Breathless

SNCC is a non-fiction film made by Danny Lyon about his giddy time inside the “beloved community” that took down Jim Crow. Lyon, who was born wild, maps the movement of mind that led young radicals to dump (what one blissed out poet of revolutionary dawns termed) “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute.” (You can watch SNCC here, one tap away, at Lyon’s Bleak Beauty blog.)

Picking up on an invite from John Lewis, who’d become his friend-for-life, young Lyon stepped off from the University of Chicago to join the Southern freedom movement in 1962. James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, saw that Lyon’s eye might have its uses for an organization that needed to make Americans all over the country feel the struggle for Civil Rights down home. Lyon became SNCC’s first/echt official photographer. His movie’s narrative rests on hundreds of his 35mm still pictures (many of them never shown before) and a soundtrack of recordings made inside black churches in the early 60s.

The meld comes together with the force of reality in a sequence of images about thirty minutes into SNCC. A chorus fronted by Betty Jane Fikes—a teenager back in the early Sixties—belts out “This Little Light of Mine,” seeming to animate from within photos of mass meetings with everyday people, SNCC regulars, and famous allies (James Baldwin, MLK et al.). You are there—in the pews of a reconstituted church-on-film that contains years of euphoric fear.[1]

Footage in SNCC from a retrospective back-and-forth between Lyon and Julian Bond defines the parameters of that historic era. Lyon allows he was put off when LBJ famously borrowed words from the Movement’s anthem—”We shall overcome”—as the president pressed a joint session of Congress in March of 1965 to pass legislation guaranteeing voting rights for all. Lyon is one among plenty of white 60’s vets who have mocked LBJ’s “ventriloquism.” (Bob Dylan, for example, is snooty about LBJ’s line in Chronicles.) But Bond isn’t having it. He points out that Martin Luther King teared up when Johnson echoed the Movement’s catchphrase. (Bond is in tune with James Bevel—one of the most creative Southern freedom-fighters—who once talked back to LBJ haters:

[I]f I was to rate the Civil Rights speeches of the ’60s…I would give that speech the number one place…I think it’s classical, in terms of rising above being a Southerner, being white, being anything…and just in that moment possessed by the spirit of being a man looking at America, looking at the Constitution, looking at the struggling people. And I think there was a genuine sense of love and respect that went from Johnson to all people.[2])

Bond evokes LBJ’s emotional meetings with grieving parents of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner to school Lyon, who takes the lesson well, copping to his “bourgeois” white boy’s angle on LBJ’s role. But Lyon also helpfully recalls how SNCC people had once been prevented from singing “We Shall Overcome” on the podium at the March on Washington in 1963. The glory days of the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement began with the great petitionary March and peaked when LBJ took care of the people’s business on March 15th, 1965. No doubt there are those who’d seize on the different responses to SNCC’s “Overcome” and LBJ’s, citing the disjuncture within the conjuncture as proof of this nation’s boundless hypocrisy. But I plan to stay a believer.

Lyon isn’t given to beamishness about America. (He has done something close to hard time reporting on this country’s prisons: “Seven and a half percent of all single adult Americans between twenty and thirty-five are felons and have been locked up in prison. It’s like a cancer inside us. Prison seems to be part and parcel of America…”[1]) Yet he’s still thrilled by SNCC’s commitment to achieving our country.

SNCC isn’t meant to be the definitive film on the Movement. It’s not comprehensive like Eyes on the Prize. And it doesn’t get deep into the back story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (check Freedom on My Mind) or the Birmingham Children’s March (try Mighty Times). Lyon avoids SNCC’s weeds. His movie won’t help you grasp, say, tensions between SNCC and SCLC or conflicts between James Forman and field organizers like Bob Moses and Charles Sherrod. (Lyon touches on how Stokely Carmichael came to replace John Lewis as SNCC’s Chairman and events that forced SNCC’s white members to move on, yet he’s not out to have the last word on such matters.)

Lyon also treads lightly when he brings up what went down in 1986 when John Lewis won a campaign against Julian Bond to become the Democrats’ nominee for congress in the one district in Georgia with a black majority at that time. (During a debate, Lewis challenged Bond to join him in taking a urine test, implying his old comrade had become a druggie.) It was a dispiriting stretch for everyone who’d come of age convinced Lewis and Bond were both heroes of our time.

The two men didn’t speak for years. Lyon’s film aims to underscore their eventual reconciliation. Lyon’s footage of his Q&A’s with the departed Lewis and Bond are keys to the film’s soul. Lyon’s exchanges with Bond leave you wondering if anyone could’ve been kinder or suaver than this J.B. (Though Julian teasingly invokes another possible contender when he refers to his grandfather as the “original James Bond.”)

Lewis, by contrast, was country till he died. Lyon’s final meet-up with him gets gently intense. They head out to a city park[4], where they talk dogs-and-weather. A fragile Lewis flashes back to past family outings. Bundled up but still enjoying a hint of Spring, the two old buddies gladly take the breeze, though both know Lewis’s breath will soon become air.
…

Notes

1 A phrase coined by historian Ty Geltmaker (who lived it in Act Up during the 80s). See his “The Queer Nation Acts Up: health care, politics, and sexual diversity in the County of Angels” published originally in Society and Space, 1992, volume 10, pages, 609-680.

2

…And I think it’s very clear in that speech that it is not a political speech. It’s more or less a sermon. And it was the same effect that I get when I hear good preaching. It’s, you know, it’s like this guy is really saying it and he’s not playing, and because he is saying it and because he is not playing something is going to be done. And it was like that’s the law. That the President is speaking…and people hear him and they know that he is right and they’re going to address the problem. And it was like, yeah, well, that is solved…

Bevel’s own patriarchal biases—he’d go on to organize the Million Man March in the 90s—may partly explain his deep responsiveness to the TCB vibe in LBJ’s speech. But Bevel’s rap is still good democratic talkback.

3

…There are even prisons run by corporations inside the United States. In other words, you can make money by locking people up…Recently I drove from the northeast corner of Utah down to our home in New Mexico. America has changed. The road has changed. There aren’t any gas stations any more. There aren’t any mechanics either. There are just a bunch of ugly mini-marts selling crap to overweight people in a world where the most successful sentiment is greed. And that changes us.

You cannot have prisons without guards. And for every day of life you steal from these people, you steal something from yourself. For every pleasure you deny them, you deny another to yourself. For every severe sentence you steel yourself to hand out you diminish something inside yourself. And when you insist on execution you kill something inside yourself. You kill your humanity. Be neither a slave nor a master. Just be free.

Neither Slave Nor a Master – First of the Month