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The
highlight and main event of this year’s Martin Luther King,
Jr. Unity Celebration at UT may well have been the protest
for policing equity in the black community, which
temporarily halted the formal ceremony. The protesters,
Community Solidarity/Ferguson Response Network of Toledo,
led by Brother Washington Muhammad, marched unannounced to
the front of the stage immediately after remarks by Mayor D.
Michael Collins and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot” and
other slogans while more than 2,000 attendees looked on.
“I didn’t
know it was going to take place, but I don’t have an issue
with it (the protestors),” said Linda Alvarado-Arce,
co-chairman of the MLK event. “That’s what Dr. King was
about. I’d rather have protestors than people just being
complacent about their community. People need to stand up
and carry the torch forward for community change,” she
added.
In recent
years, I have become disengaged from Toledo’s version of MLK
Unity Day, a ceremony, in my opinion, which has seemed to be
a mirage, a fantasy, or mere daydreaming about who King the
Dreamer actually was and what his dream was really all
about.
Having been
“re-evangelized” with the “good news” of the civil
disobedience that took place at this year’s MLK celebration,
I was inspired to reach out to scholar, mentor and noted
King biographer, Stewart Burns. We discussed Martin Luther
King, Jr. - then and now- as well as ways in which the
spirit of MLK might be reclaimed.
Perryman: What
are your thoughts on the premise floating around that Dr.
King’s assassination was precipitated primarily because his
stance on classism had become more pronounced than even his
views on race.
Burns: More people, perhaps, have tended to talk about King standing against
the Vietnam War. Of course, the Poor People’s Campaign that
King put together was - - I think that maybe that’s what
you’re getting at, as Andrew Young himself said, ‘When we
organized the Poor People’s Campaign, we were public enemy
number one.’ And the FBI has admitted that they were out to
destroy King. But I’ve always interpreted that to mean to
destroy him politically, destroy him psychologically. They
didn’t want a martyr on their hands.
Perryman: If you
talk about the people in power, the richest one-to-two
percent are likely to control more than half of total wealth
from a global perspective. According to a recent report, the
80 wealthiest people in the world altogether own more than
the 5 billion or so people at the bottom of the income
scale. It can also be said that the gross wealth disparity
and the privilege that accompanies it is perpetuated by
siphoning off resources from the middle and underclasses
that provide the economic base for the rich. These powerful
“Phat Few” are extremely determined to hold on to their
power. The point to remember is that King died in the midst
of a Poor People’s Campaign, advocating on behalf of
sanitation workers – an issue that involved working people.
Burns: Right.
Perryman: Further,
the economic base for this country’s wealth was the free
labor of slaves - -who were shipped in from thousands of
miles away with the acquiescence of the northern U.S. But
the wealthiest people lived in the southern states, now
known politically as red conservative states.
Burns: And now it’s coming out that cotton was an even more vital industry.
In the 19th century, cotton was the basis of all
global trade. And so the slave trade and slave production of
cotton was absolutely central, even more than I had
realized, to the whole world economy. And so when slavery
was abolished, it wasn’t just the South. It was all these
northern cotton mill owners who had invested in
plantations. They had major investments in the plantations
in the South.
I always
knew it was interconnected, but it was even more. Now, it’s
being documented that all these interconnections existed,
and how the northern industrial economy was completely in
bed with the southern slavocracy. The whole nation of
course was a slavocracy. But these times we’re living in
are just - - what is going on in this world?
Perryman: Well,
two things come to mind that, as an expert on King, I really
would like to hear your thoughts on. One is the apparent
sanitizing of the federal holiday that marks the birthday of
Martin Luther King, Jr. And secondly, how would you
contextualize the King movement in light of the numerous
police assassinations of unarmed African Americans occurring
today?
Burns: Well, of course the latter is not anything new. On the one hand, it
feels like it’s become an epidemic. On the other hand, it’s
always been an epidemic. But now it seems to be more
blatant than ever before. How these murders, the Eric Garner
case in particular, just probably because we get to actually
see it on video, but the fact that this type thing could go
on, and that these grand juries one after another, just
absolutely refuse to indict the cops for these murders is
astounding.
I hope
that this means that some new movement is going to arise,
some resurgence of the Black Freedom Movement will take
place that will be larger than before, and will recognize
that, while people of color and black men in particular are
most subject to this systemic violence, in fact we’re all in
this together in one way or another.
And all of
these things are connected as we’ve talked about. So the
climate change is all very connected with the other evils,
the other triple evils of race, poverty and militarism that
King talked about. It seems like things have kind of quieted
down at least for now. Maybe it’s because it’s so damn
cold. Nobody wants to do a die-in when it’s zero degrees.
But I just
hope that - - sometimes there are crimes that you never find
out about, or you don’t have the sort of incontrovertible
evidence you need to show that these are cold-blooded
murders. And then, in the Cleveland case, which is so close
to where you are, I’m just reading about that. How can they
get away with this?
So I just
hope that this will not only motivate a new movement, but
that it will be a more inclusive movement and a more
powerful movement that can not only look at these issues in
isolation, but look at them all in terms of the pattern of
the power structure that is obviously feeling extremely
threatened, and the militarization of local police forces
and all these things that directly ties with it, with the
government, the National Security Agency certainly.
And I do
think that every crisis is an opportunity. And I think that
this will force some kind of awakening that we just have to
come together and fight these things in a more united and
more comprehensive way than ever before. But this is an
awfully strange world that we’re living in right now.
Perryman: In your
most recent book, We Will Stand Here Till We Die,
which you sent me a free autographed copy, you called the
method of change that Martin Luther King, Jr. used “soul
force” because the term nonviolence described King’s
philosophy too narrowly. You stressed how critical it is for
activism to be assertive without being violent. Do you think
that that method is still relevant and can lead to a rebirth
of the movement?
Burns: Yes, absolutely. But there are different ways of being assertive. And
in relation to the police, and of course what’s going on in
New York, I think that- - now more than ever perhaps, it’s
important to show that nonviolent action can be powerful and
militant and the substitute for violence.
So I hope
that people who engage in protests will be as creative as
they can be but it’s always a slippery slope into violent
reactions. I think there used to be a lot more nonviolent
training - - because without the training, without the
discipline, self-discipline, it’s hard not to respond
violently when you’re attacked by the police.
Also, King
always talked about needing to combine the legal
constitutional route with the sort of direct action route.
And it’s extremely important, I think, for people to
challenge the grand jury decisions and to push for the
Department of Justice to intervene in all these cases. And
maybe this new Attorney General (Loretta Lynch), if
confirmed by the new GOP controlled U.S. Senate, will be
more proactive than Eric Holder has been. But I think a lot
has to happen on the legal front, but nothing’s going to
happen on the legal front without the protests and the
community organizing. It all has to work together.
I hope
that answers your first question.
Perryman: Thank
you.
Stewart
Burns, Ph.D. is a distinguished historian of the Civil
Rights Movement and author of the Wilbur Award winning
biography of Martin Luther King Jr.,
To the Mountaintop (2004).
A former editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers at
Stanford University, he produced the Montgomery bus boycott
volume, Birth of a New Age. He published the first history
of the bus boycott, Daybreak of Freedom, made into
the HBO feature film Boycott that he conceived and consulted
on, winner of the NAACP Image Award (2002). His most recent
book: We Will Stand Here Till We Die: Freedom Movement
Shakes America, Shapes Martin Luther King Jr. (2013).
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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