 Photo: Bill Hackwell |
One of the amazing things learned in the twentieth century was how to transform atomic matter into energy. But one of the other things learned in the twentieth century, which was just as amazing, was how to turn a small amount of social mass into an enormous amount of energy.
A striking thing about the movements of the twentieth century is that some people learned that amazing social physics. I think of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Bob Moses as a kind of Einstein of social movements. Just as Einstein learned about atomic energy and how to turn a small amount of mass into a large amount of energy, Bob Moses, Ella Baker, and other organizers learned the secret of how to turn a small amount of social mass into an incredible amount of energy.
If you think about what happened in the twentieth century, something profound happened all over the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, most people had no political rights. If you went around the world, you would find that most people were colonized. Most people were second and third-class citizens. About 80 percent of the population of the world could not vote. They could not participate in the governing of their countries. Even the borders of many colonial states were determined by Europeans.
That was the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most of the people who did not have rights were non-white people. At least they had no rights that white people were bound to respect.
So when you think about individuals like Gandhi, W.E.B. DuBois, Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King, think about what things were like when they were born. That was the world they encountered, and that they set out to transform during their lifetime. You begin to understand what an enormously important path they took.
DuBois was born soon after the end of the Civil War. When he looked out at the world, African American people like me were just getting out of slavery. People in Africa were just beginning to move into a new form of slavery called colonialism.
DuBois set out to transform all of that. He lived a long, remarkable life. He died in Ghana in 1963, on the eve of the historic civil rights march on Washington. Imagine that life. Here is someone born at the end of the Civil War who finished his life in the midst of the tremendous transformations toward independent, Black-ruled nations in sub-Saharan Africa.
Look at Gandhi. He began his professional life in South Africa, mobilizing people there against the South African apartheid regime at the beginning of the century. He then moved back to India to take on the most powerful nation at that time-the British Empire. Everyone talked about the British Empire and how powerful it was. “The sun never sets on the British empire,” they said. Now the sun doesn’t rise on the British Empire. That was the challenge Gandhi took on.
Part of a larger struggle
When I say Gandhi, I hope you know that’s shorthand. All of these people-King, Mandela, Gandhi-are symbols for something much larger. Gandhi didn’t start the Indian independence movement. He wasn’t even the main organizer. There was an independence movement when he arrived in India.
In the same way, King didn’t start the modern Black freedom struggle. We wouldn’t be talking about Martin Luther King if it wasn’t for Rosa Parks. He might have been a wonderful minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church or at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, but we wouldn’t be talking about him today.
When we talk about these people, we talk about them as symbols for something larger. They are symbols of the tremendous struggles that took place to bring about an end to a certain kind of racism that had different faces. One of the faces was colonialism, another face was apartheid, and another face was the American Jim Crow system.
But one of the things that DuBois, Gandhi and King understood was that all of these were the same. They understood that when they fought against one, they were fighting against the other. They understood the connections. That’s why Gandhi didn’t miss a beat when he left South Africa, went to India, and began working in the struggle there.
All of this is a way of saying that we need to look at history and understand that Martin Luther King was part of that tremendous struggle that transformed the world in an unprecedented way.
Part of what I want to do is to give you some pointers about how to tell that story and to talk about Martin Luther King. I get invited to Martin Luther King Day celebrations and I usually have to listen to someone reciting the “I Have a Dream” speech. It frustrates me. I just say, “Gosh, that’s just not it.”
If King had been a bad orator, does that mean that the story would not have been important? We need to begin to understand why that story is important. It’s not because the “I Have a Dream” speech is a great speech. It’s kind of an accidental speech, really. You know, King didn’t intend to give it. He had prepared some other remarks and went off extemporaneously at a big event. People remembered it and now it becomes “King: The Sound Bite.” Most people have never heard the complete speech.
But I would go further than that. It’s not even about King. As I said, King is a symbol.
About 15 years ago, I wrote one of the more controversial articles I’ve written as a scholar. I said that if King had never lived, the movement would have happened pretty much the way it did. A lot of people got all upset about that. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” the critics said. “King is a great person.”
Well, at that time I was editor of King’s papers, so I hope that he’s an important individual. But I needed to say that because it’s true.
The Montgomery bus boycott still would have happened. The sit-ins still would have happened. The voting rights movement in the Deep South would have happened. Why do I know that? Because King didn’t initiate those struggles. He didn’t sustain them.
What then did he do? We have to tell the story correctly.
The larger picture
What he did-and it was an important contribution-was to offer a vision of how to understand that those struggles fit into the larger picture of what’s going on in the world. He was an educator. He was the one who was able to say to participants in that struggle: “What you’re doing is not simply desegregating buses in Montgomery.” Remember, when he became the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, the struggle was not even about desegregating buses. The original demands focused on the fact that Rosa Parks was treated rudely. Only later did the demand come to fully desegregate the buses.
But King gave a speech on the first night of the boycott. He said that when the history books of the future are written, they will have to say that there lived a Black people, a people that had the courage to stand up for their rights, right here in Montgomery, Alabama. In his subsequent speeches, he compared that movement to the anticolonial struggles in Africa and Asia.
Now that was an amazing feat, when you think about it. You’re talking about a one-day boycott in a medium size town in Alabama that hadn’t even made it to the front pages. And King is saying that when the history books of the future are written, they will have to say this was part-and-parcel of that greater struggle.
And you know, he was right!
I can imagine that a lot of us don’t have that kind of vision. If we were put into that position of talking to the group after that first night of the boycott, we would have said, “Well, let’s prepare for the second day of the boycott.” It would have been very down-to-earth. People were doing that-we have the recording of that whole evening. There were lots of people who were saying, “Well, you know, we gotta get the things organized for the second day, and maybe we gotta think about what’s going to be the demands. …” And then King gets up and gives this amazing speech. That was tremendously important.
What King did was to put our struggle in this broader context.
Racism, poverty and war
One of the most important speeches that King gave was the Nobel Prize lecture. It wasn’t even the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which was very brief. That speech had some wonderful lines. He said, “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” Wonderful.
But the lecture was a much deeper and much more thoughtful attempt to try to come to terms with what was the meaning of what he was doing. It talks about three things. It talks first of all about racism. It was 1964, at the high point of the struggle. He said that in America, thousands of relentless young people, Black and white, have temporarily left the ivory towers of learning to storm the barricades of bias. One day all of America will be proud of their achievements. Well, I’m not sure all Americans are proud. But, more importantly, he said that the struggle against racial bias was only part of the struggle. King said we have to begin to move beyond that toward the issue of world poverty.
He said that the second evil which plagues the world is poverty. Almost two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed and shabbily clad. So it’s obvious that if humanity is to redeem its spiritual moral lag, people must go all-out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the haves and the have-nots of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life. There is nothing new about poverty, he said. What is new is that now we have the resources to do something about it. He insisted that the rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed.
Now it’s interesting that he’s saying this, not in terms of poverty in the U.S. You notice he mentions poverty in the world. He was already beginning to talk about a global poor people’s campaign.
The third great evil, he said, is that of war. Recent events, he said, have vividly reminded us that nations are not reducing their arsenal of weapons of mass destruction-rather, they are increasing them. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted.
He said: “It is, after all, the nation-states which have produced the weapons which threaten the survival of mankind and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character. It is as imperative and urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to racial injustice.” This was King in 1964.
One of the things about King’s stand on the war in Vietnam is that it didn’t come easily. He said of himself, “I did not march. I did not demonstrate. I did not rally.” Why? Because he thought that it would hurt him in his struggle for domestic change if he got involved in the anti-war movement.
Finally, though, after he saw what was happening, he said, “As hopeful days became disappointing months, we watch setbacks in the search for peace and advances in the search for military advantage.” He went on to say that he had begun to feel guilty about his silence. He said this in terms that I think have a lot of relevance today. “Whether right or wrong, I have far too long allowed myself to become a silent onlooker. At best, I was a loud speaker, but a quiet actor, while charade was being performed.” He finally decided: “I had to speak out if I was going to erase my name from the bombs which fall over South and North Vietnam. The time had come, indeed it was past due, when I had to disavow and disassociate myself from those who, in the name of peace, burn, maim and kill.”
Structures of oppression
We did accomplish the “rights revolution” of the twentieth century. We did bring about this tremendous change. Eighty percent of the people could not vote at the beginning of the century, while now at the end of the century around 80 percent of the people at least have formal voting rights. That’s one measure of the change. Changes have occurred in terms of the position of women in society. Many people are now part of independent nations that are free of colonial domination.
But we all know that lots didn’t change. Among the things that didn’t change are the systems of oppression that were put in place during the period of colonization. Most people in the world now live in independent nations, but they didn’t determine their borders. They didn’t determine what kind of nation they would live in.
So many of the problems in the world today result from the fact that we live in a world that was created through these structures of oppression. One of them is the U.S. electoral system. Why do we have an Electoral College? Why don’t we just vote for president? We have an Electoral College because there was a structure of oppression called slavery. The framers of the Constitution didn’t want to have a popular vote for president because that was very dangerous. The Electoral College was not elected by the people. It was elected by the legislatures, because there was always a fear that people would make the wrong decision if you had democracy.
I remember in grammar school and junior high when they teach you civics and they try to explain the Electoral College. How many of you could ever understand that? Of course, you can’t, because there’s no reason for it other than fear of democracy.
Look at the situation in Iraq. Who created the borders of Iraq? Why did the first Gulf War take place? To turn back the invasion of Kuwait. But who created Kuwait? Just look at a map. You see Kuwait and you look at what’s under the ground: lots of oil, no people. Look at Iraq: lots of people, less oil. Was that accidental?
Now, because of the battles of the twentieth century, young people have certain kinds of political rights, although these are always being threatened. Nonetheless, you have those rights. But now you face the deeper issues that King was talking about thirty years ago: what to do about the systems of oppression that have been put into place. How do you deal with people in the Middle East who would like to change the geography of the Middle East, not to meet the needs of Europe or the United States, but to meet their own needs?
I’d like to end with King’s “Drum Major Instincts” sermon. It’s one of the best sermons that King gave because it allowed him to write his own epitaph. I’ll explicate the sermon a little bit to draw out some things that you might not see in it immediately.
He said: “I’d like for somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question.” He was listing the things that you want your life to be remembered for, and one of the main points of your life was that you tried to be right on the war question.
But he went on to say, “I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.” I thought about why he would add that. Did he mean that literally he was out working on food wagons? I think what he meant by that is that so many of us sometimes get so involved in fighting abstractly for justice that we don’t see the injustice right in front of us-the needs that need to get taken care of right here, right now.
He goes on to say, “I want you to say that day that I did try to clothe those who were naked. I did try that day to visit those who are in prison.” In other words, do the things that you can do on a day-to-day basis as well as the things that involve the big picture of social justice and war.
“If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have all the fine and luxurious things in life to leave behind. I just want to leave a committed life behind.” I think that’s a good message for us today.
