Since we’re talking about allyship so much these days, (mostly by popular demand, a hopeful sign) I want to share a short video with you that doubles as a master class in speaking up and out.
Charles Morgan, Jr. was a young white attorney living in Birmingham Alabama when four little black girls were murdered after a bomb planted by the Klan exploded while they were attending services at the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was Sept 15, 1963.
The city had become known by many black residents as “Bombingham” for the constant attacks on their struggles for civil and voting rights, attacks which were entirely unpoliced by the all-white and anti-black police force. In the aftermath of the bombing, the business community and local press fretted about the reputation of the city, blaming “other people” for the terrorism experienced by black people.
The following Monday morning, Morgan addressed a white businessman’s club in Birmingham, and delivered a speech that asked a powerful question: Who was to blame for the attacks?
Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful, worried community asks, who did it? Who threw that bomb? The answer should be we all did it. Every last one of us is condemned for that crime, and the bombing before it and the ones last month, last year, a decade ago, we all did it.
It’s every little individual who talks about the niggers and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. Every governor who shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator. Courts that move ever so slowly and newspapers that timorously defend the law. It’s all the Christians and the ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence.
It goes on for several more minutes and is worth every second of your time. Morgan’s words were a direct affront to the audience, no doubt. But he also described the specific cruelty of Jim Crow and paints a picture that is all-too-familiar today.
Birmingham is a city where four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system, lead a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods, restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances to Negro wards, while local papers on their front and editorial pages call for order and then exclude their names from obituary columns. And who is really guilty?
The speech earned him death threats instead of applause. Largely shunned, he moved to Atlanta where his trailblazing work continued to shape the civil rights landscape. He sued to desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama; he successfully challenged segregated prisons and juries. In 1969 he forced an election in one county in Alabama that led to the election of six black local officials. Later on, as an ACLU lawyer, he represented both Muhammad Ali in his bid to avoid being drafted in the Vietnam War and Julian Bond after he’d been denied his seat in the Georgia legislature. He died in 2009.
It’s not hard to imagine what Morgan would be saying today, but here’s one guess—It wouldn’t include thoughts and prayers.
Many thanks to Princeton professor, historian, author and online friend Kevin M. Kruse for flagging this story. Kruse does double duty on Twitter as a debunker of annoying racist myths in history, and he’s an unflagging ally. Be sure to follow him—unless you’re a fan of Dinesh D’Souza.)
On Point
| Attention the next generation of Most Powerful Women: |
| Your conference is almost upon you. Fortune MPW Next Gen 2018 will be held December 11-12 in Laguna Niguel, Calif. While we love all our Fortune convenings equally, this Summit provides a much-needed boost to the up-and-coming working women’s soul. It brings together rising women in business, philanthropy, government, sports, and beyond, for a two-day immersion into the issues facing women today, and the thinking that will change the world tomorrow. I’ll see you there! Register here, nominate someone else to attend here, coverage from previous Next Gens below. |
| Fortune |
| Meet the women who made this year's record number of female political candidates possible |
| You’re going to want to print out and frame this extraordinary oral history created by my colleagues Emma Hinchliffe, Kristen Bellstrom, and Claire Zillman. While the unprecedented number of women running for office is an important story this year, the first “Year of the Woman” came in 1992, when 28 women ran for Congress, nearly doubling the number of women in the House and tripling the number of Senators to six. Fortune spoke with twelve women, ten of whom were candidates, who helped shape the groundbreaking era. For most, it was a calling and a duty. “With Anita Hill being a woman and black, it inspired me that I too could do it,” says former Rep. Eva Clayton (D–N.C.), “Anita Hill affected a lot of people, and she certainly motivated me to be an even stronger candidate.” Please read and share. |
| Fortune |
| Transgender service ban challenged by veterans groups with a new legal filing |
| Veterans groups including Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), New York City Veterans Alliance, Protect Our Defenders, National Veterans Legal Services Program (NVLSP), National Law School Veterans Clinic Consortium (NLSVCC), High Ground Veterans Advocacy and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), have joined an amicus brief filed yesterday to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The brief is a response to the July 2017 policy disenfranchising transgender troops. “[A]mici here will focus on an equally important defect in the Transgender Ban that directly impacts the public interest: if implemented, the Transgender Ban will hamper the effectiveness and performance of the military itself, in much the same way as previous, now-rejected categorical limits on service based on race, gender, and sexual orientation did in the past.” You can read the brief in its entirety here. IAVA press release and additional resources are below. |
| IAVA |
The Woke Leader
| The incredible whiteness of academic citations |
| Experts of color in every discipline remain woefully under-cited in academic and related publishing, a fact that researcher and assistant professor Victor Ray argues has hindered progress for decades. He notes research that suggests this racial exclusion affected legal scholarship in the civil rights era. “White civil rights scholars may have a different set of interests than scholars of color, subtly influencing their reasoning,” he writes. “Or white scholars may be inadequate defenders of the rights of people of color.” Besides institutionalizing whiteness, the racial politics of citation holds people back. “Citations draw our attention to the ideas that supposedly matter, they are a measure of one’s intellectual influence and they shape what we are able to think about a given field. Citations, or a lack thereof, bolster reputations and facilitate or exclude one from subsequent opportunities.” |
| Inside Higher Ed |
| A delightful short film aims to encourage empathy for immigrants and refugees |
| A group of Disney artists, claiming heritage from more than 30 different countries, banded together in their off-hours to create Weeds, a short, animated film designed to highlight the plight of immigrants and refugees. The three-minuteish short was directed by Walt Disney Animation Studios artist Kevin Hudson (Big Hero 6, Moana); animation supervisor Hyun Min Lee worked with nearly 40 other Disney artists to create the story of a dandelion who is struggling to get to a place where the grass is literally greener. In the summer of 2016, when anti-immigrant rhetoric was building, Hudson had an epiphany while pulling weeds in his own yard. “I looked over at my neighbors dry and barren yard and suddenly had this amazing feeling of empathy for the little plants wilting in the sun and realized what they must feel like looking over at my green yard.” Click below for the film and related website; here for an interview with Hudson. |
| Weeds Film |
| A new way to think about the digital divide |
| The worry used to be that low-income kids would end up on the wrong side of the digital divide, without access to the internet and the many screens it powers. Now, affluent communities are embracing “throw-back” teaching methods which eschew screens for precious human interaction. Increasingly though, kids in remote rural and/or low-income communities are being raised by screens. The new research that suggests that limiting screen time might help with behavior and attention issues is often news to low-income parents. “I go from speaking to a group in Palo Alto who have read my book to Antioch, where I am the first person to mention any of these risks,” says Dr. Richard Freed, a psychologist who wrote a book on the dangers of too much screen time and recommends ways to connect kids with real-world experiences. |
| New York Times |
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| Eugene 'Bull' Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety, Birmingham, Alabama |
