A brick, a beach, and a lesson that never stopped moving
By Ben Jealous
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – There is an old man in the movement who still brims with the courage and love forged on a Chicago beach. His eyes do not work well anymore. It seems to bother him less than you would think. Norman Hill has always seen more with his head and his heart than most of us ever see with our eyes.
I met Norman in the summer of 1993, at the convention of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. He was its president. He and the labor leaders Bill Lucy, Richard Womack and Clayola Brown gathered two dozen young Black organizers who shared their vision. Lucy had helped lead the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis the week King was killed.
Stacey Abrams was one of us. Derrick Johnson was one. Jena Roscoe was one. I was one. They passed down what A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin had taught them. Civil rights and workers’ rights are one fight. Racism splits working people apart. Economic injustice profits from that division. Our answer has to take on both.
Norman learned that from those two men. He also learned it on a Chicago beach. In 1960, Rainbow Beach was public by law and White by custom. Velma Murphy was 21 years old and president of the South Side NAACP Youth Council. She decided to test it. If students in the South could sit down at a lunch counter, young people in Chicago could wade into Lake Michigan.
Norman helped her build a group, Black and White together. Some wanted an all-Black action. Norman and Velma said no. Black leadership and Black and White people standing side by side were not rival ideas. Together they were the plan.
In late August 1960, they walked onto Rainbow Beach. They spread blankets. They read books. They played checkers. They walked into the water.
A White mob gathered. Rocks and bricks flew. A brick hit Velma in the head and knocked her out cold. Norman picked her up and carried her off that beach. It took 17 stitches to close the wound.
They went back anyway. Again and again, through the next summer, they claimed their beach. The papers carried Velma’s story, and the crowds that came to stand with them grew. The city was forced to protect them. Rainbow Beach became a beach for everybody.
That victory was a blueprint. Black-led. Black and White together. Built on working people standing as one. Brave enough to take a beating. Disciplined enough to come back. The lesson did not stay on the beach.
Soon after that summer, Stacey, Derrick, Jena and I went to Mississippi. Governor Kirk Fordice wanted to be rid of the state’s three Black public universities. He had already threatened to call out the National Guard rather than spend another dollar on them. Now he wanted to shut down Mississippi Valley State and put a prison on the campus.
He wanted Alcorn State gone. He wanted Jackson State made over into something else. Alcorn is where Medgar Evers met Myrlie Beasley. They married on Christmas Eve. They worked side by side in the Mississippi NAACP office until the night Medgar was shot dead in his own driveway.
Saving Alcorn meant saving the ground where that love began.
We organized. We pulled in White Mississippians who understood that a state that shuts down its Black colleges will not stop there. Norman’s theory, tested again, 700 miles from the lake.
The plan died. All three schools are open today.
Derrick stayed in Mississippi and went deeper into the place where labor, civil rights and politics meet. Today he is president and CEO of the NAACP. One of his early mentors down there was Charlie Horhn. Charlie brought Black and White workers at a Jackson factory into one union. He started the state’s first Randolph Institute chapter. In 1993 he ran the campaign that sent Bennie Thompson to Congress.
Charlie is 91 now. His son John is the mayor of Jackson.
Clayola Brown is the president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute now. She sits in Norman’s chair. She was there in that room too, already carrying the same lesson forward. The women and men Norman trained across the decades will gather in Chicago at the end of this week. Legions from labor. Leaders in civil rights and politics as well. Our titles have changed. The bond has not.
The late Rev. Jesse Jackson built the Rainbow Coalition into a national force. In Chicago’s moral history, there is no Rainbow Coalition without Rainbow Beach. And then there is the love story.
Velma Murphy became Velma Hill. They married the year after the brick. More than six decades of love, labor and civil rights.
But the marriage was never the point. It was the workshop.
Two dozen of us sat in that room in 1993 because Norman and Velma had spent thirty years building something strong enough to hold us. That is what a movement marriage does. Medgar and Myrlie did it in Mississippi. Myrlie carried the work for decades after they killed him, and went on to lead the NAACP herself. The love did not end in that driveway. It went out into the world and made leaders.
It is what Derrick and Letitia do now, pouring into the organizers coming up behind them the way Norman poured into us.
I once asked Norman how he and Velma lasted so long.
“Find a woman who is as much of a warrior as you are,” he told me, “and marry her.”
What he built with her raised us. Stacey. Derrick. Jena. Me. Legions more across the decades. We came to them as students and they sent us out as leaders, and every one of us is proud to count ourselves among Norman and Velma’s children in the movement. The rainbow did not stop at the water’s edge. It ran through Randolph and Rustin. It ran through Medgar and Myrlie. It ran through Norman and Velma. It reached two dozen students in 1993. It runs through Derrick and Letitia. And it runs all through the NAACP family.
Norman’s eyesight has dimmed. His vision has not. At Rainbow Beach, and in every life it still touches, the rainbow never ends.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president and CEO of the NAACP.
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