Keep Your Head Down

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Published at CounterPunch on January 30, 2025.

When I read Thomas Gaither’s obituary in the New York Times,“Thomas Gaither, Who Chose Jail After Civil Rights Sit-ins, Dies at 86” (January 24, 2025), I knew exactly how far protest had come since the heady, but also violently repressed civil rights movement. The peace movement, the women’s movement, the movement for gay rights, and the environmental movement have all failed on the left. We have long since become rear-guard actors and movements subservient to the political and economic systems in the US. Right-wing populism and nativism both here and around the globe seized control of the levers of power in nation after nation. Victories through protest and legislation were almost always reversed, or modified.

Although there have been historical epochs in the US where the right-wing juggernaut reared its ugly head, it was during the presidency of the right-wing former actor, Ronald Reagan, when the contemporary march toward the control of the government by the few and the very wealthy began. The Great Communicator Reagan told his minions that it was “Morning in America”… and the nation would be “Prouder, Stronger, Better,” while it was really the beginning of the end of sane politics and the somewhat fair economic relationships of Roosevelt’s New Deal. We see in Reagan’s handlers’ words reflections throughout US history and especially in the billionaire class of the Trump administration. The working class and parts of the middle class began a slide in their well-being from which there has not been a recovery. It wasn’t a clown car or Wild West show coming into town anymore: This was the real thing. The few and the very wealthy were in control with the rubber stamp of those who vote. The Democrats had become useless and no third party was allowed near the seats of power.

I think that Thomas Gaither’s participation in both the lunch counter sit-ins and his work with the Freedom Riders were the bravest kinds of actions. He was sent to the infamous Parchman Farm in Mississippi as punishment for his lunch counter sit-in. The major premise of the movement of civil disobedience was the underlying principle of direct nonviolent action as a tool to achieve civil rights. A person or group disrupted the status quo and paid a price. The latter worked when some in power, or with the levers of power at their fingertips, reacted and sometimes changed as those who suffered penalties followed this dictate. Thomas Gaither later earned a doctorate in botany and became a professor.

History records, however, despite the heroic efforts of those who took part in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the gains made have been somewhat lost in obscenely high levels of incarceration, schools that remain segregated, and ghettos. Economic gains have been few, but a Black middle class did emerge.

The fortunes of the peace movement were somewhat similar to the trajectory of the civil rights movement from which it partly emerged. Reagan began the march toward endless wars with his low-intensity wars in nations in Central America. George H.W. Bush destroyed much of the Vietnam Syndrome, the hesitancy of people in the US to endorse foreign wars. George W. Bush did the rest with endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the continuing proxy wars today. The CIA always had its secret wars going on and between 700-800 military bases around the world did the rest. Is it any surprise that Trump uses active duty military troops on the streets of the US to round up immigrants in clear violation of US law? Democrats now outpace Republicans in their zeal for war, but war and an economy on a war footing are products of the duopoly. Genocide, despite the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, had the full support of the duopoly in the Gaza Strip.

Protesters against Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and endless wars in the Middle East are gagged by the state. College and university campuses, once a bastion of free speech and protest, become gulags for some protesters and their supporters. Protest on the streets against this genocide are also violently repressed by the power of the police state. Coincidentally, the police as actors doing the bidding of the few and the very wealthy, have always been a presence across this nation in the places where many Black and Brown people live.

The women’s movement’s accomplishments were a two-edged sword. While some working class women joined careers in the professions, that phenomenon was mostly a middle-class experience. Many Black and Brown women see their economic situations remain mired in the plight of the working class and lower middle class with stagnant wages and rapidly rising inflation. The push for abortion rights was destroyed in large geographical areas of the US by the Republican right. Christian fundamentalism is a driving force in the loss of reproductive rights.

Even a casual observer sees the deterioration of the natural environment. Forest fires burn, smoke-filled skies are often the norm, and the fossil fuel industry, the enormously wealthy stepchild of the duopoly, is bankrolled by the government. Endless rains, droughts, and heat waves become more and more the norm. When protesters who support the natural world mount demonstrations, such as at Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, they are brought to their knees by the security state and its local dogs are literally loosened.

These are the words of a worker speaking about the far right in a Harlem bookstore with a decided left bent: “They’ve got the wind in their sails.” Those words are nearly a decade old and the far right not only has the wind in their sails, but they’re close to tanking life on this planet for this species along with most other species. These words were spoken by a shooting survivor of the Kent State University massacre: “Keep your head down.”

I haven’t returned to protest in Washington, DC since January 2001, when the warmonger George W. Bush was inaugurated amid a massive police presence. Protest signs were taken away from protesters unless the signs met a narrow standard set by Bush officials. A bodyguard of a TV celebrity punched a protester standing nearby for some comment that protester made.

The contrasts between the 2001 inauguration protests and the 1971 antiwar protests in DC were as if these protests had taken place in a different world, however, there was always official government repression of protest. The Vietnam antiwar protest movement did indeed have the wind in its sails. After sleeping in West Potomac Park, our contingent of protesters was pursued by the police for hours and the tear gas was everywhere. A friend and I sought refuge in an apartment house where two students gave us shelter. A government helicopter hovered nearby and police chased protesters into that apartment building. Those were heady days!