Sunday, January 18, 2015

Completing the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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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