As I began reading “Freedom Summer,” I had no idea about this event. It is my belief that all U.S. citizens should have civil rights and those civil rights should be protected. In order to protect those rights, people, Caucasian and African American, put their lives at risk. Looking at this situation from an African Diaspora, I could not believe that that many non-African Americans wanted that kind of change. With that said, I believe that even though those people were helping with the civil rights movement, there was still a lot of distrust, not only between races, but within them. Certain Caucasians hated the ones that were registering African Americans to vote, and even killed a few of them. At the same time, I’m sure African Americans were hesitant to go through with this process for fear of their and their families’ lives. Many people risked a lot to make sure that everyone had basic civil rights. Those people deserve to be recognized as American heroes in my opinion.
Nathan Dennison
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My intention in introducing the term "African Diaspora" is to remind us of the international context in which these domestic social and political changes are taking place. We want to understand the civil rights movement not only as a significant event in U.S. history, but also as a global event. These mass protests--the boycotts, the sit-ins, the marches and speeches, but also the creation of various organizations, and the involvement of ordinary people as leaders of these movements, as THE MOVEMENT themselves, symbolized the possibilities of change for other oppressed people around the world. Within the Diaspora itself, civil rights activists in the US communicated directly with black national leaders in the Caribbean, and on the African continent, as they sought to create new government for themselves, independent of European colonial powers. The activists of the civil rights movement inspired protesters in South Africa, for example, to engage its apartheid government over the issue of pass laws, and to question the whole maintenance of the colonial system. The forms of racism we are concerned with are not simply about the individual or the daily insults, but also about the ways in which the leading institutions of American society and government operated then (and still operate today) on a segregated basis. Certainly, these protesters do deserve our recognition of their heroic sacrifices; my question is, do we honor them today by the way we interact in our society now?
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