Concord Monitor – Opinion: ACLU: Falling in Love with America

Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer based in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com.

“I have fallen in love with my country – its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn once wrote. “No one can take away my love for my country! I felt then, as I do now, that it is a rich, fertile, beautiful country, capable of supplying all the needs of its people. It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people and not to a small propertied class.”

Imagine a paradise that belongs to the people, a land where all people are created equal, all endowed with the same inalienable rights, all protected from predators and exploiters, protected from elites who exploit their privileges and power at the expense of fellow citizens.

This is our calling.

I am a fan of Concord, New Hampshire native Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – feminist, radical labor activist, civil rights activist, early birth control advocate, communist, speaker, and one of the founders of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), of which I serve on the board of directors of the New Hampshire branch.

Flynn participated in a New York textile strike in 1909 and was an organizer of the “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. The strike was so named because the strikers carried signs reading “We want Bread and Roses too,” demanding not only better wages but also time and opportunity to enjoy their lives.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, portrayed as “The Rebel Girl” in a 1915 song written by Joe Hill, an activist songwriter and member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) who served as a laborer at the Silver King Mine in Park City, Utah, came to mind last weekend as I attended a biennial ACLU Leadership Conference (BLC) in Atlanta, GA.

“Yes, her hands may be hardened by work / And her dress may not be very fine / But in her breast beats a heart / That is true to her class and her kind …”

I fell in love with my country again.

The BLC was a conference full of rebellious girls, boys and others. It was a gathering of Americans so different, so beautiful, so often unseen and unrealized in my native New Hampshire, that it reminded me of what Malcolm X wrote in his “Autobiography of Malcolm X” about the pilgrimage to Mecca: “I saw all races, all colors, blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans in true brotherhood! In unity! Living together! Worshiping together…”

I immediately felt drawn into a community where everyone understood—even as avowed atheists and non-Christians joined in, linking arms and singing gospel music—that, as New Hampshire native Mary Baker Eddy once said, “human hatred cannot reach you when you are wrapped in the armor of love.”

We gathered together as congregation members for worship at the Horizon Sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

During my years in New Hampshire and abroad, I have experienced and recognized how much of the soil of the South is sacred ground, land that has been nourished since 1619 by the blood of enslaved and indigenous peoples, by the blood of protesters, activists and children killed by racist segregationists and Ku Klux Klan members.

From my conventional Northern perspective, I understood it better when Billie Holiday sang in “Strange Fruit”:

“Trees in the south bear strange fruits, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies sway in the southern breeze, strange fruits hang from the cottonwoods.”

Where I better understood that the inhumane, criminal and racist triumphs of white supremacists and nationalists centuries ago – which continue today with different techniques in different forums – give them, in their view, license to extend their depredations to all people who do not look like them today.

Here I better understood why Jonathan Daniels of Keene, who was murdered in Hayneville, Alabama, in 1965 while protecting young Ruby Sales, was not protected by his white collar and the pin he always wore, which featured a white cross in the center with the initials ESCRU underneath, which stood for Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity.

It’s not just about people with dark skin, it’s about denying life and freedom to others.

Less than a three-hour drive from Hayneville, we stood arm in arm in Atlanta, affirming that American civil rights are for all of us or none of us, and that much work remains to be done.

I couldn’t have been prouder.

On our last night in Atlanta, at the awards dinner, I watched former prosecutor and Georgetown University Law Center professor Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men, not only receive the ACLU Presidential Prize, “awarded to full-time scholars of any discipline to honor outstanding, lifetime contributions to civil rights and freedoms in academia,” but I also heard him speak in his acceptance speech of solidarity with student protesters demanding an end to the war in occupied Gaza, and of solidarity with civil disobedience and free speech.

Solidarity with people like me who wear the black and white checked keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

I also witnessed Cecile Richards, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and co-founder of the women’s political action group Supermajority, receive (remotely) the Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty, the ACLU’s highest honor, for her lifelong commitment to advancing civil liberties.

It was a wonderful moment. And as an image of Baldwin, one of the founders of the ACLU, was streamed live across large screens, I couldn’t help but imagine how even more inclusive the ACLU could be if it one day decided to award an Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Medal of Protest.

This would be a symbolic departure from her unjustified expulsion from the ACLU in 1940 because she was a communist.

That would be cool – and would make me even prouder.

Today, I, the son of Arab immigrants, an Arab-American-Muslim photojournalist and columnist who has passed his prime, am able to freely write this tribute to my loved ones, colleagues and friends, because since 1920 – by Areas To roe To Skokie and beyond – the ACLU is America’s ambitious North Star, central to protecting and advancing America’s constitutional rights, civil liberties, and voting rights, central to preserving our fundamental freedoms and our democracy.

That makes me proud.