (Shipp, 2005). The Montgomery Advertiser put it this way: “Young Rosa lived in a time when white men were men and black men were called ‘boys’ or worse” (McGrew, 2005).

Many papers joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in remembering that Parks became a test case over her husband’s fears: “‘Rosa, the white folks will kill you,’ he said, but he later supported her actions” (Suggs & Bennett, 2005). It was her upstanding, dignified manner that put her in that position to make history: “Being a pillar of her community, Parks’ reputation had been beyond reproach amongst those who knew her” (McGrew, 2005).

Parks’s achievements, usually listed in the first sentence of her (and any) obituary, reveal how newspapers defined the civil rights movement. For USA Today and the AP, both known for their straightforward style, her refusal “launched a new era in the civil rights movement” (Vanden Brook, 2005) and “sparked the modern civil rights movement” (Fowler, 2005). The Los Angeles Times heralded “the Alabama seamstress whose simple act of defiance on a segregated Montgomery bus in 1955 stirred the nonviolent protests of the modern civil rights movement and catapulted an unknown minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to international prominence” (Woo, 2005b). The Detroit Free Press simply wrote, “When Rosa Parks refused to get up, an entire race of people began to stand up for their rights as human beings” (Spratling, 2005). In the New York Times, her “refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man” on a city bus “grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s” (Shipp, 2005).

King is visible throughout. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the 26-year-old newcomer to Montgomery was chosen to lead the group formed to organize the boycott following Parks’s arrest. Atlanta and other papers write about his “stirring speech” that kicked off the boycott. But King is noticeably absent from the Montgomery account, where local figures are prominent. The Montgomery Advertiser condensed the 13-month boycott and its ramifications to one paragraph:

Parks was later fined $10, plus $4 in court costs. The boycott drew to a close shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Browder v. Gayle, ruled against the Montgomery ordinance that caused Parks’ arrest, thus outlawing racial segregation on public transportation in the city and the South. (McGrew, 2005)

While the issue of moral standing was addressed, no newspaper explained the gender politics of the NAACP’s focus on arrested women. Many obituaries mentioned the women previously arrested for not giving up their seats but deemed unsuitable by the NAACP for a test case, with the Los Angeles Times calling their pasts “unsavory.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution concluded its obituary by comparing Parks to the 15-year-old Claudette Colvin. ³ She

had been arrested and taken away in handcuffs for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in March 1955. Black leaders briefly considered her for the test case. Then they learned she was pregnant and unmarried. On December 1, 1955, Parks, a woman above moral reproach, stepped up and sat down. (Suggs & Bennett, 2005)

Odetta, 1930-2008

The Post and the New York Times rushed in shortened versions of their Odetta obituaries in the Wednesday editions after learning of her death Tuesday night. By Thursday morning, readers had a somewhat different picture. The most obvious change for Post readers was the headline: from “Odetta, 77, Sang the Soundtrack for the Civil Rights Movement” to “Odetta, Matriarch for Generation of Folk Singers.” Initially, New York and Washington readers received a direct racial link between past and present when her manager told both papers that she had hoped to perform at the upcoming inauguration of president-elect Obama. The following day, the Post clarified that she had yet to be invited (though her desire is included a photograph caption). Still, her civil rights credentials were expanded in the later articles. Besides singing at the March on Washington, where King introduced her, she also “sang in front of President John F. Kennedy on the nationally televised civil rights special. . . . Alongside King, she marched for voting rights in 1965 in Selma, Alabama” (Weil & Bernstein, 2008b).

The New York Times, which made Odetta the first African American to be the subject of its obituary videos, referred to the movement’s visual memory in relating how “Odetta’s voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington to end racial discrimination.” The New York Times linked Odetta’s music to another civil rights icon: “Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger led to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was once asked which songs meant the most to her. ‘All of the songs Odetta sings,’ she replied” (Weiner, 2008a, 2008b).

The New York paper emphasized her southern background, noting that she was born in Birmingham “in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place—particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South—shaped her life” (Weiner, 2008a, 2008b). It added that her father died when she was young, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles in 1937. This passage suggested a fatherless child, but the Los Angeles and Washington papers reported that her mother had remarried, she had taken her stepfather’s name, and she had not lived in the South very long.

Other complications were found to dramatize her story. The Los Angeles Times wrote that even though its city

wasn’t as overtly racist as the Deep South, she suffered some of the same indignities that came with being black. “We lived within walking distance of Marshall High School,” Odetta told the Los Angeles Times some years ago, “but they didn’t let colored people go there, so we had to get on the bus and go to Belmont High School.” (Lewis & Boehm, 2008)

Every article noted she had turned away from her classical training, with racism playing a part. A pioneer who had inspired Ossie Davis had served as a warning to Odetta. Even though her mother hoped she would follow “the racially groundbreaking career of opera singer Marian Anderson,” Odetta recalled, “I was a smart kid and I knew that a black girl who was big like I was never going to be in the Metropolitan Opera” (Weil & Bernstein, 2008b).

According to the New York Times, she was transformed after discovering folk music in San Francisco while on tour, and traditional prison songs she learned “hit home the hardest and helped her come to terms with what she called the deep-seated hate and fury in her”:

“As I did those songs, I could work on my hate and fury without being antisocial,” she recalled. “Through those songs, I learned things about the history of black people in this country that the historians in school had not been willing to tell us about or had lied about.” (Weiner, 2008b)

The Los Angeles Times wrote that “her blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together.” The AP reported that with an Odetta record, “listeners could close their eyes and imagine themselves hearing the sounds of spirituals and blues as they rang out from a weathered back porch or around a long-vanished campfire a century before” (Anderson, 2008).

Odetta’s historic recordings as a “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” as the New York Times headline put it, contrasted with the compositions of Nina Simone, another classically trained artist whose anger was expressed in her song “Mississippi Goddam.” In Simone’s New York Times obituary 5 years earlier, her career is said to suffer because “in the 1970’s her music fell out of fashion in the United States” (Keepnews, 2003). Odetta’s career trajectory is placed on a more politicized path:

Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with . . . Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President . . . Kennedy. But with King’s assassination in 1968, much of the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement, and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack began to fade. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter. (Weiner, 2008b)

This authoritative denouement of Odetta’s popularity and the civil rights movement ignores Black pride and Black power and dismisses the protest music that evolved alongside the freedom struggle. Moreover, it showed how tone reinforces memory, with Simone’s verbal rejection of the movement’s successes seen as bitter, while the New York Times’s own conclusion in the context of Odetta was reported as unfortunate and uncontested truth.