The more I follow the latest controversies over homosexuality — the furors over same-sex marriage and the consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop — the more I’m convinced that I am watching the latest civil rights struggle.

And the more I’m convinced that the emphasis is going to be on struggle.

Those of us who are geographically distant from events in San Francisco and New Paltz, New York, may be tempted to dismiss the lines at the city halls until they stretch into our town. We have a vague sense that something is happening, but we seem to take the instances as patches of trees, not a forest.

Television and newspaper reports contribute to this view. The events came across like sports stories as journalists tallied the increasing number of couples waiting to wed: first in the tens, the fifties, then the hundreds and thousands. Subsequent events were reported, in turn, with a breathless bit of surprise: it’s happening again, and again, and again …

But we haven’t made the jump to realizing that, in this case, a whole bunch of trees is really a forest. We haven’t put the events together to see them as components of a whole, as components of a movement that is emerging as we watch.

I wonder whether that inability rests on the way Americans have mythologized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That’s the Civil Rights Movement — in capital letters.

Those twenty-odd years of battles for racial equality have been condensed into sets of buzzwords. We talk about “the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,” where four little girls died in Sunday school, or “the first sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina,” where four college students first challenged segregated seating at a dime-store lunch counter.

We remember the march from Selma to Montgomery and, of course, the bus boycotts in that same city.

But we don’t talk about the other campaigns, like Albany, Georgia, where the local sheriff successfully outwitted organizers who came to his city.

I’ve seen this first-hand in the civil rights history of my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Most recitations stop in 1960, when a young civil rights protestor, Diane Nash, confronted the mayor on the steps of city hall. Nash asked the mayor point blank whether he believed that segregation was wrong. He paused, swallowed and answered yes.
The tale ends there, as if segregation disappeared in a matter of days. In fact, boycotts, sit-ins — and overt resistance to integration — continued until 1965 when those upholding segregation accepted the inevitable.

This romanticization of the civil rights movement has deceived the generations who did not witness it. They think the movement was a series of brilliant skirmishes instead of a war. They think that a few well-placed assaults, and a nimble charge or two will yield total and lasting victory.

Because America has frozen the civil rights movement in time, we have a distorted view of its methods.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, an organizer for the Nashville campaign, warned about the dangers of that view when he spoke in Nashville on Valentine’s Day.

“Young people feel that if they just get a march together, the walls are supposed to come down. When they don’t, they get upset,” he said during a panel on the methods of the Nashville campaign.

He was reminding his audience that the civil rights struggle demanded preparation and strategizing. Protestors didn’t rush into stores to sit at lunch counters. They practiced, honing their reactions to the abuse they knew they would receive.  That’s why they didn’t flinch when hecklers jammed lighted cigarettes into their arms during sit-ins.

They’d prepared at workshops beforehand.

Rev. Vivian and his contemporaries understood the scope of their struggle. In order to win, they had to destroy entrenched values and beliefs about one’s place in society and in culture. The struggle affected folks on both sides of the protests, because the possible outcome would be the end of the world as everyone knew it.

In its way, the civil rights struggle was an apocalypse. Some welcomed it, and they weren’t all blacks.  Others didn’t, and they weren’t all whites. Those who welcomed it, marshaled their efforts for it. Those who feared it, waged a dogged battle against it.

In the same way, the pictures we’ve seen of a beaming Bishop Robinson in full regalia, hugging his partner and of a lesbian couple embracing, kissing and crying for joy, contest our notions of family and religion.

No matter what we believe, we’re going to grapple with the changes that are bound to come.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs