15 March
SuAnne Big Crow
15 March 1975—9 February 1992
Happytown
The 3,500-square-mile Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota is the largest and poorest Indian reservation in the United States. Half of its nearly thirty thousand residents live below the national poverty level, with unemployment at around 85 percent. Scores of homes are without electricity and plumbing. The life expectancy, forty-seven years for men and fifty-two for women, is the shortest in the entire Western Hemisphere. As if the living conditions aren’t bad enough, the Sioux who live at Pine Ridge regularly endure local racism and federal indifference. Tussles between whites and Indians aren’t uncommon.
But in 1987, a thirteen-year-old girl named SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated another way of dealing with the hostility directed at her and her people. She did it at a high school basketball game between the girls of Pine Ridge and Leads, a mostly white town about one hundred miles north of the reservation.
The Pine Ridge team traveled to Leads for the game. Although memories of what happened are mixed, the standard version is that fans on the Leads side of the gym began hurling racial epithets the moment the Pine Ridge team walked onto the court. Some hollered “Squaw!” and “Gut-eater!” and the Leads school band started thumping out a fake Indian drumbeat.
Then the unexpected happened, one of those breaks with convention that can defuse violent situations. SuAnne, a member of the Pine Ridge team, took off her warm-up jacket, draped it over her shoulders, and began a Sioux shawl dance while chanting a traditional song. The gym went silent. When she finished the dance, SuAnne grabbed a ball, dribbled to a hoop, and shot a basket. The gym roared with approval.
Even though parts of the story may be mythic, the whole perfectly fits SuAnne Big Crow’s character. As a teenager, she toured the reservation and then the country encouraging Native Americans to avoid the use of drugs and alcohol. She was an outspoken critic of bigotry but always sought to reconcile with racists rather than condemn them. She dreamt of a youth center at Pine Ridge, a place she called “Happytown,” where Sioux kids could gather for recreation and self-improvement. And along the way, she became a basketball star who set several athletic records while graduating at the top of her class. She was the pride of her community, and her people were crushed when she was killed in a car accident at the age of seventeen. Her funeral procession was six miles long.
But SuAnne’s spirit of creative reconciliation remains a living memory at Pine Ridge. Admirers collected funds after her death to build what’s now called the SuAnne Big Crow Boys and Girls Club. The Club serves twenty-six hundred reservation youngsters. Its facilities include a restaurant named “Happytown.”
16 March
Rachel Corrie
10 April 1979—16 March 2003
Shielding Dignity
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one common tactic of the Israeli army, whose official name is Israel Defense Forces or IDF, is house demolition. Called a counterinsurgency security measure by its defenders, critics argue that it’s often an excuse to seize territory for Israeli settlers. The demolitions are carried out by armor-plated bulldozers that the military for some reason calls doobis, or “teddy bears.” The heavily screened windows of these huge vehicles protect their drivers from sniper bullets and shrapnel, but also limit their range of vision.
On 16 March 2003, one of these bulldozers ran over and crushed Rachel Corrie, a young American member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organization dedicated to nonviolent direct action in defense of West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians. In a typical ISM action, volunteers stand as human shields between IDF doobis and Palestinian buildings earmarked for demolition. The hope is that their presence will inhibit the destruction of homes and the displacement of families, or at least draw international media attention to it. People from around the world travel to Israel to participate in ISM actions.
Rachel Corrie was one of them. A native of Washington State, she decided to delay her graduation from Evergreen State College to volunteer for a while with ISM. After arriving in Israel in early 2003, in the third and especially violent year of the Second Intifada, she was sent to the Gaza Strip city of Rafah, home to seventy thousand Palestinians. Corrie’s initial assignment was guarding the Canada Well (so-called because of its funding source), which had been heavily damaged by IDF bulldozers. Rafah municipal workers trying to repair the well, which supplied upwards of 50 percent of the city’s water, were regularly fired on by Israeli troops. While protecting it, Corrie reported that bullets hit the ground so close to workers and volunteers that bits of debris hit their faces.
On the day of her death, Corrie and six other ISM volunteers where shielding a number of Palestinian homes in Rafah that the Israeli military claimed were guerrilla hideouts. Reports differ about exactly what happened. Some say that the bulldozer operator, angered at an insurgent grenade that had exploded nearby, deliberately ran over her. Others say that she was in his blind spot. What’s certain is that Corrie was hit by the vehicle and crushed to death as she stood or knelt as a human shield.
In an e-mail message to her mother written two weeks before her death, Corrie confessed to occasional moments of fear and despair at the violence surrounding her. But she also spoke of finding inspiration from the Palestinians. Through them, she said, “I am discovering a degree of strength and the basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances—which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity.”
17 March
Bayard Rustin
17 March 1912—24 August 1987
Marching for Freedom
On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Looking toward the Washington Monument in the distance, he took a deep breath and launched into one of the most famous speeches ever given in American history. Addressing the estimated quarter of a million people gathered to hear him, he memorably told them that he had a dream that one day segregation would be a thing of the past in the United States.
The man who was responsible for putting together the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was Bayard Rustin, a longtime pacifist and civil rights advocate. Because he had ties with the Communist Party and was gay, several of King’s closest advisors warned him against associating too closely with Rustin. They were afraid that the authorities, particularly FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, would use Rustin’s past to smear the movement. But King stood by Rustin, recognizing that he was one of the most skilled members of his team. The success with which Rustin coordinated the march proved King right.
Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Moving to Harlem in the 1930s, he joined the American Communist Party, later saying that it was the only organization in the United States at the time that opposed segregation. He soon broke with the party, however, because of its endorsement of violence as a political weapon. His reading of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi had converted him to nonviolence.
When the United States entered World War II, Rustin refused induction and was sentenced to three years imprisonment. Upon his release, he began working with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and became an advocate of nonviolent direct action in the struggle against segregation. He joined a team of sixteen men—eight blacks and eight whites—who intended to travel throughout the South on a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Their action was a protest against the interstate law that forbade blacks and whites from riding on the same bus. The journey was launched on 9 April 1947. In North Carolina, the bus was stopped and several members, including Rustin, were beaten by local cops and then given hard labor jail sentences. But their treatment helped direct the nation’s attention to the evils of segregation.
His participation in the Journey of Reconciliation