How quickly we can forget history - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

If you’re as old as I am, you’re probably as surprised as I am that issues you’d thought were settled long ago are suddenly in the news again.

 

Perhaps we should have seen examples in the past of how the law can be twisted to serve the interests of the powerful. It seemed, for instance, that civil rights had truly been established, after more than a century of slavery was overturned by Republican President Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s, yet southern politicians had still found a way to keep Blacks segregated.
In the early 1960s, Blacks in the south still had to use different washrooms, drink at different fountains, ride at the back of public buses and most couldn’t vote. Civil rights protesters and federal government action seemed to have ended that, but if we’re not careful, at least some of that indignity could return. 

 

In Florida and other states, public libraries have been forbidden from teaching about Black history.

 

Recently, I’ve been re-reading This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me, the memoirs of Canadian Hollywood director Norman Jewison, who died this past January at 97. The director of movies such as Fiddler on the Roof, Moonstruck and The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! recalled that he enlisted in the Canadian Navy late in the Second World War because of his young age. 

 

After the war, he decided, before he was discharged, to travel through the southern U.S. One day he got on a bus and automatically went to his favourite place at the back. The bus driver wouldn’t move the bus because the back of the bus was reserved for Blacks. After he explained to Jewison why the bus wouldn’t move until he changed his seat, the humiliated Canadian got off the bus.

 

The director remembered that feeling when he made the movie In the Heat of the Night, in 1966. The movie tells the story of a Black detective with a northern U.S. police force who mistakenly gets off a train in a southern town and is immediately suspected in a local murder investigation. Once he has cleared his name, he works with the local chief of police (Rod Steiger) to solve the murder.

 

Originally, the studio planned a small budget filming on a Hollywood sound stage and assured Jewison that the movie was too small to interest Jewison. By accident, Jewison met Bobby Kennedy at a ski resort and when he described the story to him, Kennedy told him this was an important story that he must tell.

 

Jewison gained control of making the movie and he went searching for a location to shoot it (no studio picture for him). He found various possibilities in southern states but Black co-star Sidney Poitier didn’t want to film in the southern states where discrimination was still dominant in the 1960s. They filmed in a town just north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

 

The movie won five Academy Awards, including best picture, beating out such classics as The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Bonnie and Clyde and In Cold Blood. (It missed capturing a Best Director Oscar for Jewison.)

 

But somehow things, today, are bringing back memories of the 1960s. For instance, Donald Trump, former U.S. President and current front-runner to lead the Republicans in this fall’s presidential election, has become a hero of the right wing of Republicans. This is a three-times married, serial sexual assault perpetrator who has been recorded as bragging about how he could sexually assault women! He told the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention in Nashville last week he promised to use a second term in the White House to defend Christian values and even suggested he’d shield the faith’s central iconography, warning that the left wants “to tear down crosses.”

 

This is a man who supported police when they were criticized in 2020 after a cop killed a Black suspect by putting a knee on his neck for more than eight minutes. Although the officer was subsequently found guilty of murder, President Trump reacted differently, calling protesters “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.”

 

He had protesters cleared from a Washington street by soldiers, then walked across the park and, in front of an iconic church, held a Bible aloft in a striking photo op. Decades earlier, Trump had bought a full-page advertisement in New York to call for the execution of five young Black men charged with the murder of a white woman in Central Park. Years later, the men were proven innocent and released.

 

People forget what Trump has seen and done, and they also forget the horrid history of people who would see themselves as Christian but have committed murderous sins. So much for learning from history!