Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Down by the (Potomac) Riverside

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Mike Peterson Published: August 28, 2011 1 minute 0 comments

Joel Pett offers a thoughtful perspective on the new MLK memorial on the National Mall.

I'm old enough to remember the Civil Rights Movement, but just young enough to have not quite been an active part of it. I say "active part" because we're all part of it still, in the sense of "You're either part of the solution or part of the problem."

I worked at a summer camp in 1966, the summer before my senior year in high school, and waiting on tables was a large part of our duties in the job. The kitchen staff was black and we became friends with the younger guys, who were college students.

Two of them were actively involved with the Civil Rights Movement down South where they lived and they told us of the extensive training sessions they had, simply learning to take abuse without fighting back, which was an essential part of the movement under Dr. King, and one that carried over into first years of the antiwar movement.

It was a hard thing, to care passionately enough to go out in the street but to restrain that passion when you were being attacked. On the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, it's worth pausing to think about what they went through and to remember the lives lost in the voter registration drives and other activities that made up the movement in those days of glory.

It was perhaps inevitable that passive resistence as the primary tactic of the movement did not last forever. To be effective, a movement has to grow beyond a small, dedicated group, but, as it grows, core principles become diluted.

You can be cynical about that and speak bitterly about hangers-on and dabblers, and I have. Forty years ago, I wrote a song about the showboat type who used to get up and harangue the crowd at anti-war demonstrations that included the line, "While there's war, I've got it made; I never would have gotten laid if it weren't for that damned old Vietnam War."

But we also need to bear in mind that, about the time I was singing that song down at the campus coffeehouse, Peter Yarrow said in an interview that a lot of people thought demonstrations were the movement, and demonstrations were not the movement.

He's right, of course, and the movement goes on.

Joel Pett is right, also, and his deliberately minimalist style belies the maximalist depth of this cartoon.