On New Year’s Day, 1969, a group of student civil rights activists began walking from Belfast to Derry. Their protest was inspired by the famous 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, a high point of the African-American civil rights movement. Both events provoked horrific violence.
In 1965, protesters did not even make it out of Selma before they were attacked by Alabama state troopers wielding billy clubs, whips and tear gas. It was dubbed “Bloody Sunday”, a name that would resonate in Derry seven years later when British troops killed 13 civil rights protesters.
It took three attempts for marchers to depart Selma for Montgomery in 1965. In contrast, the 1969 march largely avoided violence until its fourth and final day when demonstrators were ambushed 9km outside of Derry at Burntollet Bridge. A mob that included off-duty members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary set upon the non-violent marchers with stones, iron bars, and sticks spiked with nails.
These two marches are the focus of Forest Jones’s Good Trouble, which uses them to tell a broader story about connections between the two civil rights movements.
Though there is little information in this book that is not already familiar to experts, Jones effectively brings these stories to life in a way that will engage readers new to them. He enlivens his retellings with interviews with some of the surviving activists such as Eamonn McCann.
Jones, an African-American journalist whose parents were civil rights activists, and who has acquired an obvious love for Ireland, marvels at the parallels between the two civil rights movements. He is thus the latest in a longer tradition of African-Americans, from Frederick Douglass onward, to see commonalities between African-American and Irish oppression. As one American civil rights leader who toured Northern Ireland during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s declared, to see white people oppressing other white people was “a bit of mindblow”.
There were, as Jones points out, many similarities between the positions of African-Americans and Catholics in Northern Ireland during the 1960s. Both groups suffered from political disenfranchisement and job and housing discrimination. Both suffered from state repression, as the collusion between police and vigilantes during the 1965 and 1969 marches demonstrated. Indeed, the Northern Irish civil rights movement consciously modelled itself on the African-American one, drawing tactics, slogans, its anthem (We Shall Overcome) and even its very name.
From his examination of the civil rights era, Jones draws a contemporary lesson about the need for mass action to resist injustice and about the utility of tactics of non-violent resistance in doing so. He adopts the motto of African-American civil rights leader John Lewis on the need to make “good trouble”. What comes through clearest in Good Trouble is the courage of those who put their bodies on the line in service of a broader cause. Such bravery seems to be in short supply today; recalling the struggles of the civil rights era can help inspire a new generation of activists.
However, as is often the case, trying to draw a simple lesson from history ends up simplifying that history. For example, Jones too neatly separates the heroic struggle of non-violent civil rights protesters from the physical force republicanism that he implicitly condemns. The civil rights movement was hardly a front for the IRA, but there was some overlap between them and their growth was historically intertwined.
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Indeed, though the title, Good Trouble, references Lewis’s famous quote, it sounds a discordant note in the context of Northern Ireland, where three decades of low-grade civil war euphemistically known as the Troubles began in the late 1960s. Some historians date the Troubles as sparked by the violence on Burntollet Bridge.
In drawing parallels between the two civil rights movements, Jones also overlooks key differences. The oppression of African Americans in the US south was more severe than that of Catholics in Northern Ireland. The UK government did not intervene to enforce civil rights in Northern Ireland in the way the US federal government did. Churches played a much bigger role in the American movement. And while Northern Irish activists were inspired by the African-American movement and saw their causes as linked, they at first had few direct connections to them.
As is often the case when activists are inspired by social movements in another part of the globe, there was some degree of misunderstanding. When protesters set out from Belfast in 1969, they proclaimed they were marching “to Selma”, the city from which marchers had set out in 1965.
- Daniel Geary is a professor of US history at Trinity College Dublin
