Black and green civil rights

Posted by Jim on August 18, 2018

Black and green civil rights

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Fifty years ago the Civil Rights movement in the Six Counties began with
a march from Coalisland to Dungannon, which is being re-enacted today by
Sinn Fein. Brian Dooley describes how the original marchers drew
inspiration from the campaign for civil rights in the United States.
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Fifty years ago this week, several thousand marchers set off from
Coalisland on the first civil rights march in the north of Ireland.

The world remembers the Derry march of 5 October 1968, when the RUC
batoned the protestors off the streets, because it ended in violence and
– more importantly – was televised, but the Coalisland to Dungannon
march came first, and was much bigger than the Derry protest.

The march marked a tactical departure for the Northern Ireland Civil
Rights Association (NICRA), which had been content until the summer of
1968 with trying to pursue anti-discrimination cases in the courts,
issuing leaflets and writing letters to the press drawing attention to
gerrymandering and unfair housing allocation. In June 1968, Austin
Currie had brought media attention to housing discrimination by
squatting in a house in Caledon.

Republicans and others in NICRA pressed for more direct action, and
advocated taking to the streets in American-style civil rights marches.
Drawing on a long tradition of solidarity with the black American
struggle which stretched back to the 1840s, a march was planned for the
last Saturday in August 1968.

Television pictures of demonstrations in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and
elsewhere inspired civil rights activists in the north of Ireland, and
political links between black American and Irish activists spanned
several generations.

Daniel O’Connell had been a leading and public opponent of American
slavery, and in 1845, former black slave Frederick Douglass toured
Ireland. He gave a series of lectures in Belfast, and appeared at a
political rally at Dublin’s Liberty Hall with O’Connell to raise support
for the anti-slavery movement.

In the 1920s, the political grandfather of black nationalism, Marcus
Garvey, studied the structure and modus operandi of Sinn Fein, and
modeled his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) on the same
lines. At the huge UNIA rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in
August 1920, Garvey telegrammed Eamon de Valera in the name of 25,000
black delegates to formally recognise him as president of the Irish
Republic.

That same year Garvey sent a telegram to British Prime Minister David
Lloyd George asking that Republican hunger striker Terence MacSwiney not
be allowed to die, and sent another to MacSwiney’s priest which said
“Convey to MacSwiney sympathy of 400,000,000 Negroes”.

MacSwiney’s death after 74 days on hunger strike touched a deep chord in
Garvey, who repeatedly expressed admiration for the prisoner’s
sacrifice. “I believe the death of MacSwiney did more for the freedom of
Ireland today than probably anything they did for 600 years prior to his
death”, he said, and compared him with Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi.

Fifty years later, Republicans were again linking their struggle to the
black civil rights movement in America, and were key in organising the
march to Dungannon.

Although Republicans provided the flatbed lorry from which the speakers
were to address the crowd, and supplied the stewards, march organizers
were keen to present the march as a civil rights, as opposed to a
Nationalist, demonstration. In fact, a NICRA official prevented Roy
Johnston, the IRA’s Director of Information, from delivering a message
of support at the start of the march.

When the procession reached the outskirts of Dungannon they found the
road ahead blocked by a police cordon, behind which stood several dozen
counter-demonstrators, led by Ian Paisley. A request to reroute the
protest and the presence of the police threw the civil rights marchers
into some confusion, and a heated debate raged between those who wanted
to take on the police, and those who insisted that the march remain
non-violent.

The march eventually passed off peacefully, and the marchers dispersed
singing “We Shall Overcome” with some voices mingling in “A Nation Once
Again”.

Links between Irish and black American activists intensified in the
following few years, with Eilis McDermott of People’s Democracy going to
Black Panther Offices in New York, where she was made an “honorary
panther”, and Bernadette Devlin McAliskey forging political ties with
the Panther leadership and even visiting prominent black radical Angela
Davis in jail in California in 1971.

Davis was awaiting trial for murder and kidnapping, had been on the
FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, and been publicly identified as “a terrorist”
by President Richard Nixon. Davis was acquitted of all charges, is now a
university professor and has remained a key ally in the Irish struggle.

She visited Belfast to take part in a women’s rights movement conference
in 1994, and remembered: “I thought immediately about the situation in
apartheid South Africa because I had visited South Africa and what
struck me most was the military presence … I’ve known about the
occupation for very many years, but it was quite another thing to come
face to face with it and to be searched everywhere … in the aftermath
of that visit I made a point to include in all of my talks some comments
on the situation there.” Davis joined former New York Mayor David
Dinkins and other black leaders in the campaign for the release of
Roisin McAliskey.

It was not just the radical wing of the black civil rights movement that
has supported Irish activists. In 1972, two weeks after the Bloody
Sunday massacre, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded
by Martin Luther King, sent a delegation of top officials to a NICRA
conference in Belfast. Bernard Lee, Juanita Abernathy and Juanita
Williams addressed the meeting and took part in protest marches about
the killings.

Several black Members of Congress have also taken a keen interest in the
Irish situation, including Donald Payne, the first African-American to
be elected to Congress from New Jersey. He visited the six counties in
1995 and in 1997 introduced a bill in the House of Representatives
calling for a ban on the use of plastic bullets by the RUC.

Although the civil rights march of August 1968 went largely unnoticed by
the international media, it marked the start of a new phase of direct
resistance to unjust laws, a willingness to confront authority in the
streets, and renewed co-operation in the long tradition of solidarity
between the black American and Irish struggles.

* Brian Dooley is author of Black and Green, The Fight for Civil Rights
in Northern Ireland and Black America, published by Pluto Press.