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A new do for civil rights

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 10/4/2002

JESSE JACKSON is lucky the movie was not called ''Hair Salon.'' The sisters would have really put the hot comb to him.

''I respect his work and everything he's accomplished,'' said Bernice Thomas, who has owned Your Hair Salon in Harvard Square for 19 years. ''For that we give him a plus. But after he got caught being unfaithful to his wife and having a baby after he had been the spiritual adviser to Bill Clinton, a lot of us felt he embarrassed the church.

''A lot of people have not healed yet from that. So the movie was a form of healing. When the actor said `(bleep) Jesse Jackson,' most of the women in the shop were so happy. We said, `Yes, get him.' Now it's over. Now we can say to Jackson, `We forgive you - after the movie.'''

By now, most semiconscious people know that Jackson, Al Sharpton, and friends of Rosa Parks have not forgiven ''Barbershop.'' In the movie, an old coot barber flails away at icons. Besides dissing Jackson, the barber crudely said Rosa Parks didn't do anything but sit down on a bus, Rodney King deserved to get beat, Martin Luther King Jr. was a womanizer, and O.J. did it.

Jackson and Sharpton have demanded that the segment be cut out of home videos. Sharpton said, ''We can't afford for the new generation of moviegoers to buy into the same desecration of Dr. King that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI used to discredit him.''

I laughed through the entire riff. For one, the other barbers immediately shouted down the coot in a downpour of general discredit. The other was that like all well-executed humor, there was a gem of clarity in the coot, a deft challenge from the younger generation of movie makers to confront civil rights history in technicolor instead of monochromatic deification.

The reference to Parks, whose arrest in December 1955 sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, reminds us that despite her personal courage, the boycott could have begun before her.

In March 1955, Claudette Colvin refused to get up for white passengers. She was 15, an A student, and extremely angry about the subservience her parents, a lawn cutter and a maid, had to show towards white people. Any movie called ''Hair Salon'' would have her in it as a rebel way ahead of the 1960s. In a 1998 interview in the Washington Post, Colvin said that as a teenager she declared to friends, ''I'm not going to straighten my hair until I get a sign from God.''

In April 1955, Aurelia Browder, who would end her life in 1971 as the mother of 21 children who yet earned a college degree with honors at Alabama State, refused to get up. In October, Mary Louise Smith Ware refused to give up her seat. On that particular day, the 18-year-old maid, who made $2 an hour, was steaming because she had not yet been paid by a white woman for $11 worth of work. She told the bus driver, ''I got the privilege to sit here like anybody else.''

But E.D. Nixon and other Montgomery civil rights leaders did not make icons out of those women. Browder, despite her bootstrapping, was thought to be too unsophisticated for courtroom grillings. Nixon wrote off Ware, claiming that she lived in a tarpaper shack with a drunken father. The family actually had a working-class house. The father, the sole provider for six children after Ware's mother died in 1952, worked two jobs and lived until the age of 90.

Colvin's case at first excited Nixon because she was smart and in the NAACP Youth Council. Ironically, Rosa Parks, an adviser to the council, had helped start a Colvin defense fund. But that summer Colvin became pregnant out of wedlock, and Nixon dumped her.

The boycott awaited the arrest of Parks, who Nixon deemed ''morally clean.'' Colvin, now in her 60s and living in New York, has said that Parks was the most effective choice. But she also wishes that African-Americans would acknowledge the imperfections of the choice. In the Post interview she said, ''They didn't want me because I didn't represent the middle class.'' In the Guardian, she said: ''They just dropped me.... None of them spoke to me. They didn't see if I was OK.... They just didn't want to know me.''

That was a critical point of ''Barbershop.'' The old coot barber, in his scripted scattershot, wants us to consider that we might be better off today if we had not waited for pristine test cases such as Rosa Parks. It might have been a more inclusive nation had we fought for Claudette Colvin. He warns wealthy African-Americans and black leaders who want us to ignore their warts because of their accomplishments not to turn around and dismiss the poor, the pregnant, and those with criminal records. We need more movies to put the hot comb to history so we can straighten out the present.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com .