“Early morning, April 4
shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at Last, they took your life
They could not take your pride” ----U2 “In the Name of Love”
On this day, fifty years ago , a voice of hope calling for America to fulfill its promise; a voice for justice in a country where justice has been long denied, was silenced. Today marks the beginning of that long journey into night, the years of darkness into which we have now been wandering for now half a century. The violence that was 1968 abruptly extinguished the greatest hopes of a generation to unite black and white in an effort to address the pressing problems of racial and economic injustice in the United States. The ensuing backlash shifted the country markedly to the ‘right’, making possible a return to power of conservative America. In time, the heirs of Hoover and Eisenhower and Taft would give way to the acolytes of Goldwater, who would destroy the national consensus that was the New Deal and wage relentless war on those left behind as well upon the middle class itself.
From this perspective, we cannot underestimate the loss of Martin Luther King, Jr.
King is now handed down to us as a venerated icon, a sanitized version of history forgetting that in his lifetime he was vilified, hated, jailed and subject to relentless surveillance. He is presented to our young as “The Good Negro”, almost as a fawning “Uncle Tom” caricature, as if he made his reasonable requests and the country simply acquiesced. This history is a lie for it overlooks the church bombings, the freedom rides, the killings of civil rights workers, and the hate-filled streets as King took his movement north to Cicero, Illinois and other places demonstrating to America that racism was indeed, as it is now, not a Southern but a national problem. During his lifetime King, along with Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael were the most hated figures on the national stage.
They were hated because they presented the country not merely inconvenient truth, but because they laid bare the convenient lie that was the American promise. In King's words, an uncashed promissory note written into not only the Declaration of Independence, and British Common Law but into the very fabric of our Judaeo-Christian tradition. A note long overdue, now come due. “How Long?” he intoned in a call-and-response refrain “Not long!” he would answer.
At the time of his death, King was planning a "Poor People’s" march on Washington in which his critique of America would expand from civil rights to include the disproportionate burden the poor were carrying in fighting the war in Vietnam, and shifting greater emphasis in his definition of social injustice to economics. His plan was to pressure America to address the inequality of incomes and employment, taking to heart the criticism of Malcolm X that it didn’t cost anything to integrate lunch counters, the real challenge was to get the greater society to share the fruits of labor and the wealth that labor alone produces. It was precisely this cause that led him to Memphis in support of garbage workers, all of whom were terribly underpaid and two of whom had been crushed in the back of a poorly maintained garbage truck. Advised not go to Memphis and take up the cause, King couldn't refuse. This was precisely what the upcoming "Poor People's" march was meant to address. It was at this juncture — at the very point where the movement would share goals with a larger society and demand that justice be served by creating a more expansive and more inclusive middle class - that the flame that was Martin Luther King, Jr. was extinguished. After his death, there were marches in Memphis and elsewhere, and there was a big march on Washington later in the summer in which the poor took up residence in makeshift housing on the Capitol Mall, naming it “Resurrection City”, but the movement failed in its efforts to broaden itself, in large part because the voice that had given so much life was no more.
We miss you, Martin. You taught us that what happens to the least of us threatens all of us and that we are each others keeper. Oh, how you would have stood up to Nixon and Reagan. How you would have castigated ‘Ol Two-Cows, and now Caesar Disgustus and ridiculed with a moral voice that only you could have brought to the arena, the oxymoron that is “Compassionate Conservatism.” You would have celebrated with us the election of Obama, but you would have had no illusions about a dawning new age. You would have reminded us to maintain our eternal vigilance and to keep our eyes on the prize. We were blessed to have known you and for a half-century now we have wandered in the wilderness still seeking the promised land.
“How Long?...Not Long!”
It has been a half-century now and greed, gluttony and avarice run riot in the land.
“An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”.
Impeach and Imprison
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(1) Copyright 2004-2008http://www.MetroLyrics.com/in-the-name-of-love-lyrics-u2.html
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Note: This is another re-write of a post on this date 10 years ago, commentaries on that election year that changed America.
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