'Troublemaker': A Book Review

'Future Hope' Column 

By Ted Glick

“Time after time on the Grenada (Miss.) Square [in 1966] when we were confronted and outnumbered by Klan-led mobs armed with baseball bats and steel pipes, our songs held us together. And often – not always, but often – our singing literally prevented them from charging into us with their clubs swinging. I know that sounds impossibly mystic and fanciful, but it’s true. I saw it. I experienced it.”
                                       -Bruce Hartford, “Troublemaker”: Memories of the Freedom Movement

As I write it’s the day before the big Global Climate Strike, happening because, 13 months ago, one 15 year old young person in Sweden, Greta Thunberg, translated her despair about the climate emergency into action. Week after week, she and others who joined her somehow sparked a movement of young people that will see, tomorrow, 4500 actions in 150 or so countries, over a thousand of them in the USA, demanding that the governments of the world get truly serious about shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewables and energy efficiency, for a justice-based, clean energy revolution.

Those young people part of that movement, and all the rest of us, would gain a great deal by getting and reading the new book, “Troublemaker,” by Bruce Hartford, a personal memoir of what it was like to be part of the civil rights/Black Freedom movement between 1963 and 1967. There are so many lessons to be learned for today, so much inspiration from Hartford’s experiences and his insights about movement- and organization-building learned from those experiences.

The first part of the book is about Hartford’s involvement as a teenage activist in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in 1963 and 1964 as part of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and, in the Bay Area, as part of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley. But the strength of the book is the stories about his time in the deep South, in Alabama and Mississippi, from early 1965 to 1967.

This section of the book begins with Hartford going to Selma, Alabama the day after the brutal Edmund Pettus Bridge attack on March 7th, 1965 by police against 600 nonviolent Black demonstrators.  Hartford describes in detail what things were like afterwards as the movement held together and kept active until, two weeks later, it won a federal court case mandating that they could march from Selma to Montgomery, which they then did. This was one of the most historic moments of the epic 60’s battle against racist and violent Jim Crow segregation.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: tedglick.com