By Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo
The month of February in the US is Black History Month. It is a period when the nation looks at the state of black America. This year, something caught my attention- how the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK, tried to stop the Civil Rights Movement and the way the American government squashed them. Listening to an NPR program on the activities of the KKK in Mississippi, I felt there could be one or two things Nigerians, under Boko Haram assault, can learn from that experience.
For those unfamiliar with the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan emerged in the Southern part of the United States in the 1860s. The group has had three incarnations over the last 100 years. But the central ideology that it promotes is white supremacy. The white supremacy ideology claims that whites (non-Catholic and non-Jewish) are superior to other races and that they own America and will do anything possible to keep it that way. Depending on the era, it manifests itself in the form of opposition against the freeing of slaves, opposition against the Civil Rights Movement and opposition against immigration.
Of course, there are different variations of the KKK stance as there are different factions of the KKK over the years. But in every case, the weapon of choice of the KKK has remained terror.
For example, on a Sunday morning in September 1963, four KKK members placed 19 sticks of dynamite next to the wall of 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama. Inside the church, dozens of black children were getting ready for Sunday service. The bombs exploded and killed four girls. Amongst those charged was Robert Chambliss. In Birmingham, he was known as Dynamite Bob. Charges were later dropped and he walked away free.
In 1964, three Civil Rights Activists, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, went to Mississippi to investigate the bombing of a black church. Two were young, white, Jewish and one was black. In Mississippi, they were pulled over by cops for speeding. 10 hours after, they were released. Cops followed them to the boundary of the town. They were never seen again. Their station-wagon was seen burnt some 13 miles away from the town. President Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI to investigate the case.
The FBI director, J. Hoover told agent James Ingram in charge of the field office, “'You will do whatever it takes to defeat the Klan, and you will do whatever it takes to bring law and order back to Mississippi.”
The federal government sent in over 400 navy sailors to search for the missing men. During the search, they found the bodies of two 19-year old black men, Charles Dee and Henry Moore chained to a car engine and drowned in the Mississippi River. The two men had been kidnapped and beaten unconscious.
It took many months before the bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were discovered in a shallow grave. They were all shot. The FBI, which had opened a new office in Mississippi and had recruited informants, some of whom had penetrated the KKK, arrested James Seale, the son of a chapter leader of the KKK. The FBI handed him over to the local district attorney who dropped all charges. It wasn’t the first of such. The FBI knew that local authorities in the Deep South, the police, government officials, had been infiltrated by the KKK. And many of them were KKK sympathizers.
One of the most famous resistances to the KKK was an incident called the Battle of Hayes Pond. It happened in North Carolina in 1958 when KKK members burned crosses at the home of two Lumbee Native Americans. When they returned for an all-night rally, they were surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbee. In the gun fight that followed, the KKK members were wiped out.
In 1892 alone, over 161 blacks were lynched in the South. All white juries freed suspects. Amongst the prominent murders of the Civil Rights era were those of Willie Edwards, Harry and Harriette Moore, Medgar Evers, and Viola Liuzzo. From 1940 to 1970, over five million blacks left the South as a result of the murders, intimidations and assassinations.
In an effort to fight the KKK, the U.S. federal government revived the 100-year-old Force Acts. The acts were passed in 1870 to protect the voting rights of African Americans. The FBI launched a counter intelligence program called COINTELPRO. With it, J. Edgar Hoover charged the agency to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” the KKK. The FBI used surveillance, infiltration to discredit and disrupt the activities of the KKK so much so that rival KKK factions accused each other’s leaders of being FBI agents. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed lawsuits claiming millions of dollars in damages for the activities of the KKK. The KKK spent money defending itself that it had to scale back on it activities.
Just like the KKK did in American south, the Boko Haram group is aimed at using terror to intimidate and suppress the minorities in the North. The KKK came into full force each time America wanted to reaffirm its’ creed – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” For the KKK, all men are not equal. To the KKK, the rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are reserved for some men.
The incarnations of what is now the Boko Haram have always been based on an opposition to the central idea of Nigeria as a nation in which, “We the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, having firmly and solemnly resolved, to live in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God, dedicated… to provide for a Constitution for the purpose of promoting the good government and welfare of all persons in our country, on the principles of freedom, equality and justice, and for the purpose of consolidating the unity of our people.”
The resistance to the idea of Nigeria by elements in the North is legendry and long running. Like the KKK, the idea that the Muslim Hausa-Fulani people in the North are superior to other ethnic groups in Nigeria and that they own Nigeria and will do anything possible to keep it that way has been floating around since the colonial era. It bolsters the idea that the North should be left for Northerners. It is an idea that had been promoted by mainstream northern leaders like Ahmadu Bello. It is therefore not a surprise that those on the fringe, like the Maitatsine followers in the 80s have always enforced the same principle with terror. The adaptation of Sharia in the North at the beginning of 2001 fed into the same narrative. It set the stage where the rights of minorities to be free, to live equally and obtain justice were seen as affronts to the North. Churches, hotels and businesses became symbols of that rejection of minority rights and must be destroyed. And then, the Boko Haram came and the targets expanded to include all symbols of the Nigerian state.
Like the KKK, sympathizers of Boko Haram have infiltrated government authorities in Northern Nigeria. These sympathizers are freeing Boko Haram suspects just like KKK sympathizers did in the U.S. Deep South. People are fleeing the North in their thousands. The only difference is the reaction of our federal government.
The timid Nigerian federal government, in words and actions, is yet to assert that Nigerians have the rights to live freely in any part of the country they want. They are wobbling and failing to do whatever it takes to restore law and order in the North. A serious country facing challenges like Boko Haram will seize the opportunity to restate its creed. It will make new laws, revive old ones, and do whatever is needed to reaffirm the core principles that a group like the Boko Haram is fighting against. Instead of negotiating with Boko Haram members and compensating families of their dead fighters, a government worth its name will be compensating the victims of Boko Haram terror and enforcing the rights of Nigerians to be Nigerians anywhere in Nigeria.
But who am I deceiving? We have no resolute government, no solemn creed and no invested citizenry. For us, ‘we the people’ comes with an asterisk.
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