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Post-civil rights era, post-apartheid links

Contemporary relevance.

The reason why Michael Coard and Godfrey Sithole presented programs in recent days recognizing two significant historic events revolves around the reality of the often seamless connections between the past and the present.

On the surface there seems at best distant connection between these featured events, but the fire of long sought freedom ties the two together, transcending the space between America and South Africa.

Both events recognized freedom fighters respected in their respective nations — America’s legendary 19th century anti-slavery/Black rights activist Frederick Douglass and South Africa’s Tsietsi Mashinini who spearheaded the 1976 Soweto Uprising that helped push apartheid onto the trash heap of history.

Michael Coard, the respected Philadelphia attorney and spark-plug behind Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), gave voice to the stirring words of Douglass’ awesome 1852 speech, titled “The Meaning Of The Fourth Of July For The Negro.”

Coard presented Douglass’ famous remarks during an ATAC event near the Liberty Bell in Center City on Independence Day where a ceremonial Emancipation Proclamation took place for the nine slaves held by America’s first president, George Washington, when he headed the nation living in a house at Sixth and Market streets.

A few days before that unusual ATAC ceremony, Godfrey Sithole, long-time Philadelphia representative of South Africa’s ANC (African National Congress), hosted a program in Center City recognizing the 34th Anniversary of the Soweto Uprising.

On June 16, 1976, thousands of Black South African youth staged a massive demonstration in Soweto outside Johannesburg protesting against apartheid education that precipitated a brutal response from South African police leaving more than 20 people dead.

By the end of 1976, the brutal crackdown unleashed by South Africa authorities desperate to preserve white supremacist apartheid claimed 600 lives.

That June 16th uprising reignited the fight inside South Africa against apartheid that boiled for over a decade leading to the prison release 14 years later of the revered Nelson Mandela who went on to become the first post-apartheid and first Black leader of that nation.

A documentary about that 1976 uprising and its then student leader Mashinini provided the focal point for Sithole’s program.

In the wake of the June 1976 revolt, the intense police manhunt for Mashinini forced him to flee his homeland to avoid incarceration if not death.

Sithole fled South Africa in 1963 not returning to his homeland until 1994 after the fall of formal apartheid. Sithole played critical roles in Philadelphia’s anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s — a movement that helped move many comparable campaigns around America.

Sithole said the anti-apartheid movement in America had a “tremendous impact” on the course of events in South Africa.

Sithole acknowledges that the end of apartheid is not the panacea so many expected.

Post-apartheid progress is uneven, Sithole said. For some Blacks, things are “far better off,” yet for most of South Africa’s Black majority the “benefits have not reached” them as they remain mired in grinding poverty in a nation flush with mineral and industrial wealth.

Uneven progress is a dynamic operative in post-civil rights era America that recently celebrated its second Independence Day under the leadership of the nation’s first Black president.

Legally sanctioned segregation of the races no longer exists, but the institutional racism that once sanctioned that segregation continues its insidious assault driving disparities from infant mortality to levels of income.

Douglass in his 1852 speech posed a fundamental question that resonates today irrespective of a Black in the White House and other advances since the 1960s.

“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?” Douglass asked rhetorically during an address in Rochester, N.Y.

“I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim.”

While the American Civil War and an amendment to the US Constitution (the 13th Amendment) officially ended slavery, its legacies inclusive of Jim Crow segregation and entrenched inequities persist, Michael Coard said.

“Douglass spoke about the American slave, but I can replace the word “slave” with American Black man, Black woman and Black child and still ask the same question,” contends Coard.

“Douglass spoke about ‘gross injustice’ 152 years ago and I see gross injustice today in the lack of education Blacks face, the lack of employment, the poor housing in most Black communities, the large differences in wealth and the discrimination in the criminal justice system,” Coard said in an interview late last week.

“I don’t think Douglass thought we’d be talking about these same things 152 years later. His speech remains relevant because in so many ways, racism in American hasn’t changed.”

Douglass warned in his 1852 address that the existence of slavery destroyed America’s “moral power abroad ...”

During the height of apartheid, South African leaders deflected criticism by citing the existence of legalized segregation and institutional racism in America.

Many — whites and Blacks alike — counter Coard contending that race discrimination is not the cause of the debilitations so many Blacks endure daily.

Interestingly, Douglass addressed the realities of racism in his 1852 speech — realities denied then and now.

“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me,” Douglass declared, seeing America’s “shouts” of liberty and equality as “hollow mockery.”

Linn Washington Jr. is an award-winning writer who teaches journalism at Temple University.