This protracted and reactionary effort culminated in the establishment of a segregationist and terroristic regime in the Southern states known as \u201cJim Crow,\u201d beginning with the passage of the Mississippi constitution of 1890. This first segregationist state constitution, for all intents and purposes, made Black Americans second class citizens and took away their right to vote. All other Southern states soon followed Mississippi with passage of their own \u201cJim Crow\u201d constitutions. In the years that followed, the Supreme Court of the United States put its stamp of approval on the constitutionality of segregation with its ruling for the segregationists in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The system of racial segregation in the South was not just about demoting Black people to second class citizen status under the lie of \u201cseparate but equal,\u201d but it was a full fledged regime of terror against Black Americans in the South. According to the landmark report of the Equal Justice Initiative on lynching, first published in 2015, between the years of 1877 and 1950 the racist \u201cJim Crow\u201d terror in eleven Southern states resulted in over 4,000 documented cases of lynching. (2) The terror had a clear aim of keeping Black people economically, socially, and politically disenfranchised. While many Black families attempted to migrate out of the South, there were not that many jobs for them in the North since racism was also very strong in the industrial North and even in the workers trade unions dominated by whites. The Northern industrial cities satisfied their need for low wage labor by using the cheap labor of new migrants from Europe. And then, World War I broke out in Europe in 1914. Immigration to the United States plummeted and there was a labor shortage in the North. This process facilitated what is known as the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970, six million Black Americans left the Southern states for the Northeast, Midwest, and even the West, the single largest migration of the country\u2019s citizens within its own borders. (3)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Great Migration had a profound cultural, social, and political impact on the United States. While Black people in the big cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West were still subjected to \u201cJames Crow\u201d racism, they had better jobs, better opportunities for their children\u2019s education, and the right to vote. In the cultural scene, this ushered in a new era of amazing creativity in literature, music, and the arts that completely transformed American culture. Literary giants such as James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Tony Morrision came out of this era. Jazz and other musical genres were directly impacted or were rooted in the migrants who came out of the South. Professional athletes who broke and held records for decades in many sports were from families who had dared to migrate amid the terror in the South.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So when the American Civil Rights movement went into a high momentum phase after the Supreme Court\u2019s Brown vs. Board of Education<\/i> ruling (deeming \u201cseparate but equal\u201d educational spaces unconstitutional) and Rosa Parks\u2019s action that led to Montgomery Bus Boycott in the 1950s (social protest of the segregation policies in public transit), Black intellectuals who had emerged from the Great Migration and didn\u2019t live in the South played an important role.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The question facing the movement hinged on the roles of the Black activists or intellectuals who lived outside the segregationist South as compared to those of the activists who were protesting in the streets of cities like Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery (among others) and who were actively subject to police brutality and white supremacist\/KKK terror. Who would play the main role? Civil rights icons like W.E.B Dubois had emphasized the main role of the South in the past. Yet, this time, one woman made a crucial difference.<\/span><\/p>\n In May 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, deep in the deep South, was a major hotbed of civil disobedience action facing police brutality and KKK racist aggression. The Kennedy Administration, which had not yet taken a decisively supporting position on the movement, wanted to quell the Black population in Birmingham. So, JFK\u2019s brother, Robert Kennedy (RFK), who was also the Attorney General, was given the task to meet with a representative group of the movement in a quiet fashion in a Kennedy-owned apartment in Manhattan. As professor Imani Perri of Princeton writes in her book, present were a \u201cwho is who\u201d of the Black writers, musicians, and other intellectuals of the time, including the immortal James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s advisor, and a 33-year-old activist playwright whose play, \u201cA Raisin in the Sun,\u201d had already gained her international fame. (4) Her name was Lorraine Hansberry, a tiny person with a large presence. Present also was a young \u201cSouthern freedom movement orga-nizer Jerome Smith. Smith had founded the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had initially come to New York so that doctors could attend to the jaw and head damage he\u2019d sustained from beatings at the hands of Southern cops.\u201d (4)\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n According to Baldwin, the meeting began quietly, yet Jerome, with a jaw still healing from the injuries incurred by the Southern police, started to challenge RFK, stating that the federal government was insincere because it was not really protecting the protesters in the South\u2014and, specifically, in Birmingham\u2014because the protestors were left alone facing police brutality. RFK completely ignored Jerome, which is when Lorraine stood up and said: \u201c\u2018You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man [Jerome Smith] over there. That is the voice, she added after a moment during which Bobby Kennedy sat absolutely still staring at her, of twenty-two million people.\u201d And then she said, \u201cWe would like, from you, a moral commitment,\u201d before walking out from the apartment with most of the attendees following her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n About the aftermath of the meeting, Perri writes: \u201cThough RFK was reported to have considered the meeting a great waste of time, less than one month later, his brother President Kennedy, at RFK\u2019s urging, gave his landmark civil rights address during which he proposed the legislation that would be known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the address, JFK spoke of civil rights as not just a legal issue but also, as Lorraine said, a moral one.\u201d (4)<\/p>\n The role of the Iranian diaspora in the \u201cWoman, Life, Freedom\u201d movement has similarities with what was discussed above. Although it is not a one-to-one comparison and there are clear differences between the Great Migration and the over six million Iranians who have emigrated from Iran in the last four decades, similar discussions are going on in this movement regarding who should lead the movement and who shall determine the outcome. There are overt and covert efforts to hijack the movement from abroad by certain political forces that avoid using the main slogan of \u201cWoman, Life, Freedom\u201d and have attempted to put their own stamp on the movement.<\/p>\n We know that giving a \u201cmoral commitment\u201d to the Civil Rights movement and the Black people fighting on the streets in the deep South by the Kennedy Administration made a significant difference in the final collapse of \u201cJim Crow\u201d segregation. One could argue that the lesson we learn today from the words of Lorraine Hansberry, in that historic meeting that was seemingly a \u201cwaste of time,\u201d is that dismantling the Islamic Republic\u2019s gender apartheid system and establishing a secular and democratic Iran could only happen by the people inside Iran and especially the women leading the \u201cWoman, Life, Freedom\u201d movement. We have yet to find our Lorraine Hansberry, to put the men who would like to hijack and tame the \u201cWoman, Life, Freedom\u201d movement under their own \u201cleadership\u201d in their place. Yet, we could definitely learn from her: what the Iranian diaspora and the international community could provide is a \u201cmoral commitment\u201d to support the movement to the end. That is the invaluable lesson of the Civil Rights movement for our Iranian communities around the world.<\/p>\n References:<\/span> Is The \u201cWoman, Life, Freedom\u201d Movement Inside Iran Our \u201cDeep South\u201d? By Hooshyar Afsar It may sound far-fetched to many, yet there are clear similarities between how the American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s overcame seventy years of Jim Crow segregation in the United States and what we Iranians are engaged with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"two_page_speed":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/peykmagazine.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Women-life-freedon-iran.jpg\")
\n<\/span><\/p>\nThe Little Big Woman!<\/b><\/h4>\n
Historic Lesson<\/b><\/h4>\n
\n
\n(1) Foner, Eric, The Second Founding<\/i>, W.W. Norton & Company (2019).<\/span>
\n(2) https:\/\/eji.org\/reports\/lynching-in-america<\/span>
\n3) Wilkerson, Isabel, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America\u2019s Great Migration Paperback<\/i>, Random House (2011).<\/span>
\n(4) Perri, Imani, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry<\/i>, Beacon Press (2018).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"