Black and green
Civil Rights - USA and Ireland
Thirty years ago the Civil Rights movement in the Six Counties
began with a march from Coalisland to Dungannon. Brian Dooley
describes how they drew inspiration from the campaign for civil
rights in the United States.
Thirty 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
recognize 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 at £12.99. To order direct (free p&p in the UK) call 0181
324 5570 (24 hrs).