You did not have to be "crazy to not be afraid in the South during the Civil Rights Movement", BOTR. Where the hell did you get that idea? My family and neighbors certainly weren't. They lived in Birmingham, Alabama--the most segregated city in America and the front line of the Movement. In 1963, Birmingham's Police Commissioner paid a visit to our Dynamite Hill neighborhood. He didn't come to talk or reconcile differences. He came up our street in a TANK, accompanied by police dogs and a squadron of Birmingham's all white police force. Some forty years afterward I asked my Aunt Doris if she was afraid when Eugene "Bull" Connor rolled past her front door in his tank, swiveling the gun turret around and pointing it at her home and that of our relatives and neighbors. "No," Aunt Doris replied. "I just wondered how somebody could hate us that much."
My family and neighbors had an active share during those turbulent years. When the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed on Sunday, 15 September 1963, one of our neighbors was among the four girls killed. My cousin Percy Jones was one of the founders of the Black Student Association at the University of Alabama in the 1960s and led protests there against University policies that were clearly racist and discriminatory. My father forced poll workers in Birmingham to register him as a voter when he returned from serving in Korea and was told he would not be registered. No, 1`, it wasn't fear, but outrage and the sense of justice that moved people across the country to take part in the struggle for justice and freedom for all. Their words and actions inspired American Indians and Latinos to do the same in the American West, women to do so throughout the country, and lately LGBT people to throw off the shackles of bigotry and discrimination in our time.
The movement succeeded because many ordinary people took part. Some followed Martin Luther King and adopted his code of non-violence. Some did employ violence because they thought King's efforts would bear little or no fruit. The truth is that it took the actions of the violent and non-violent to secure civil rights for black people in the United States. Both philolosphies had valid points in their arguments. But the theme song of the movement inspired many people in this country and beyond its shores to no longer suffer in silence and endure abuse but to rise up for their human rights and to fight for them by any means necessary.
Those of us who have fled the tyranny of the WTS can indeed look to the Civil Rights Movement in the USA and the work of many others outside it for inspiration. It is interesting to note that when the Civil Rights Movement was a going and active concern in this country, the WTS stayed silent and told Witnesses that they could and should have no share in its aims or purposes. That was put forth at the same time the WTS changed its thinking about who the "superior authorities" in Romans 13 were. So any Witness who wanted to actively protest against racism was told to stand silently on the sidelines and let God take care of the matter. That has always been the WTS stance unless its own interests are threatened. It is strange that the organization claims it has fought for such rights as freedom of speech and religion in its court battles in many different lands when the reality is that it has fought for freedom for itself and none others.
Likewise in 1995 when the Million Man March took place in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of encouraging black men to shoulder the responsibilities of husbandhood and fatherhood, the Society criticized any male Witnesses who had a part in it. Never mind that the reasons and causes were good and commendable, the WTS said it was outside the scope of proper Witness activity. More than one Witness took great exception to this "counsel." But the WTS cared nothing for such opinions and maintained its hard line on this as it has other subjects. Anyway, I just wanted to respond to BOTR's remark which I viewed as uniformed.
Quendi
