Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr Day. Much will undoubtedly be written about 50
years after key civil rights legislation and the sadly still needed “Black
Lives Matter” movement which is happening right now. For me this is the logical falling out of the
fact that Martin Luther King Jr did not get to finish his work before he was
taken from this earth. I have little
patience for those who simply want to say it is evidence that we have not
gotten very far. This is a superficial
understanding of institutional racism and the violence that interrupted attempts
to get to its root.
In the past year I have heard Tavis Smiley give an hour long
talk on his book Death of a King: The last 365 days of Martin Luther King,
Jr., and I have just seen the movie
Selma. Smiley makes the point that
after King came out against the Vietnam War his popularity took a huge
hit. Many people felt he was “going too
far” and that he was “off topic” by talking about the war. If you have never heard or read the talk
King gave on the war I encourage you too because his words were nothing short
of prophetic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U It will be 25 minutes well spent!
King very deftly ties in the role of capitalism in the
oppression of poor people of all races.
He uses the term revolution which won him a death sentence with the powers
that be. He was increasingly clear in
the last year of his life that we would have to change the economic classism of
our society if the role of Black people in US society was really to
change. He was in fact in Memphis to
support the garbage collectors at the time of his death because he was trying
to focus on the economic struggles of the poor.
I encourage people to follow the activities of Smiley and Dr. Cornwall
Davis as they have taken up in their previous Poverty Tour, the task of calling
American’s to complete the uncompleted work of MLK on economic equality!
King’s message was radical and that is why he suffered huge criticism
and shunning at the end of his life even from people who had been his
supporters. He states in the speech
that he “agrees with Dante that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those
who in a time of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” As someone who is a climate activist these
words remain timeless to me as they so well apply to our current crisis which
people remain silent about. It is also
ironic because as Smiley well documents many followers betrayed him by being
silent, not defending him against the verbal targeting in the difficult final year
of his life.
One of my favorite parts of his Vietnam speech is where he
says he finds it amazing that the same people who praise him for calling for
non-violence in the face of the violence of white man, Bull Connar, would
condemn him for calling for an end to US violence against the brown skinned
people of Vietnam. Here Martin
encounters the same experience that Quakers have for centuries that our call
for non-violence is ignored or found amusing until we make the call to our own
country to disarm at which point we are treated as traitors. But in the point he is making there and elsewhere
in the speech where he talks about the colonization of Vietnam, he is decades
ahead of his time in pointing to the colonial
and violent roots of racism!
While it has been known in movement circles for years that
The FBI had MLK watched all the time (apparently his own photographer was on
the payroll of the FBI), his phone tapped, and deliberately put women in his
path to seduce him and then sent tapes of him with the women to his wife to
weaken his marriage – it was surprising to me to see a mainstream movie
actually acknowledge that. I see within
the social justice movement and public in general when people wonder what harm
it is that the govt has recently revealed it has all our phone records…that we
have forgotten our history. We have
forgotten how the govt has used people’s personal information to target them
when they dissent.
I appreciate about both Tavis’ book and the movie Selma
their efforts to help those of us who lived through the civil rights movement
and those who have been born since to not forget our history. Many people believe the Republican talking
line that we have “outgrown” the need for the Voting Rights act. Perhaps when people can see the great
sacrifices that were made by African Americans in order to win the vote and the
deep systemic attitudes and practices that created obstacles to voting, then it
can be understood why things like requiring id to register to vote just starts
again the creation of obstacles for the poor to prevent voting.
When I hear people responding to Black Lives Matter by
thinking that the solution is simply to indict police officers who have shot
black citizen’s I again feel that there is a lack of understanding of the
deeply rooted racism. Yes they should
be held accountable, but that is a bandaid after the wound. We must first understand the deep fear and “otherness”
that racism creates that makes officers quick on the draw and quick to pull the
trigger. Only when we complete Martin’s work
will we make America safe for Black people.
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