The man in a battered Indiana Jones fedora reading a New York newspaper in a Colorado coffee shop looked at us at the next table, then folding the paper, offered it to us, saying, “I suppose you want this.”
We were 1,000 miles from our Shack on Shabbona when we met the speaker, James “Strider” Benston, 79, a white man who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King at Selma, was beaten by police, threatened by the KKK, spent too many nights in too many small town jails in the south, and all the while seeking, as he says, to be a just person in an unjust world.
Born in Tennessee but raised in Arkansas, at age 19 in 1964, Benston traveled to Atlantic City for the Democratic National Convention when he heard Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi plead for integrated delegations from every state.
Ten minutes of listening to Hamer, Benston said, changed his life. He became a foot soldier in the epic march for civil rights in this country. He spoke of his association with the leaders of the movement; of Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, and Malcolm X, among others, and how his “new life began in Selma in 1965? on the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
He was there, he said, as part of the internal security section, but on March 7, 1965, no one on the bridge could match up against the tear gas, police clubs and the men on horseback. He was beaten he says, and his nose was broken that day.
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Marches in other towns led to more beatings and more jail time.
The names, dates, and events of everything that happened to him seemed to be improbable to this grizzled newspaper wretch because there is an old newspaper adage that says, “if a story is too good to be true, it probably is not true.”
Benston may have read my mind. He showed us a tattered photo of Dr. King and his entourage on a more successful march later that month. “That’s me,” he said, pointing to the youngish man in the upper right hand corner. The nearly six decades could not erase the resemblance.
The rest of the story is from his postings online and from social media. Take them for what you believe they are worth.
In April 1965, a UPI telephoto shows him pinned to the ground by police in Camden, Alabama. He was charged with resisting arrest. He was holding a little girl’s hand when one of the deputy’s pointed a shotgun at the child and threatened to kill her.
“You do what you gotta do but I ain’t’ moving,” is what Benston recalls was her reply. Benston says they were tear gassed as he grabbed the girl and ran.
Benston writes that his arrest made national news that night and was seen by relatives, who “decided my beating was appropriate” and sent him a Bible.
He says he faced similar perils in both Demopolis and Linden, Alabama and in September 1965, Benston writes he was held “incommunicado” in Mobile for a month before he was able to smuggle a message to Carmichael, setting the stage for his eventual release.
There is a Chicago connection to his story. He says he came to Chicago, was a steward in the truck drivers’ union at a turbulent time when Yellow Freight was swallowing up smaller companies. He reminded us, the company filed for filed for bankruptcy last month, and then asked, “do you know Studs Terkel?”
He told us the last time he saw him, Dr. King gave him $25 to get back to Arkansas with charge to “Give ’em hell, Arkansas.”
What makes Benston tick, I believe, is what I saw in his YouTube post, when he quotes French philosopher Albert Camus who wrote that a person’s greatness lies in the decision to be stronger than his condition of life, “but if his condition is unjust,’ Benston says, “his only way to overcome it is to be just himself.”
Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.