Will Good White People Stand Up Again in 2022?

President Biden’s agenda is being canceled by the Republicans. Sen. Mitch McConnell has built a solid wall of Senate opposition to current Biden initiatives—voting rights, infrastructure, immigration, police reform, and even a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. The American people are being led into a dark political era.

The commonality of this opposition is that they aim it at the obstruction of progress for people of color. Throughout our history, fair-minded White citizens have historically aligned themselves with their ethnic minority brothers and sisters during periods of intense racial subjugation, polarization, and/or attempts to weaken democracy.

As we enter this political Stygian night, the hope for the salvation of our republic will hinge on the good White people who have stood for what is right throughout our history. They did so in the 2020 presidential election despite the widely held view that the emerging New American Majority (composed of ethnic minority groups) was the deciding factor in the electoral victory.

Although that is true to a large extent, without significant White votes in the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a Democrat would not be in the Oval Office. Throughout our history, they have been bellwethers of future progress in the most trying of times—from the period of slavery and immigration of diverse people as America moved to become the most powerful nation in the world.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an American Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor, and abolitionist, born in Maine, became a fervent advocate against slavery while living in Missouri and Illinois in the early 19th century. After founding a religious newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri, he wrote zealously against the peculiar institution; a pro-slavery mob murdered him at a warehouse where he hid his printing press in 1837.

Lovejoy was adamant in sustaining the publication of anti-slavery articles over the intense objections of his neighbors and friends who counseled him to stand down on this issue. As a devout Christian, he would not tolerate the servitude of his fellow human beings.

In March 1965, appalled by the White response to the civil rights protests she witnessed in Selma, Alabama while watching TV, a Michigan homemaker named Viola Liuzzo heeded the call of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Leaders assigned her to ferry protesters back and forth from Selma to Montgomery during the March, and while driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, the 39-year-old got fatally shot by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members in a pursuing car. It was unknown at the time that an undercover FBI informant was also in the car with the Klansmen.

Liuzzo became a target of the Klan after they noticed her passenger was a young Black male. To discredit and smear her and shield his informant, then FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, launched a disinformation campaign alleging that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party. She was accused of abandoning her children and going to Selma to have sexual relationships with African-American men involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Hoover briefly got away with this ruse.

Between 1961 and 1963, the FBI monitored Stanley Levison, a Jewish business executive, lawyer, unpaid advisor, and close friend of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover targeted Levison earlier for his supposed affiliation with the American Communist Party although Hoover admitted that the relationship was not current. He took these accusations to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy.

JFK pulled King aside during a White House meeting after the 1963 March on Washington and advised him he should essentially cut Levison loose, which King ignored. Hoover used the King-Levison affiliation as a pretext to gain approval from RFK to set up a 24-hour a day wiretap of King. Hoover fixated on labeling anyone advocating for civil rights as a Communist or as anti-American.

A most interesting White supporter of African American progress was the Rockefeller family that had established and contributed to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). But one of its not widely known donations was the funding of bail for hundreds of protesters arrested throughout the 1963 Birmingham crusade.

Clarence B. Jones, Dr. King’s personal attorney, flew to New York City and accompanied Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to Chase Manhattan Bank on a Sunday morning in 1963 and received a briefcase containing $1 million in cash for bail for the Birmingham marchers. He signed a promissory note agreeing to pay it back, but within months without making any payments, he was informed that the debt had been repaid.

The foregoing examples demonstrate that there have always been good White people who gave the full measure of devotion to social justice for Americans of color. In these racially divided times, it is even more imperative that White allies continue their support.

As laws designed to suppress voters (especially ethnic minorities) and manipulate elections make their way through state legislatures at a rapid pace, White votes will be crucial in ensuring equity, justice, and Democratic control of the House and Senate after the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.