Racism Does Not Take a Holiday on Mother’s Day

By Chauncey DeVega | Originally Published at We Are Respectable Negroes. May 10, 2015

Mother’s Day has history. In the United States, racism and white supremacy are in the blood and sinew–quite literally of the land–and penetrate almost every aspect of the culture.

Mother’s Day cannot escape its grasp and shadow.

For example, Mother’s Day was celebrated in Japanese-American internment camps during World War 2.

There was Mother’s Day during America’s many decades-long regime of Jim and Jane Crow.

The Ku Klux Klan, the largest terrorist organization in American history, would hold rallies on Mother’s Day:

White and black Freedom Riders were viciously beaten by a white mobon May 14, 1961–Mother’s Day–as they risked their lives to make American democracy whole, struggling against a herrenvolk white racist State that deemed African-Americans to be second class citizens:

On Sunday, May 14, 1961—Mother’s Day—scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window.

As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. “Burn them alive,” somebody cried out. “Fry the goddamn niggers.” An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled n Sunday, May 14, 1961—Mother’s Day—scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window.

As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. “Burn them alive,” somebody cried out. “Fry the goddamn niggers.” An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.

Black America loved its moms even while White America deemed them not worthy to drink from “white” water fountains, to sit in the front of buses, to try on the fancy hats and other clothes while shopping in white owned stores that they would later wear to their Mother’s Day church services and dinners, or to not be exploited as maids, house servants, or “wash women”, as these wonderful mothers worked to provide for their families and communities in a racist and sexist society.

In the Age of Obama, the mothers of black men, women, boys, and girls, who have been shot dead by thug cops are still mothers–they are now mothers whose children were stolen from them by the State and those who it has given the power to commit legal murder against black and brown people, the poor, and the mentally ill with impunity.

Michelle Obama, the First Lady of the United States, and mother to two beautiful children, has been subjected to vicious racism by a White Right and a Republican Party cum white supremacy because the symbolic politics and optics of a black woman, and her family, as American royalty is anathema to their belief that “real America” is synonymous with “white”.

The black mothers who have lost their children to policy thuggery have been victims of physical violence; Michelle Obama and her family have been subjected to symbolic violence as an antecedent and fantasy wish fulfillment for actual physical violence by white racists and their allies.

The colorline lives through Mother’s Day.

Perhaps, this is rooted in the origins of the American version of the holiday, as it was legislated into existence by a white supremacist president named Woodrow Wilson, and sponsored by a unrepentant white racist congressman/senator from Alabama known as J. Thomas Heflin of Alabama.

From The New York Times:

The House resolution that led President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to proclaim the second Sunday in May Mother’s Day was the only memorable accomplishment in the 26-year career of the biggest boob in the history of Congress. He may also have been the most shameless racist.

J. Thomas Heflin of Alabama served in the House from 1904 to 1920 and the Senate for 10 years after that. “Cotton Tom” was a walking editorial cartoon of the yahoo nabob, a great bus of a man in white frock coat, outsize bow tie, pointy shoes and candy-striped socks.

Another nickname, Tom-Tom, presumably alluded to his gallery-packing oratory, which featured moos, cock-a-doodle-doos and the obligatory “Negro dialect.”

To point out that Tom Heflin was a member of the Ku Klux Klan does him too much justice. The Alabama Klan of the 1920’s was the insurgent populist wing of the Democratic Party, which launched such liberal politicians as Hugo Black. Heflin was a demagogue uncorrupted by ideology.

He was very high on womanhood, however — provided that it was preceded by “sacred white.” In the 1930’s, he championed two famous oppressed females against “vile despoilers of our precious white women”: the unemployed mill workers who defined an epoch in American race relations by leveling false charges of rape against nine black youths, the Scottsboro Boys. Not long after arriving in Washington, the Congressman had shot and wounded a black man for “insulting” a white woman on a streetcar.

Crass consumerism is America as well. It mocked the founder of America’s Mother’s Day holiday Anna Jarvis:

Mother’s Day was not Tom Heflin’s idea, of course. The creator was Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia, who mounted a one-woman letter-writing campaign to lawmakers, editors and heads of state after her mother died in 1905. Jarvis’s sentimental obsession caught Heflin’s ear above the din of the era’s suffragists. He voted against their cause, the 19th Amendment, a few years after his legislative favor to Jarvis.

Jarvis soon threw her own militant energies into anti-capitalist crusades against the confectioners, greeting-card interests and carnation profiteers she felt were exploiting her day. Her inheritance dissipated, she spent her last years, blind and destitute, in a sanatorium room swamped once a year with the mass-produced Mother’s Day wishes she abhorred. She died, at 84, in 1948.

Quite the visual, no?

On this Mother’s Day 2015, if you can and are willing, please do something nice for the moms you know, those who you may not know directly, and those moms who have had their children stolen from them by racism and classism.

Like all other holidays, remembrances, and commemorations, Mother’s Day is fully of American society–with its ugliness and yes, sometimes triumphs and victories–and not something outside and away from it.

Chauncey DeVega is the editor and founder of We Are Respectable Negroes, as well as the host of the podcast known as “The Chauncey DeVega Show”.