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(Here's one more look at the late Nelson Mandela and the Southern senator who dismissed him as a communist. This was published recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.)
(Nelson Mandela in 2008)
When Nelson Mandela spoke to the U.S. Congress on June 26,
1990, the godfather of modern-day Republican obstructionism, the late U.S. Sen.
Jesse Helms of North Carolina, wasn’t in the chamber.
I was there as a reporter, but “Senator No” was protesting.
“Before we get his halo in place too securely, let’s examine this guy,” Helms
groused.
Of course, Helms had made up his mind about the man who led
the fight for freedom against apartheid rule in South Africa. Helms called
Mandela a “communist,” much like he called Martin Luther King Jr. a communist,
and he opposed sanctions against South Africa like he opposed civil rights
legislation and a holiday named after King.
Helms missed a good speech. It came just four months after
Mandela’s release from 27 years in prison. Mandela died last month at the age
of 95.
Echoing King’s speech in the 1963 March on Washington,
Mandela said South Africa “has known nothing but racism for three centuries,”
but it could become “an oasis of good race relations, where the black shall to
the white be sister and brother, a fellow South African, an equal human being.”
Mandela even invoked King in his speech, citing him along
with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick
Douglass and others as having inspired South African freedom fighters in their
“struggle to guarantee the people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
(To the right, Jesse Helms)
If Ol’ Jesse were alive today, what would he say about his
philosophical successor, Tea Party hero and Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of
Texas? “Nelson Mandela will live in history as an inspiration for defenders of
liberty around the globe,” Cruz posted on his Facebook page Dec. 4. “Because of
his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free.”
Cruz has since caught hell from supporters even farther to
the right than he is. Still, Cruz is no hero. Had he been a senator back in
Helms’ day, he would have fought side-by-side with the owlish North Carolinian,
raising Cain about commies in both the U.S. South and South Africa. It’s easy
to praise someone after he’s safely entombed in the grave.
Helms wasn’t the only
conservative of his day who held contempt for Nelson Mandela. President Ronald
Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and then-Congressman and
future Vice President Dick Cheney all preferred racist, white-ruled South
Africa and apartheid to Mandela and his African National Congress.
The world rightly mourns the death of a great leader in
Mandela. Again much like King, he took his stand at a time when non-racist rule
in his homeland seemed impossible. King spent time behind bars, and so did
Mandela, nearly three decades of it. He even refused a pardon in 1985 when the
condition for it was a renunciation of violence in the cause for freedom.
Like King, Mandela once believed nonviolence was the way to
end racism, but the South African government’s own brutality convinced him the
ANC had to arm itself and wage combat if it was to succeed. In the end,
however, it was Mandela’s genius at negotiation and vision of a nonracial
future, not violence, that won the day. He proved Mao Zedong was wrong when the
old revolutionary insisted that “in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary
to take up the gun.”
The struggle, of course, goes on, both in South Africa and
here at home. Mandela helped end apartheid, but deep poverty continues. One out
of every four South Africans is jobless. Racism in the U.S. South is no longer
officially sanctioned, but blacks continue to be the poorest in what is still
the nation’s poorest region.
At the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, public
protests by churches and groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
Students for a Democratic Society and the Congress of Racial Equality forced
Chase Manhattan and other major banks to withdraw some $40 million in financial
support for South Africa’s white government.
Yet major banks today continue to be on the wrong side in
social justice issues. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s divestment
campaign against JP Morgan Chase for its support of Reynolds American finally
forced the tobacco company in 2012 to agree to meet with FLOC regarding serious
health and other issues among migrant workers in the tobacco fields.
Back in 1990, Mandela told Congress that he hoped the poor
would never point a finger of accusation “at all of us because we failed to
respond to the cries of the people for food, for shelter, for the dignity of
the individual.” Mandela heard their cries. Who does today?
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