Forty Years

Friday, April 4 - an interesting day. On April 4, 1850, Los Angeles was incorporated as a city. No one celebrates. No one mourns. Actually, no one much cares - you just drive about, as usual. But Friday, April 04, 2008, turned out to be a big day nationally. It was the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. It was the big story in the media - see the Washington Post’s comprehensive account here. But you needn’t bother - it was all over the news. You couldn’t have missed it. We like round numbers, and we now have a black man who could well be the next president of the United States. Everything came together. All the pieces fell into place. It seems the times do change.

 

Hillary Clinton spoke in Memphis. She was pretty good. Barack Obama spoke in Indiana, reminding people of how Bobby Kennedy broke the news of the King assassination to a black crowd in Indianapolis. If you’re old enough, you remember what Kennedy said - and remember that there was no rioting in Indianapolis. Kennedy spoke to understanding and decency, that stuff that is beyond race, or deeper than race. That seems to be what Obama has been up to all along - the same sort of message - so his being in Indianapolis, reminding that crowd of a good white man, seemed absolutely appropriate.

 

The third candidate, John McCain, who long opposed the federal King Holiday, was in Memphis, at the motel where King was gunned down, in the rain, standing under an umbrella held above his head by an old black man - quite a bad visual there - and said nice things about King. And he apologized for his long opposition to any holiday for the man - he was young (fifty, actually) and now knows better. There were boos, and some shouted that everyone makes mistakes, and “we forgive you.” It was awkward, but he knows he had to do this. No one mentioned that McCain’s great-great grandfather, William Alexander McCain, owned a plantation, and later died during the Civil War as a soldier for the Mississippi cavalry, and that this William Alexander McCain did own fifty-two black slaves. Well, it’s true. But they cut him some slack - better late than never.

 

But there is John Conyers, the man who authored the Martin Luther King Day Holiday Act:

Conyers says his biggest achievement has been the Martin Luther King Holiday Act of 1983. “[It's] by far and away the thing I am most proud of,” he says of the fifteen-year struggle to make that dream a reality. 

Conyers was so kind, as you can see in this clip. It’s from the MSNBC coverage. Conyers is chatting with the often inane female host, Alex Witt: 

Conyers: When John McCain was my colleague in the House and I introduced the Holiday bill, he voted against it in 1983… Now I believe in forgiveness, but it’s incredible that all he can do is show up on April 4th and think that everything is okay. We’re not just African Americans, but we’re most people. 

Witt: Rep. Conyers I think in all fairness we should say, perhaps you did not hear it but certainly John McCain did offer an apology for that first vote in 1983 when you did put forward that bill. You had not heard that? He did make that apology, sir, so that he regretted voting that way back then. 

Conyers: Yea, well look. I’m happy. That was in 1983, he didn’t make any apology, he didn’t make any apologies in 1987, so I guess I’m thrilled and forgiving that finally when he’s running for President he remembers to apologize. No, that’s great. 

Witt: Well, he has done so today and perhaps you’ll take that as some sort of appeasement, but anyway… 

Conyers is bitter and sarcastic. Witt is in over her head. She has to move on. 

But it’s all part of what that brilliant and radical Princeton professor, Cornel West, calls the Santa Clausification of King. 

 

Here’s what West had to say on the Tavis Smiley show on January 12, 2007, when discussing why it’s important to remember what King was actually doing: 

 

I think it’s very important because you see a lot of chit-chat about Martin every year and Martin has been so domesticated and tamed and defamed, you know, what we call the Santa Clausification of the brother. 

Tavis: Wait a minute. Hold the phone, hold the phone. The Santa Clausification of Dr. King, which means what, Dr. West? 

West: He just becomes a nice little old man with a smile with toys in his bag, not a threat to anybody, as if his fundamental commitment to unconditional love and unarmed truth does not bring to bear certain kinds of pressure to a status quo. So the status quo feels so comfortable as though it’s a convenient thing to do rather than acknowledge him as to what he was, what the FBI said, “The most dangerous man in America.” Why? Because of his fundamental commitment to love and to justice and trying to keep track of the humanity of each and every one of us. 

The FBI did say that. Things were different back then - or maybe they weren’t that very different. But West is right - King has become nice man, a good sort of trouble-maker, if there is such a thing. 

 

Matthew Yglesias is okay with that: 

 

I think the creation of the King Myth and the displacement of the more authentic radical King is a good thing. A country doesn’t get official national hero types without mythologizing and sanitizing them to a large extent, and it’s a good thing, at the end of the day, that King has moved into national hero status. 

Perhaps so, but one can go a bit overboard. Carolyn Garris may be a bit absurd in what she wrote for the Heritage Foundation in 2006: 

 

It is time for conservatives to lay claim to the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King was no stalwart conservative, yet his core beliefs, such as the power and necessity of faith-based association and self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, are profoundly conservative. Modern liberalism rejects these ideas, while conservatives place them at the center of their philosophy. Despite decades of its appropriation by liberals, King’s message was fundamentally conservative. 

Everyone wants a piece of the action, now that the idea of the man has been sanitized, and now that he’s long gone and obviously not able to say things that make people uncomfortable any longer. But King might disagree with Garris, from the great beyond. Let’s have a séance. Let’s not have one, actually. Carolyn Garris can say what she wants. Everyone else does. 

 

But maybe this calls for some anti-revisionist history. See Kai Wright in American Prospect, with Dr. King, Forgotten Radical: 

 

America began perverting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message in the spring of 1963. Truthfully, you could put the date just about anywhere along the earlier timeline of his brief public life, too. But I mark it at the Birmingham movement’s climax, right about when Northern whites needed a more distant, less personally threatening change-maker to juxtapose with the black rabble rousers clambering into their own backyards. That’s when Time politely dubbed him the “Negroes’ inspirational leader,” as Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff point out in their excellent book Race Beat. 

Up until then, King had been eyed as a hasty radical out to push Southern communities past their breaking point - which was a far more accurate understanding of the man’s mission. His “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is in fact a blunt rejection of letting the establishment set the terms of social change. “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,” he wrote, later adding, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” 

So it was Time magazine that began to sanitize King - he got some sort of stamp of approval in the spring of 1963, and that was that. Of course that couldn’t happen now - no one publication, or news anchor, speaks for America now. Lyndon Johnson may have once said - when “the most trusted man in America” turned against him on the Vietnam War - that when you lose Walter Cronkite you have lost the war, but now you can lose Anderson Cooper and still have Bill O’Reilly, or lose Time and still have the Weekly Standard. Things are fragmented now - lose Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert and you still have Glenn Beck. 

 

Be that as it may, Wright says it’s a shame that quotation, about how freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor but must be demanded by the oppressed, just never seems to be mentioned in the coverage of King now, and certainly wasn’t mentioned on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination: 

 

Generations after the man’s murder, our efforts to look back on his life too often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about his much-discussed dream. And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that remains urgently important to Americans’ lives. Today, I don’t mourn King’s death so much as I do his abandoned ideas. 

But Wright argues that it had to be this way: 

 

We’ve all got reason to avoid the uncomfortable truths King shoved in the nation’s face. It’s a lot easier for African Americans to pine for his leadership than it is to accept our own responsibility for creating the radicalized community he urged upon us. And it’s more comfortable for white America to reduce King’s goals to an idyllic meeting of little black boys and little white girls than it is to consider his analysis of how white supremacy keeps that from becoming reality. 

But Wright notes that King called the armed forces a “cruel manipulation of the poor” and said war funding was like “some demonic destructive suction tube,” siphoning off resources needed to deal with urgent domestic issues. And Wright notes that King warned that our zeal for war reflected “a far deeper malady in the American spirit,” one which drives us to consider the protection of our “overseas investments” to be “a greater imperative than the preservation of life.” 

 

That’s the part we seem to have decided it’s best to forget. People like the conservative Carolyn Garris do forget that, or skip over it. 

 

Over at Hullaballoo, Digby adds context: 

 

One of the things I think people may not completely grok about us loathsome and reviled baby boomers is that our politically formative years were a little bit unusual - when we were young our leaders and heroes kept getting assassinated. You can imagine how that might shape a person’s view of politics. Fortunately that hasn’t happened in a long time, which is something we should be grateful for. But for a while, in the 60s, it seemed to kids like me that this was normal. 

Martin Luther King’s assassination felt inevitable - especially to him.

Of course she quotes King’s last speech on that: 

 

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life - longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. 

Digby doubts that anyone in that audience thought he was being dramatic - “America was in a violent period. Everyone knew it.” 

 

And King had been making more trouble. He finally spoke against the war in Vietnam - and he did so as icon, he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. People were upset that he abandoned his legacy or whatever. He was hurting his cause. 

 

Digby sees that as brave, and sees herself as naïve: 

 

That is the other side of the liberal baby boomer ethos - our ridiculously earnest appreciation for public protest and brave speeches. When we were young, these things seemed imperative. 

But King did make an extraordinary anti-war speech a year before he was assassinated, at the Riverside Church in New York City. That’s the one people like to forget. The text is here and the audio here. And it was amazing, as Digby summarizes: 

 

Consider just how radical this was in 1967: he took the political and military establishment on directly and fiercely, long before it was fashionable and at great cost to himself. He spoke up for the victims of the war on all sides, tried to explain the history of the conflict, refused to demonize the communist “enemy” and accused the American government of manipulating events and lying to the people. 

Today this would land him on the no-fly list: 

 

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. 

… Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. 

… Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. 

And it goes on: 

 

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. 

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. 

Digby notes that change a few words and that could have been said today about Iraq. Obviously those now saying King was such a nice man, like John McCain, just forget this particular speech. 

 

Digby: 

 

There was nothing frivolous or self-serving about this speech, or trite and old fashioned about its sentiments. It was American to its core, in the very best sense of the word…. 

Others might disagree. But it doesn’t matter. Much just disappears over forty years. But some of us remember.