What the USA is really like and why Trump was elected twice. An excerpt from "Voices of BLM" by Oksana Bryukhovetska.
In the second half of July, the Lviv publishing house "Chovyn," specializing in reportage and documentary literature, will publish an important book by Ukrainian researcher Oksana Bryukhovetska, "Voices of BLM" – a story of the present day of the United States of America that we don't know.
"Voices" is the result of numerous interviews and several years of work on the texts, which began in 2020 in the USA during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. These protests spread throughout the United States that same year after a white police officer deliberately murdered a Black man named George Floyd, and were supported in many countries around the world.
The characters in the book, telling their own stories, unfold before us a complex history of the present-day United States: the reader is presented with an America that we do not know, but which is the real America.
"The Voices" is also about who and why twice elected Donald Trump, one of the most controversial politicians of our time, as President of the United States.
LIGA.net publishes the story of activist and public figure Jo Ann Bland. As a child, she participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the marches led by Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama. Jo Ann became the youngest child imprisoned for protesting.
The 1960s: The Story of My Childhood and the Struggle for Freedom
I was born and raised in Selma, Alabama. It's in the South, and Selma is located right in the middle of the state of Alabama. At that time, it was one of the most racist states in America, and segregation was the norm.
People who looked like me couldn't do many things that white people were allowed to do. I remember not being allowed to go to restaurants, not being allowed to try on clothes in stores. But I didn't understand why I couldn't do these things. I thought it was because white people didn't want us to do them. And I didn't know that in other cities at that time, people just like me had the right to do these things.
My mother died in the white hospital ward when I was three years old. My grandmother came from Detroit to bury her only daughter and stayed to help us children and my father. Besides me, my father had three other children. Before that, my grandmother lived in Detroit, and we called it "the North." And in the North, she had freedoms we didn't have in the South. She could do many things that were forbidden to us. So she began telling the women in our community about these freedoms. My grandmother couldn't understand why the South hadn't changed since she left 35 years ago.
She was introduced to a woman named Amelia Boynton. Miss Boynton and her husband, Samuel, were people who had long realized that if we, Black people, could vote, we could change some of the laws that were unfair to us. Since the early 1930s, they had worked with an organization called the Dallas County Voters League, trying to register African Americans to vote in that area. Grandma started attending the activists' meetings and took us with her. It was boring, but we had to go. We children had to sit at the feet of these history makers while they strategized about something called "freedom."
I thought that freedom in America had already been granted to all people, because I already knew that Abraham Lincoln had freed all the slaves. Maybe the adults didn't know about it, I thought, because they kept talking about gaining freedom. And every time I asked about it, none of them could explain it to me specifically in a way that I could understand.
One day we were on Broad Street, the main street in Selma. There was Carter's drugstore, it's still there today. In the 1960s, when I was growing up, Carter's had a big lunch counter, and I really wanted to sit there, but my grandmother said I couldn't. She said that colored children – that's what we were called then – couldn't sit at that counter. That it was the law. But that didn't stop me from wanting to sit there every time we walked by, and I saw white children sitting there, licking ice cream cones, spinning on the high stools. I so wanted to be in their place. (...) And from that day on I started fighting for freedom, because I really wanted to sit at that counter. (...)
We, the children, would go to the courthouse and go up to the second floor where the registration commission for voting was working. Sometimes they would see us coming and close the doors in our faces. They wouldn't let us in. Then we would kneel on the steps of the courthouse, and someone would say a prayer to the Creator, asking to soften the hearts of these wicked people so that our parents would be allowed to vote until we grew up to vote ourselves.
They quickly went wild and started bringing yellow school buses to the courthouse, packing us in and taking us to jail. They crammed us into cells designed for one or two people. I had never been in a cell before where 20 or 40 people were crammed into such a small space. If you were lucky, or unlucky, to be near a bed, you couldn't sit on it for long. There was no mattress, just a metal frame. And it was very uncomfortable for your back. The toilet was right there, under your feet. No privacy, right there under your feet, in the presence of this large number of people huddled close together. (...)
They did all this to break our spirit. But, in the end, they released us. We went home, took a bath, ate good food, and I realized that I still couldn't sit at the counter in Carter's. And I would show up in front of the courthouse again and often end up back in jail the same day.
In December 1964, a letter was sent to a man named Dr. Martin Luther King, inviting him to speak on our program on January 1st. Dr. King accepted the invitation because he was already aware of the voter registration work that the Dallas County Voters League had been doing for 37 years. He was also aware of the voter registration work that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been conducting there since 1963.
If you study Martin Luther King's movement, you'll find that he never went to places where the movement wasn't already organized. There were activist groups that had already made some progress. And Selma was no exception. The Dallas County Voters League was established 30 years before he came here, so the groundwork was already laid. Just like other places, he chose Selma because it was already organized.
Dr. King chose Selma as the headquarters for the fight for black voting rights in the United States. And since then, everything has been in a ferment here. Dr. King (...) sent Reverend James Orange to Perry County. There, Reverend Orange was able to organize the students. It was easy to organize the students because their parents worked for the very people who were trying to prevent us from getting the right to vote. They marched to the courthouse and were arrested, all of them, along with Reverend Orange. (...)
On March 7th, we gathered at the George Washington Carver housing project and, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, marched down Broad Street. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we encountered a wall of police. The front line of the march stopped, and John Lewis asked permission to proceed. The policeman replied: there will be no march between Selma and Montgomery, you have two minutes to disperse and return to your church. And in less than a minute, they attacked us.
I had never experienced physical violence before. I liked the marches, it was fun – feeling the spirit of the movement, singing, talking, being with my friends, not going to school, I loved it all. When I reached the highest point of the bridge, I was in the middle of a stream of about six hundred people walking two by two. (...) They attacked from both sides – front and back, just beating people. Everyone indiscriminately – young, old, black, white, men, women. It didn't matter. People lay around bleeding, motionless, and it was impossible to stop to help them, because you would also be beaten.
I heard shots, but as far as I know, no bullets were fired on the bridge that day. They released two canisters of gas into the crowd. The gas burned our eyes, got into our lungs, it was impossible to breathe, nothing was visible, panic spread. You constantly bumped into the same people you were running away from. It seemed like it lasted forever. And if you could run away from those who were on foot, you couldn't escape those who were on horseback. The poor horses were frightened, they reared and kicked. They trampled people, breaking their bones. The last thing I remember on that bridge that day was a woman and a horse that ran into her. I didn't know what happened, whether the man on horseback pushed her and she fell, or the horse ran straight into her, I don't know. I only know that when I sit here on this bridge 56 years later, I still hear the sound of her head hitting the pavement. (...)
On March 21st, we set out again from the chapel. We crossed the same bridge, and this time the same policemen were supposed to protect us all the way from Selma to Montgomery. It took five days to walk to the capital. Five days. There are no motels between Selma and Montgomery, and there still aren't any today. We had to carry everything we needed for this march with us.
On August 6 of that same year, 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed. And it removed the obstacles that prevented us, black people, from voting and that put us constantly at risk of attack.
How the changes took place and my case today
Now I can try on clothes in stores. I can eat in restaurants. But the changes happened slowly. Some guys went to that Carter's store with the counter to integrate. They weren't served, so they called the manager. A confrontation occurred, in which the guys clearly failed to uphold the principle of nonviolence. The owner closed the store, and when he reopened, the counter was gone. (...)
So, change happened slowly, especially here in the South. It wasn't like one morning we woke up and received everything, all the rights that the constitution granted us. Every right we have was fought for, won through struggle.
School integration began in the fourth grade. And I remember one black family who were the first to go to a white school. The following year, we went. I went to the eighth grade to integrate into a white school. (...) It was simply unbearable and I think it caused a transformation in me, it left its mark on who I am today. (...)
I worked in the army for nine years. When I first returned home from the army, I decided to stay in the South again. (...)
I found a job with a youth leadership organization, in a project called "21st Century Leadership." We worked on community issues. Young people were taking to the streets. I told them my stories about how we struggled in the 1960s, how we coped with it. (...)
A week later, I founded the company "Journey for the Soul," and now I travel across the United States. I meet people from all over. And people visit Selma, where I give tours and tell them our story. And I like it. I get paid for speaking, so I can pay my bills, that's how I live. (...)
After the election and Black Lives Matter
(...) Republicans have never hesitated to push their agenda, ever. No matter who it hurt, their agenda always came first. But it seems that when we're in power, we want to compromise. What the hell! We shouldn't compromise. (...)
So, I think he [Biden] needs to push his agenda. And push forward, because we're tired. We've been oppressed for a very long time. The oppression didn't start yesterday. We don't think, of course, that he's a miracle worker. When Obama was elected, he lost Congress. Then, I know, he lost the Senate. And he couldn't do anything, and Joe Biden was his vice president. He knows this well. So why isn't he doing it? Donald Trump immediately signed orders, and nobody said a word, he was a tyrant, and nobody said a word. Now you're telling me you can't do the same thing? It's your time! (...)
Our Black Lives Matter demonstrations were mostly peaceful; I don't recall any fights. Only once, when people in Montgomery went to protest across from the Capitol and wrote "Black Lives Matter" on the sidewalk, were they arrested. But arrests, as we know, bring attention to the issue. When you're arrested, it's on the news, and people start talking about it. That's what happened to us in the 1960s, especially with children. They sent children to jail, and it affected America's moral compass. And now with Black Lives Matter, I think everyone who watched young George Floyd die, how he was murdered in front of people, everyone felt it. I think it changed people's moral compass. And that's why we saw people of different colors at these protests, not just Black people. (...)
Our children and our history
Schools in the United States are largely segregated, not just in the South, but across the country. And that's truly sad, because it's in schools that our children could get to know each other, to dispel some of the crazy ideas their parents have. This would be possible if they knew each other better. But we don't mix them. White kids here, black kids there. So all the kids hear is what people like them tell them. They don't try to understand others, to get rid of that fear that's passed down to white children hereditarily, when they believe what their parents say. Only when they get to college do they start to change.
When you're in a diverse group, you're forced to deal with people who don't look like you, and one day you wake up and say, oh, she's not so bad, or he's not so bad; what my father told me isn't true. And then you seek independence from those views, and that's how change happens. That's why I think Black Lives Matter is doing good organizational work. Because what we called black people's problems are also problems of people in general, and that's why people of all colors have come out to fight these problems. Not just people who look like me. And that's what I like about this movement.
First of all, I've learned over the years that you can't prettify our history. And children can sense the falseness. You have to give them an understanding that this was the past, and we are in the present. You study this to make sure it doesn't happen again in our time. I've often seen transformations in children's groups; they can ride a bus from California to Alabama together, and they're all friends and happy, regardless of skin color. When you start telling them this story, you see them divide into groups. White children, on the one hand, feel that black children are blaming them, and black children, on the other hand, really blame them, rolling their eyes.
But, as I said, children need to understand that this should never happen to any people again. And if you don't know what happened, you're doomed to let it happen again. So, what will your role be in preventing this? And I practically taught this every day before COVID. Because you can't let children go with a sense of guilt or hatred. That's not the point of teaching history. If the real history was written, white children wouldn't hate anyone. (...)
***
Oksana Bryukhovetska – researcher, artist, and curator from Kyiv.
She lived in the United States for four years. In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, she lived in New Orleans and participated in street demonstrations with her family. Later, she traveled through the American South, including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, learning about the history of African Americans and their liberation movements. More than 20 interviews recorded in the USA formed the basis of the research presented in this book.