Cunningham: ‘Racism has got to the point where people have had enough’

WHEN Emmett Till’s mother Mamie decided on an open casket for her son’s funeral in Chicago, once his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River after being beaten, mutilated and shot, it attracted thousands of mourners in August 1955. Images of the body were circulated throughout newspapers and magazines of black interest.

The story was a familiar one, but the visibility of the brutality exposed the Jim Crow-era Southern states.

The 14-year-old had been visiting family in Mississippi and had an interaction with the married white grocery store proprietor, Carolyn Bryant. Her testimony of the account had been altered afterwards, but her husband Roy and his half-brother abducted the boy from his granduncle’s house before murdering him.

Both men were acquitted and years later, with the benefit of double-jeopardy, admitted in a 1956 interview with ‘Look’ magazine that they killed the boy.

A few months before, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama. Sixty-five years on and little has changed for African Americans. Disgusting abuses of power remain. Racism is endemic, fronted up by the highest offices of political power.

When the protests in America began about the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there was no way Aaron Cunningham (pictured), formerly of Crossmaglen and Armagh footballers, could have sat on his couch and watched.

“If you look back, maybe over the history of anything that has happened in the history of the States, people have got themselves onto the streets to force change,” he says. “This has been happening for such a long time and nothing has ever really been done about it. It has got to the point where people have had enough and they are taking to the streets.”

Cunningham makes a point that escapes many. While the world was on coronavirus lockdown, the footage of police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on the neck of George Floyd as he begged for his life on a Minneapolis road became a global event. “Everybody was at home when that video came out of George Floyd, so everybody seen it. People were not so much caught up in their daily lives, they seen it, and seen it for what it was,” he states.

Generational racism is something the Cunningham family has experince of. Aaron’s father Joey has shared his own account of playing in the Irish League as a flying winger for Portadown when he was pelted with bananas by opposition supporters. Assaults were commonplace.

In 2012, society was meant to be more enlightened, but Cunningham had those words – those words – spat at him during the Ulster club final against Kilcoo. The offender had a six-month ban, rounded down to four months. He missed no football at all. A supporter was banned from the

GAA for life. And in truth, it sort of finished Aaron as a player at home. Sure, he played on for Cross and was around the fringes of the Armagh panel, but his heart went out of it.

“I was somewhat disillusioned with Gaelic football. This plays into it a wee bit with the racist abuse I got. I sort of felt that I didn’t really get the support I should have got by the GAA regarding that matter,” he explains.

“You were sort of on the cusp of winning with Cross as well and then when we were beaten (by St Brigid’s) in 2013, it was sort of then I took a little step back from things.

“I still played on for a while, but I was putting together my plans to travel. I went over here and got a little bit of love back for Gaelic football. Just to play with different people and to enjoy the game again.”

Quips

He fell in with the Longford club in New York. He played in the Connacht Championship with the ‘county’. He got into bar-tending and delights in how social it is, meeting and exchanging quips and one-liners with people from all over the world.

His accent is south Armagh, distinctly Cross, but he has found a happiness in being a citizen of the world and wants to stay in New York. And still, there are bitter reminders of that December day in 2012.

“It stays with you. It’s not that I lose sleep at night but it is very hard to get the full story across when people don’t know the full ins and outs of it.

“Whenever we won the Ulster final and you had people from the Kilcoo club phoning my dad to apologise and speak to me to try to apologise. They were apologising for something they knew happened. Little things like that, they don’t come to light and then you see the subsequent bans that the GAA gave, how they were appealed and knocked down. It makes you question things.”

The coronavirus pandemic has meant his place of work, ‘The Ashford’ in Jersey, has been shut for 12 weeks. He has since done a bit of casual gardening work but he’ll be back protesting this week.

“I am putting myself on the right side of history and it is a matter of everybody getting out and following through,” he says. “People listening to what is happening. Not just in this country, but right across the world.”