The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is a good time to reflect on why we have such a day set aside to remember Dr. King and, more importantly, the great and noble cause for which he gave his life.
I grew up during the Civil Rights struggle. Even as a child in Northern California, far from the drama where our nation's destiny was being reshaped, I sensed that something historic was taking place; something the likes of which I might never see again.
Slavery in the Western Hemisphere began almost as soon as Columbus landed somewhere in the Bahamas (most likely Plana Cays) back in 1492. As Spanish, and later, French, English and Portuguese, began settling into the New World they needed laborers to tame the "wilderness." Unfortunately for them, most of the indigenous people had the audacity to die off, victims of diseases previously unknown to them. Yet labor had to be found; and found it was, in the form of the West African slave trade.
The slave trade was not a new thing in Africa. Stronger tribes had from time beyond time enslaved their weaker neighbors and traded people for goods and wealth as needed. Islam also found its own niche, primarily in East Africa. But the New World provided an unprecedented market for slave labor. Soon, tens of thousands of Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans. By the time the slave trade was effectively ended in the mid 1800's those figures had risen into the millions.
The United States was among the last of the Western Nations to end the practice of slavery. Abolitionists tried to stop it through legislation and vigilantes like John Brown tried to change national opinion through violence. Both failed as did middle-ground approaches like the Missouri Compromise.
Slavery led to the bloodiest war ever fought by American troops. When the Confederate States of America lost the war it not only lost its declared independence but its right to slavery as well.
Reconstruction brought carpetbaggers to fill the political void left in the South. Corruption and greed filled the vacuum left by the absence of Abraham Lincoln and his moral firmness and clarity. While the white citizens of the South were crushed into economic submission those who had formerly been slaves fared even worse. Prejudice, bitterness, poverty and misplaced pride created a culture of oppression for every Negro in the South. Although guaranteed equality under the law by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, state and local laws were enacted and often brutally enforced that kept the former slaves and their descendents from competing with anyone else for economic wealth, education or full participation in the political process.
For over seventy-five years, from the collapse of reconstruction in the 1870's to the mid 1950's, little changed. Local white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan "culled the herd" of any Blacks that were deemed to be too uppity or assertive of anything resembling equality. Threats were backed up by lynchings of hundreds of (mostly young) Black males.
In spite of this cultural and legal oppression, Black Americans developed a thriving counter-culture of their own. Within their own segregated communities they taught their own children and serviced their own needs with professionals who had been trained and educated in a small group of elite Colleges existing soley for Black students.
This uneasy social equilibrium began to unravel following World War II. Too many men had served as the military grew increasingly integrated during the conflict. Too many men had seen that the blood that was shed by each race was indistinguishable, one from another. Social taboos began to weaken. Black men who had fought and died for a common cause among white men began to question the status quo. Men like Jackie Robinson (1947 Brooklyn Dodgers)began to integrate professional sports and the increasing mobility of people from North to South and South to North made the old ways of segregation increasingly intolerable.
Finally, on December 1, 1955, a tired Black woman named Rosa Parks sat down on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and refused to give it up to a white man. She was arrested. A Black boycott of Montgomery's bus system lasted 381 days, even beyond a Supreme Court ruling in November 1956 that declared segregation on public transportation to be unconstitutional.
With Rosa Parks, the media and the nation had a face and a person to represent the long history of racial abuse. In the person of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the time a pastor at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the nation found an eloquent voice that raised the issue of racism to that of a moral imperative. Institutional racism, forced segregation and the quasi-legal contortions that justified it were vigorously decried as hateful distortions of the founding documents of our nation, especially the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence:
Both White and Black folks from the North began to head South to stand alongside those Blacks who were calmly, yet firmly, defying segregationist laws in lunch counters, public drinking fountains, and voting registration. Such people were termed "Freedom Riders" and their effect on the growing Civil Rights movement were crucial to its eventual success.
The Southern White resistance to the inevitable produced vicious assaults on non-violent demonstrators and marchers and a number of brutal murders. The majority of Americans were shamed, embarrassed and humiliated by the film footage shown on the nightly television news. Slowly, but with an air of progress stirring amidst the chaos, the critical mass of public opinion turned. In 1962, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, sent National Guard troops into Southern states to enforce federal anti-discrimination law and allow James Merideth to enroll at the previously all-white University of Mississippi.
On August 28, 1963, 200,000 people "marched" on Washington D.C. to demonstrate their demands for an end to legalized segregation. The closing speech of the day was delivered by Dr. King. It's repeated refrain, "I have a dream..." stirred the nation and elevated him as the foremost spokesperson for the Civil Rights movement.
In response, President Kennedy was emboldened to submit his "Civil Rights" bill to the congress, over a year earlier than he had planned. Following his assassination on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Southerner and new President, continued to support and endorse it.
This comprehensive legislation passed in 1964 and follow-up law, the Voting Rights Act, was passed in 1965.
On April 4, 1968, while I was a Junior in high school, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, Robert Kennedy met the same fate at the hands of a gunman in Los Angeles.
All of this I remember because I saw the drama unfold. I saw the moral rightness in the Civil Rights struggle and I was inspired to assimilate its lessons through the powerful rhetoric of a man who "spoke the truth with love" to the people of America, and articulated a vision of the way things should one day be.
Today, as we take a day off from work, it is good to remember our national past, both good and bad, as personified in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just as any of us, Dr. King was flawed and imperfect. But the banner of freedom he helped raise for his people and for all of us still rallys us to the high ideal of equality for all.
Following his death, a friend and I took city buses across San Francisco to attend a massive memorial service at Grace Cathedral. Following the service, we joined the religious and civil leaders in a procession through the great Ghiberti Doors and around the top of Nob Hill. When we returned to the Cathedral I was astonished to see people still streaming out of the church, just beginning their memorial march. There were so many people, the strains of "We shall overcome" echoed off the surrounding buildings as it was being sung simultaneously yet not in unison by tens of thousands.
I remember that moment as though it were yesterday. That moment galvinized my determination to never flinch from defending the civil rights of any and all who would ever be judged on the basis of the color of their skin rather than "the content of their character."
Is there more to be done? Yes, of course, although I believe it is less than many would like us to believe. Slowly, slowly I have watched as Dr. King's dream has begun to be turned into reality. The freedom is now there for the taking. The opportunities have been unleashed. These freedoms came through a struggle that was by no means easy. We should not expect that the struggle to implement them be any easier.
Slavery in the Western Hemisphere began almost as soon as Columbus landed somewhere in the Bahamas (most likely Plana Cays) back in 1492. As Spanish, and later, French, English and Portuguese, began settling into the New World they needed laborers to tame the "wilderness." Unfortunately for them, most of the indigenous people had the audacity to die off, victims of diseases previously unknown to them. Yet labor had to be found; and found it was, in the form of the West African slave trade.
The slave trade was not a new thing in Africa. Stronger tribes had from time beyond time enslaved their weaker neighbors and traded people for goods and wealth as needed. Islam also found its own niche, primarily in East Africa. But the New World provided an unprecedented market for slave labor. Soon, tens of thousands of Africans were sold by Africans to Europeans. By the time the slave trade was effectively ended in the mid 1800's those figures had risen into the millions.
The United States was among the last of the Western Nations to end the practice of slavery. Abolitionists tried to stop it through legislation and vigilantes like John Brown tried to change national opinion through violence. Both failed as did middle-ground approaches like the Missouri Compromise.
Slavery led to the bloodiest war ever fought by American troops. When the Confederate States of America lost the war it not only lost its declared independence but its right to slavery as well.
Reconstruction brought carpetbaggers to fill the political void left in the South. Corruption and greed filled the vacuum left by the absence of Abraham Lincoln and his moral firmness and clarity. While the white citizens of the South were crushed into economic submission those who had formerly been slaves fared even worse. Prejudice, bitterness, poverty and misplaced pride created a culture of oppression for every Negro in the South. Although guaranteed equality under the law by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, state and local laws were enacted and often brutally enforced that kept the former slaves and their descendents from competing with anyone else for economic wealth, education or full participation in the political process.
For over seventy-five years, from the collapse of reconstruction in the 1870's to the mid 1950's, little changed. Local white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan "culled the herd" of any Blacks that were deemed to be too uppity or assertive of anything resembling equality. Threats were backed up by lynchings of hundreds of (mostly young) Black males.
In spite of this cultural and legal oppression, Black Americans developed a thriving counter-culture of their own. Within their own segregated communities they taught their own children and serviced their own needs with professionals who had been trained and educated in a small group of elite Colleges existing soley for Black students.
This uneasy social equilibrium began to unravel following World War II. Too many men had served as the military grew increasingly integrated during the conflict. Too many men had seen that the blood that was shed by each race was indistinguishable, one from another. Social taboos began to weaken. Black men who had fought and died for a common cause among white men began to question the status quo. Men like Jackie Robinson (1947 Brooklyn Dodgers)began to integrate professional sports and the increasing mobility of people from North to South and South to North made the old ways of segregation increasingly intolerable.
Finally, on December 1, 1955, a tired Black woman named Rosa Parks sat down on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and refused to give it up to a white man. She was arrested. A Black boycott of Montgomery's bus system lasted 381 days, even beyond a Supreme Court ruling in November 1956 that declared segregation on public transportation to be unconstitutional.
With Rosa Parks, the media and the nation had a face and a person to represent the long history of racial abuse. In the person of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the time a pastor at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the nation found an eloquent voice that raised the issue of racism to that of a moral imperative. Institutional racism, forced segregation and the quasi-legal contortions that justified it were vigorously decried as hateful distortions of the founding documents of our nation, especially the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..."The violent reaction to attempts to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, three years after the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated schools were "inherently unequal," revealed to America the bitter hatred towards Negroes and the lengths some would go to resist the tide of change.
Both White and Black folks from the North began to head South to stand alongside those Blacks who were calmly, yet firmly, defying segregationist laws in lunch counters, public drinking fountains, and voting registration. Such people were termed "Freedom Riders" and their effect on the growing Civil Rights movement were crucial to its eventual success.
The Southern White resistance to the inevitable produced vicious assaults on non-violent demonstrators and marchers and a number of brutal murders. The majority of Americans were shamed, embarrassed and humiliated by the film footage shown on the nightly television news. Slowly, but with an air of progress stirring amidst the chaos, the critical mass of public opinion turned. In 1962, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, sent National Guard troops into Southern states to enforce federal anti-discrimination law and allow James Merideth to enroll at the previously all-white University of Mississippi.
On August 28, 1963, 200,000 people "marched" on Washington D.C. to demonstrate their demands for an end to legalized segregation. The closing speech of the day was delivered by Dr. King. It's repeated refrain, "I have a dream..." stirred the nation and elevated him as the foremost spokesperson for the Civil Rights movement.
In response, President Kennedy was emboldened to submit his "Civil Rights" bill to the congress, over a year earlier than he had planned. Following his assassination on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Southerner and new President, continued to support and endorse it.
This comprehensive legislation passed in 1964 and follow-up law, the Voting Rights Act, was passed in 1965.
On April 4, 1968, while I was a Junior in high school, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, Robert Kennedy met the same fate at the hands of a gunman in Los Angeles.
All of this I remember because I saw the drama unfold. I saw the moral rightness in the Civil Rights struggle and I was inspired to assimilate its lessons through the powerful rhetoric of a man who "spoke the truth with love" to the people of America, and articulated a vision of the way things should one day be.
Today, as we take a day off from work, it is good to remember our national past, both good and bad, as personified in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just as any of us, Dr. King was flawed and imperfect. But the banner of freedom he helped raise for his people and for all of us still rallys us to the high ideal of equality for all.
Following his death, a friend and I took city buses across San Francisco to attend a massive memorial service at Grace Cathedral. Following the service, we joined the religious and civil leaders in a procession through the great Ghiberti Doors and around the top of Nob Hill. When we returned to the Cathedral I was astonished to see people still streaming out of the church, just beginning their memorial march. There were so many people, the strains of "We shall overcome" echoed off the surrounding buildings as it was being sung simultaneously yet not in unison by tens of thousands.
I remember that moment as though it were yesterday. That moment galvinized my determination to never flinch from defending the civil rights of any and all who would ever be judged on the basis of the color of their skin rather than "the content of their character."
Is there more to be done? Yes, of course, although I believe it is less than many would like us to believe. Slowly, slowly I have watched as Dr. King's dream has begun to be turned into reality. The freedom is now there for the taking. The opportunities have been unleashed. These freedoms came through a struggle that was by no means easy. We should not expect that the struggle to implement them be any easier.
posted by Bird of Paradise at 6:34 PM
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