Forgotten Heroes [View all]

[TBF]

The hurtful nature of your comments has to do with your erasure of the people who worked outside of the spotlight and the national press to make sure that the Civil Rights Movement touched every corner of black America.

When you use your history as a hero of the movement to disparage others because you never personally knew them, it is a slap in the face to all those people who fought hard and never made it into the history books or into Congress. It is a slap in the face to people like my grandmother.

The Forgotten Heroes: It’s not about Bernie Sanders. John Lewis’s statement denigrates the unknown heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.
by Douglas Williams 2-15-16

Representative Lewis,

On Thursday, you stated the following about Bernie Sanders’s record on fighting for civil rights in the 1960s: I never saw him. I never met him. I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved with the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery and directed (the) voter education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met President (Bill) Clinton.

I am going to ignore the fact that Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater Girl, or that you once stated to a Clinton biographer that, “[t]he first time I ever heard of Bill Clinton was the 1970s,” or that it has already been well-established that Sanders worked with the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. I am also going to leave aside the fact that every mention of Bill Clinton in your book Walking With The Wind described an instance that he opposed some policy that you cherished.

Instead, I am going to talk about another person that you never saw or met. Dorothy Marie Boone-Anderson was born in Gates County, North Carolina in 1935 as one of seven children. She left formal schooling in the eighth grade to go into the fields and work to support her family.

Times were always hard for the Boones, and the lack of educational prospects for the family meant that times would always be hard. That was a legacy of a segregation that always kept black families at the edge of the American Dream; close enough to be eternally tortured by a success that was constantly visible yet always elusive. In early 1953, Dorothy became pregnant by a man named Douglas Washington Williams. Her son, Luther, would be born on September 21, 1953 ...

Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/civil-rights-movement-johns-lewis-bernie-sanders-segregation-jim-crow/