CT Vivian, Freedom Rider in the segregated American South, speaking to Eric Etheridge in Etheridge’s book about the Freedom Riders, Breach of Peace:
The normal white response is that we were creating violence, and some of them jeered at the idea of our being nonviolent. No, you’re not nonviolent. You actually are creating the violence. If you would just be, you know, quiet Niggs – I mean, colored people, then there wouldn’t be any violence.
Any dictator doesn’t want anybody to say anything about his dictatorship, because obviously, he’s going to create violence, but then, also obviously, he’s going to blame it on the victim. We didn’t play that game.
That was not only a white line but also a scared black line: “Oh, please don’t bother these white people. Because they’re gonna going to be violent. They’re gonna kill us. They’re gonna kill us. They’re gonna kill us.”
What these liberal white fellows were saying is that the non-liberals down here are gonna kill you, and you know we’re not gonna say anything to them, and we won’t be able to help you. This is now the unspoken stuff, now. And without our help, why, you could never make it, because you must have us talking to white people. And we were saying, that’s your importance, all right, but you haven’t freed nobody.
This is the genius of Martin, who spoke the whole thing so well, week after week, month after month, from that time on. Until we are in charge of our own freedom, there is not gonna be any freedom for us. As long as we allow someone else to speak for us, and they know each other very well, there’s not gonna be a breaking of the old order. We’re still going to be killed whenever any policeman decides to. And they are always gonna be covered up if they care to cover it up at all.
Who’s going to get honest enough to cut through this? This is who we are. And we know we can be killed in the process. So? We’re gonna get killed anyway. But we’re not going to do it without it being obvious, and we’re not going to do it without it being all over the world, and we’re not going to do it playing the game of your so-called democracy, which is undemocratic.
