Local activists recount history at Social Justice Day

C. Scott Vanderhoef, Rockland County Manager, was the guest of honor and recipient of Nyack College’s 2008 Social Justice Day award last Friday. He was being recognized for his long career of caring efforts for the needs of people of all classes and communities in Rockland County. Given the center seat at the head table, tall and with a strong aura of presence, featured guest, Scott was still humbled and overshadowed by a substitute keynote speaker and the presentation of a token of Rockland County history.

Wylene Branton Wood began her keynote remarks with the observation that as a young girl in Atlanta in the 1950s she has kept a scrap book of the clippings about Martin Luther King Jr.’s as he gave leadership to the emerging civil rights movement. She was nostalgic about the scrap book in part because her father had given it away when she was still young, to Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, as evidence that his work was an inspiration to even the youngest in the African American community across the country.

Mrs. Wood’s father was Wylie Branton, a lawyer with the NAACP who served as lead counsel in the case of the Little Rock Nine when their case, Cooper v. Aaron, went to the Supreme Court, as another important contribution to ending discrimination in public places in the United States. (Branton's life is described in a biography by Judith Kirkpatrick, There When We Needed Him: Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior.) As the story unfolded it became clear that “Martin King” was a presence in Mrs. Wood’s early life. The cadence of her remarks, the passion of her continuing concern for the unfinished agenda of civil rights, her call to those at the luncheon to follow King’s lead of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all rang with King’s continuing inspiration. Give a committed minute to a cause of conscience each day, she charged. It will make a difference.

King invented reality TV, argued Mrs. Wood. Television coverage of the marches, boycott activities, speeches, and meetings with leadership around the world often showed the shocking, violent response to nonviolent social action, bringing the truth of oppression and segregation into the American conscience, she said. Still true today. Still work to do.

Mrs. Wood’s closing story was her case for King’s deepest belief about how to affect positive social change – through the vote. She supported the argument by sharing that Martin Luther King Jr. gave the bulk of the financial reward that came with the Nobel Peace Prize to her father in his capacity as the leader of groups doing voter education and registration among Black voters through the United States and the triumph of the civil rights voters’ registration rights legislation.

I think Wood was right, and that King and his colleagues were right. The ultimate vehicle of nonviolent social change in democratic societies is the vote. It must be preceded by securing candidates to advance an agenda supporting social justice; but finally if we are going to see success in societies living under the rule of law, then we must vote in the people who will make the changes to current law.

Scott Vanderhoef is a Rockland County history buff, and so in addition to a plaque recognizing the award, he was given a framed and matted reproduction of the application of membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation signed by King on December 6, 1958.

Click to enlarge.

The card prominently locates the offices of FOR in Nyack, New York. Martin Luther King Jr. in his own writings, and in many historical studies of his leadership to the civil rights movement, notes that he was inculcated with the principles of nonviolent political action by Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley, staff of FOR who helped plan and sustain the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Boycott was also celebrated as a benchmark in the civil rights movement by a comic book published by FOR which sold nearly 250,000 copies in the 1950s. Vanderhoef was visibly touched by the gift and you could sense a moment of hometown pride that contributions to the work of nonviolent social change have been made by this national organization headquartered in Nyack.

Mark C. Johnson
Executive Director
January 19, 2008