Freedom on Fire : Human Rights Wars and Americas Response

Human Rights Wars and America's Response Freedom on Fire describes the shifting challenges of global leadership in a world of explosive hatreds and.
Table of contents

The city was known as "Bombingham" because more than fifty bombings afflicted the black community between World War II and When SCLC members organized a series of mass protests, marchers were attacked and jailed and many local ministers called for an end to the demonstrations. In a controversial decision, arrested adults were replaced on the streets with young children.

Images of small children attacked by dogs and police clubs and knocked off their feet by fire hoses shocked the world. The day after W. Du Bois died in Ghana, , people descended on the nation's capital, where King's "I Have a Dream" speech took on mythic proportions. Not a month later, white supremacists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, leaving four little girls dead.

Central Intelligence Agency director J. Edgar Hoover identified the attackers but disliked the Civil Rights movement, so he did nothing. Robert Moses and Amzie Moore offered their own response in by inviting northern white students to Mississippi for a "Freedom Summer" to register black workers and set up "Freedom Schools. Unlike the countless murders of local black people, these killings received international attention.

Eighty-three delegates were elected, but they were denied access to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Fannie Lou Hamer told cameras that they were the true democratically elected representatives of the state, not those sponsored by all-white state elections. The convention seated the white elected delegates, while the MFDP rejected the offer of two at-large seats. This was the most far-reaching and comprehensive civil rights legislation Congress had ever passed.

It banned discrimination in public accommodations and the workplace but did not address police brutality or racist voting tests. The six hundred protestors reached the Pettus Bridge but were pushed back by police violence and tear gas. The attack was dubbed Bloody Sunday. President Johnson was ultimately forced into action, calling on Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of Racism had excluded black people from the accumulation of wealth and resources, a historical reality that could not be addressed by legal protection in the present.

In fact, the federal government did turn its attention to the economic question with a limited "war on poverty. These programs were radical in their reach but radically underfunded and undermined by black and white resistance from the start. The link between race and class, however, could not be severed, especially during a Vietnam War that sent largely poor people of color to its bloody front lines. Even Martin Luther King began to see the links between unfettered funding for the war machine and the sea of poverty washing over America's domestic landscape.

These insights set the stage for King's infamous "Time to Break Silence" speech of and his bridging of the gap between civil rights and economic justice. At the same time, SNCC supported black draft evaders and grew critical of the rights-based approach to black freedom that seemed to be the terms on which white support was offered. It was in Mississippi where Carmichael, frustrated with the continued violence and the limits of legal protection, popularized the slogan "Black Power.

The LCFO was dubbed the Black Panther Party because its state-required ballot symbol was a black panther, a direct retort to the white rooster of the state's Democratic Party and its logo of "white supremacy. The battle waged in "Bloody Lowndes" was lost, but the efforts of a grassroots southern movement for Black Power speaks to the full range of experiences that encompassed the fight for freedom.

The movement fought southern Jim Crow and northern ghetto formation. Led by charismatic individuals and grassroots collectivities, its members turned to nonviolent action and armed self-defense, waging battle in courtrooms and on the streets. Understood in their full depth and scope, visions of the black freedom movement have yet to be fully realized.

America in the King Years, — Simon and Schuster, Harvard University Press, Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and V. Sisters in the Struggle: New York University Press, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton University Press, The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, — I've Got the Light of Freedom: University of California Press, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision.

INTRODUCTION

University of North Carolina Press, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Theoharis, Jean, and Komozi Woodward, eds. Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, — Williams and the Roots of Black Power. African Americans had long endured a physical and social landscape of white supremacy, embedded in policy, social codes, and both intimate and spectacular forms of racial restriction and violence.

By the s the black freedom movement raised a collective call of "No More"! A Jim Crow sign in an unknown area of the United States, ca. The Jim Crow laws legalized discrimination of African Americans in many facets of life, including education, housing, employment, health care, and accommodations. Two young men drink from segregated water fountains in front of Lumberton Warehouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, ca.

Blacks caught drinking from white fountains were often arrested or beaten. Philip Randolph — was a leading African-American activist for several decades of the twentieth century. Randolph had championed the rights of workers in the s, and in November he had threatened to lead a ,person march on Washington if wartime production was not integrated. Randolph called off the march.

Senate seat on the American Labor Party ticket. He was supported by friend and fellow civil rights activist Paul Robeson. Board of Education case. Board of Education of Topeka decision banning segregation in public schools overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which had declared "separate but equal" facilities to be constitutional.

The decision set a precedent that enabled the continued dismantling of Jim Crow legislation nationally. Highlander Research and Education Center. Rosa Parks — was already involved with the NAACP and voter registration activities before she became a symbol of the civil rights movement. On December 1, , Rosa Parks — refused to move from her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to make room for whites. She became widely known as the "mother of the Civil Rights movement. In and thousands of supporters participated in a mass boycott of Montgomery buses that lasted days.

African Americans organized carpools or car sharing to support those in the community who opted to rely on automobiles rather than public transportation. Flyers like this one advertised carpooling services and helped to keep the boycott going strong. Martin Luther King Jr. Ralph Abernathy — and Rev. The two civil rights leaders were arraigned along with eighty-seven other black activists. Abernathy and King worked closely together in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and were best friends. Interview footage was recorded by The HistoryMakers.

History of the Civil Rights Movement

Copyright is held by The HistoryMakers. Use of materials and use credits must be pre-approved. Three years after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. On September 25, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered troops from the Army's st Airborne Division to protect the students, who were then shielded by federal troops and the Arkansas National Guard for the remainder of the school year.

Barred by National Guard troops when they first tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September , the students were later protected daily by federal troops by order of President Dwight Eisenhower. With her husband, L. Bates, she co-published the Arkansas State News and supported civil rights causes in Arkansas and throughout the nation. She became their mentor and advisor. Children join demonstration at an unidentified U.

The Civil Rights Movement

In the SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters. The tragedy occurred the day after President John Kennedy asked Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the following year. On June 23, , Dr. The twentieth child of Mississippi sharecropper parents, Fannie Lou Hamer — picked cotton at the age of six. Evicted from her plantation job in for attempting to register to vote, she became the vice chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

In the largest protest in the nation's history up to that time, more than , marchers gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. Philip Randolph, international president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO, the march also received leadership support from the heads of the five leading civil rights organizations: The final speaker, Martin Luther King Jr. Little more than a year after President John F. Kennedy's June 11, , call for legislation to end discrimination in many areas of the law, including voting rights, public accommodations, and federally assisted programs, President Lyndon B.

Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, They were violently attacked by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The images of this horrifying brutality were seen worldwide and attracted support for the Civil Rights movement. His fight was against poverty and for economic empowerment. He also started to denounce the war in Vietnam. In King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the Poor People's Campaign, which sought to unite the poor regardless of racial background. For five days following Dr. King's assassination, uprisings and unrest erupted in more than cities across the country.

More than 60, people, including dignitaries, politicians, and celebrities, gathered in and around Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King and his father had officiated. And then finally the press. Well, I went and inspected all of this and was very concerned as the human rights person inside government that this was a violation of the human rights of the people who were being forced to return to Haiti to political repression.

So I called publicly when I was in Haiti for a review of the policy of returning these Haitian boat people and I was promptly rebuked the following day in the New York Times for having made this call for a review of the policy.

The Civil Rights Movement

But it was privately congratulated by many people inside the State Department and other places who were equally concerned about this. And three months later the policy was changed so not that my call necessarily produced the policy change, but it was part of the effort to get the policy changed and using the press is an effective way to do that. Let me then move a little bit beyond these bureaucratic battlegrounds and look more at how policy on human rights is made inside government. First is what I call the inter-agency syndrome where in order to get a change of policy you need to get all the agencies connected with that policy in any way to support the change.

This leads you to a kind of policy Catch in the context of something as fundamental as changing policy on Bosnia. Everything is happening at once and who is going to manage to get their policy, their issue, advanced to the highest level of government? By then, tragically, it is often too late because all the other syndromes then kick in. So this is Washington.

This is human rights. The Cold War was over. The country was increasingly self-absorbed. People were interested in domestic issues, perhaps interested in the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War. But right away it was clear from as early as to that there were two great forces at work in the world. But equally powerful and growing quickly during this period were the forces of disintegration.


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As the Cold War ended and failed states began to emerge, violent ethnic, religious, and political conflict became more and more part of the landscape, often fanned by people like Slobodon Milosevic or those who planned the Rwanda genocide who wanted to use these conflicts that were emerging in this period to advance their own interests. And this lead to what I call human rights wars, which are wars against civilians, ethnic cleansing, and the whole catastrophe of the use of paramilitaries against civilians populations and certainly the rise of terrorism.

Throughout the nineties these forces gained strength. They were fueled to some extent by those who were left behind by expanding markets, by those who were trapped in failed states and dead-end repression, but above all, by cynical leaders. And in the end, all of this in my view ends up turning toward those in leadership positions who used these forces to their own advantage. Just some basic statistics, by more than 3,, people had been killed in these human rights wars inside countries such as Somalia, the Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Haiti, just to name a few.

Twenty-five million people by mid-decade had become refugees, rivaling in some ways the refugee crises of the second World War. Twenty billion dollars had been spent by the US on peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance alone and, of course, a growing number of terrorist attacks at US targets.

The forces of disintegration were making strong inroads. About that time, by the mid-decade, the definition of national security was reexamined and slowly broadened. I want to describe that process to give greater emphasis to containing the forces of disintegration by working with other countries to protect human rights, far too late for many of the crises that had come up in the first half of the decade, but developing a new doctrine which I want to examine as we move through this process. The decade began with Somalia, that is to say, the decade of human rights wars, and Somalia, you will recall, was the peacekeeping tragedy where 18 US Rangers were killed in the UN peacekeeping operation.

Black Hawk Down has popularized it and in fact given even today a terrible name to peacekeeping. The irony is it was the forces of integration, that is, communications technology, that brought this catastrophe right into the living rooms of America and particularly in the Congress when the body of an American soldier was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu on CNN, which captured that terrible moment. There was a very strong Congressional, and inside the administration, outcry and reaction against UN peacekeeping -- as often happens, reacting to a crisis without looking at what the peacekeeping operations needed to do to be improved.

This led to a drafting of a Presidential decision directive known as PDD which put very strong restrictions on the use of peacekeeping forces or the US participation in any peacekeeping operation in almost any circumstance. There were no distinctions made in that case about genocide.

No one was particularly thinking in that stage about genocide.

Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response

And I should have said earlier, Joyce Leader, who is another former colleague in the State Department and was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Rwanda, is here with us today, and has very first-hand knowledge of this. The Rwanda genocide broke as PDD was coming into play and there was strong opposition in the Pentagon and the White House to keeping any UN force on the ground despite the fact that a heroic Canadian General, Romeo Dallaire, was commanding a fairly sizeable force, at least in UN terms, of peacekeepers in Rwanda. Ten Belgians were killed early in the genocide by the genocide planners, clearly as a way of testing what was going to happen to this peacekeeping force, and the tragedy was that it was withdrawn.

The US in many ways led the way but Europeans and others were very active in withdrawing that peacekeeping operation, sending a very dangerous signal to the genocide planners that there would be no consequences for their actions. And this is really the first lesson that should be learned about genocide, that you have got early on as the process seems to be gathering strength to send signals that there will be consequences for moving forward.

The small group inside the State Department who were trying to prevent the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping forces really had no traction in this environment. I arranged in the early stages of the genocide to be sent on a mission to Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania to sound out the leaders of those countries about whether they would contribute forces to a new peacekeeping force after the withdrawal of the UN force.

And I found that they were all willing but they all looked to the United States for logistical and general leadership in the military area and, of course, that was not forthcoming. I was undercut as those of us who were trying to build this force were by the unwillingness of the White House or the Pentagon to provide that kind of logistical assistance.

I will never forget, and in this hall of witnessing I should offer my witness, the scene from several thousand feet and then dropping to about in the very small plane that I was traveling in the region on, including over Rwanda. But as I dropped to feet and I got the pilot to go as low as he could I could see very clearly these were bodies choking the river. They were floating down to the beautiful Lake Victoria where they were being fished out for about a half a penny apiece by young boys who were being paid by the Tanzanian government to prevent the pollution of the lake.

That was a terrible, terrible moment and I also very shortly after the genocide was the first international traveler across Rwanda and there was deathly silence. And you saw these beautiful crops growing and, of course, all the hands that had planted them had been cut down.

My colleague from the State Department who was with me coined the phrase which I think captures Rwanda perfectly. He said it was the machete equivalent of a neutron bomb. The entire landscape denuded and destroyed of people. But I will say that although nothing was done to stop it I think the Rwanda genocide has had a profound effect. It had almost immediately a profound effect on the US response to other human rights wars in the case of Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

I remember a State Department meeting in May of as this horror was unfolding and those of us who were concerned about being shackled by the doctrine of PDD also discussed the shackles that had been placed on the United States by Cold War military doctrine, which essentially called for overwhelming force or no force at all.

Library of Congress

We began to wonder whether a new doctrine of diplomacy backed by limited force whereby threats to those who were setting out to commit genocide or crimes against humanity could be credibly delivered by diplomats as a way of preventing this kind of activity. This new doctrine actually came into play only four months later in Haiti where, as you remember, a democratically elected president had been overthrown by a military regime which was committing widespread political killing and crimes against humanity.

It was a major refugee problem, as I said before, for Florida and many other southern states and so the issue became a domestic political issue. It was no longer something happening far away in Rwanda. It was happening right close to the United States. As a result, and I also think influenced by the catastrophic events in Rwanda, there was more agreement within the interagency process and leadership by the President to develop a multi-national force to use as a way of trying to remove the people in Haiti who were causing the human rights catastrophe, General Cedras and his regime, and to reinstate the democratically elected president.

This was done under rules of engagement that were much, much stronger than they had been for the peacekeepers in Rwanda and as they were at the time in Bosnia and so it was an effective operation. This led to a reversal internally. The process of nation building, which is such a critical part of these kinds of interventions, was not attended to.

Finally let me go to the Balkans and look at a bigger, more complicated, and in the end, I think, important lesson for how we prevent genocide. The Balkan crisis, of course, after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, was downplayed by the first Bush administration and then later by the first Clinton administration.

As the battle for the control of Yugoslavia between the various contending former communist leaders who were fanning the flames of religious differences took place, Secretary of State James Baker notoriously said in , We have no dog in that fight, essentially saying that the United States had no strategic interests in what was happening in Yugoslavia. Until mid, the Clinton administration was still affected by the Somalia crisis although slowly, I think, the Rwanda experience and the success in Haiti led to a change in policy in Bosnia.

There was effectively very weak peacekeeping, mostly European, during this time, a UN peacekeeping operation with very limited rules of engagement and not the ability to fight back or to do something to stop human rights abuses that were being committed right before their eyes. This inevitably led to disaster over those four years in which more than , people were killed in a genocidal war. By May of the absurdity of the peacekeeping operation became crystal clear as peacekeepers were taken hostage by the Bosnian Serbs. To arrange for their release the commander of the UN forces at the time essentially promised the Serbs that there would be no more air strikes and this blatant appeasement led to what was effectively the greatest collective failure of collective security in Europe in half a century and that was Srebrenica.

Srebenica, you may remember, was a town in Eastern Bosnia overrun by the Bosnian Serbs in early July of Shortly thereafter women and children began to emerge from out of the woods in Tuzla with almost no men. What had happened to the men? That was the great question. They felt that human rights investigations would not be helpful to that.

But in July of I and Dick Holbrook and a number of others who were pressing for a change in policy said we have got to find out what happened to these men. I went to Tuzla, the city where the refugees were coming in. I had a tip that there were some men beginning to emerge and no one knew where the others were. I had information about who the men were and how I could find them and how I could interview them so I did. I interviewed six men who described to me their survival of their own executions. They essentially had been with the other 7, in various places around Srebrenica, were pushed into open pits after being fired upon by the Bosnian Serbs, and pushed into a mass grave and left for dead.

These few survivors were able to escape. There were two heroes I want to pay tribute to in this particular struggle and they were two low-level CIA agents who when they read my report when I returned, knowing that there had not been a willingness to task the CIA to look for this kind of intelligence previously, stayed up all night around the clock for two days rifling through thousands and thousands of aerial surveillance photographs to see if they could find photographs that matched the description of the survivors of the Srebenica massacre of the places they had been held and the ways they had been shot.

And they found photographs. They found photographs of disturbed earth in exactly the places we determined. They found photographs of men who were lined up and held in warehouses. Within ten days those photos were taken to the UN Security Council and within two weeks the policy changed and NATO began to engage in a much more aggressive effort to back diplomacy by force, bombing Bosnian Serb positions.

A process of negotiation began whereby I went out into the field and Holbrook and others were negotiating with the leaders, Milosevic, Tudjman, et cetera, to get them to stop. I was able to present information about real-time atrocities that were being committed even after Srebenica and then Holbrook was able to get these people to stop. I just want to read one very brief passage in the book, which I think gives you the full flavor both of what I saw and what the reaction was back home: In the blazing noonday sun thousands of gaunt and disheveled figures, mostly women and children, were lining up for food.

UN and Red Cross workers were feverishly trying to move the sea of humanity into makeshift shelters like the cinder block schoolhouse where later that day I interviewed Muslim men whose firsthand accounts of the mass killings at Srebenica would shock the world and finally lead four months later to an end to the war in Bosnia. But getting to that distant point would be a long story whose outcome was never certain. Certainly it was no accident that al-Qaeda was given harbor in Afghanistan and that it was important early on to —— Taliban which were harboring them.

First, I think, is the fact that we look at the war on terrorism as a kind of zero-sum game whereby any country that is with us essentially gets an approval or at least not an reprimand from us for conducting political repression inside that country. Second, I think there is a war on civil liberties here which is an unfortunate outgrowth of the war on terrorism. And, of course, today we have just seen the fact that this issue has gotten into the federal courts in a very important way in this breathtaking assertion of power by the Attorney General to designate any American citizen an enemy combatant and thereby strip that person of the Bill of Rights.

That issue is now being reviewed in the courts. Third, I think we are unfortunately engaging in systematic attacks against international law in the war on terrorism. This is the very law that we need if we are going to stop genocide, certainly the genocide convention, which is the heart of this, but also other aspects of the international treaties. At this point we are saying that in the interest of security we can disregard them.