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Monday
When I heard the news about ICE murdering Nicole Renee Good in Minneapolis, followed by Border Patrol killing two more in Portland, Oregon, the lyrics of an old Phil Ochs protest song came to mind. While the blood of martyrs, most notably Emmitt Till eight years earlier, may have been the seed of the Civil Rights Movement, in the “The Ballad of Medgar Evers” the dispirited singer just sees another meaningless death:
Too many martyrs and too many dead
Too many lies, too many empty words were said
Too many times for too many angry men
Oh, let it never be again
Evers died in June of 1963 and, as it turned out, there would be many more martyrs before Congress would pass significant legislation. Victims would include the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing and various voting rights activists. Although I was only twelve at the time, I remember sharing Ochs’s pessimism. It seemed like segregation would be with us always.
The good news is that both he and I were wrong. All those martyrs awakened even indifferent members of the public to the horrors of Jim Crow while spurring others to action. The ultimate result was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, titanic achievements that changed the American landscape. While they didn’t eradicate white supremacism (as we know to our sorrow), they made possible many of the advances we have seen over the past 50 years.
Rather than stay with Ochs, then, here’s a lyric by Lord Byron, written after leaving comfortable surroundings in Italy to agitate for Greek independence from the Turks:
The dead have been awakened – shall I sleep?
The World’s at war with tyrants – shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe – and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my Couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart…
The thorn of Nicole Renee Good’s murder will not allow sleep. As a recent Atlantic article put it, “What is now overt, in a way that it hadn’t been Wednesday morning, is that these agents are at war with the public, and have been for some time.” A trumpet is sounding and its echoes are reaching American hearts.
