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The abrupt protest by the Ferguson Response Network of
Toledo for policing equity temporarily halted this year’s
MLK Unity Celebration at the University of Toledo. The
group, led by Brother Washington Muhammad, suddenly 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 before more than 2,000
attendees.
In recent years, I have withdrawn from Toledo’s version of
MLK Unity Day, an insipid ceremony, which has failed to
capture the true spirit of Martin King as moral warrior or
to accurately portray his work of liberation and social
regeneration.
King, above all, integrated spirituality into his political
and social leadership to successfully produce the Civil
Rights and Voting Rights Acts. These two reforms have become
the foundation of remedies to discrimination in the U.S.
including race, faith, gender, sexuality, disability, age
and economic disadvantage.
The peaceful protest by the Ferguson Response Network of
Toledo at UT was anything but a random, isolated or
meaningless act. Not only did this public civil disobedience
seem to reclaim the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., but
it also may represent a local manifestation of a
re-energized civil rights movement in our nation.
I
reached out to noted scholar and M.L. King, Jr. biographer,
Stewart Burns, to discuss the topic of reclaiming the spirit
of MLK in light of criticism about police behavior and the
criminal justice system in contemporary America. This is
part two of our conversation.
Perryman:
I would like to hear your thoughts on the apparent
sanitizing of the federal holiday that marks the birthday of
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Burns: My main feeling about it is, that there has been a sanitization of Dr.
King and his message as well as the complete deletion of all
that he did and stood for the last three years of his life
when he became a true revolutionary.
The one thing that concerns
me is that it seems like everywhere, the day is being turned
into a day of community service. Of course it’s always
great to have community service. But I would much prefer
that it would be a day of community organizing and dealing
with structural issues. It just seems like there’s this sort
of massive co-optation that’s happening.
I’ve always felt this is a
day to do community organizing, to do protesting. Look at
the opportunity that you would have for protests, having
been domesticated by the powers that be. But what an
opportunity for a national day of action around the police
murders and all the things that are tied in with that.
Instead, people are seeing it
as a day of service, which says to me, a watering down of
King’s message and positions. And he (King) felt service was
a very important part of a nonviolent struggle, but it’s
important only if it’s part of the struggle. If it’s just
this isolated activity - that is such a safe thing,
especially for colleges and high schools to be involved
with, - then it’s just another one of these great missed
opportunities.
So that’s the way that I’m
seeing it. It’s always been watered down, but I see this
recent emphasis on community service, as the latest step in
this sort of pacification of what could be a very powerful
day to confront the power structures that are increasingly
frightened by the protests that are emerging around the
world.
Perryman:
And you’ve been a part of King Day commemorative events.
What would, for you, a good commemoration event look like,
in addition to being a day of organizing and protests?
Burns: Ideally, I would see it as part of ongoing campaigns. There’s a new
organization that I actually just heard about. I think it’s
called Nonviolent Campaigns. They are trying to organize
support for local activists and community organizers who are
engaging in nonviolent actions or and providing them with
resources and support
But I would get away from the
public spectacles. It just seems like now, more than ever,
that the King Holiday should be a day of nonviolent protest,
but also be connected to these larger campaigns such as
climate change, for instance.
So I guess I would, at least
for a while, kind of stay away from the spectacles and the
charismatic speakers and all the rest. Why not raise funds
for local campaigns of various kinds, either to take place
on the King Holiday or during the King week? It’s just so
much that could be happening that isn’t. And it just seems
like it would be an opportunity for a whole new step forward
in how we commemorate King and his legacy.
Perryman:
Well, you also mentioned tying this to what you called a
triple threat. And one of the things you mentioned was
climate change. How does what King tried to do connect to
climate change and these other issues that you bring up?
Burns: Well, we know about the triple evils of racism, poverty, and
militarism. But I have no doubt that King would see climate
chaos as a force of evil or peril that is all tied in with
the others in all sorts of ways, and that he would be urging
us to confront all four of these in a coordinated way.
As horrible and outrageous as
the police murders have been, I don’t think we can afford to
focus on that in isolation. I think we have to show how the
police murders are all part of a larger picture - the
militarization of local police, the underclass and mass
incarceration – returning citizens who are either coming out
of it or those on their way to it, they have to be kept down
to keep the existing power structure in place.
And it could very well be
that the police - - especially in a place like New York, are
being given greater latitude to commit these crimes, because
there’s a greater fear of how do you keep this underclass
under control without making examples of some of them? It’s
hard not to come to that conclusion that this is all part of
a larger effort to repress and to disempower this huge
underclass that has been deliberately created, in a lot of
ways, but now is a great threat to the power structure.
And whether it’s immigration
restrictions or the deportations, which of course the Obama
administration has been very involved with, or whether it’s
the border control beefing up the military presence on the
borders, all these things seem to be aimed at keeping
control of an extremely potentially explosive situation. And
all the while, 1/10th of one percent of the population are
going hog wild with greater wealth, and everyone else is
suffering. How can that continue? That’s just bound to
explode in some way.
So I just always feel it’s so
important to make all these connections and to understand
that what links all these things together is power. And it
seems that the power structures are getting more desperate
and are engaging in more desperate measures, and that could
be an opportunity. I like to think that there’s an upside to
all this, but it could be an opportunity that they will have
so unveiled their illegitimacy that it won’t take that much
more awakening for people to see that the emperor has no
clothes, and that democracy is largely a fraud in this
country.
But, for that I do wish that
we had, not necessarily a leader like King who could kind of
put all this together into sort of a more coherent vision,
but I wish somehow we were able to, in the schools and from
preschool to PhD programs, educate people about all of these
inter-connections into a holistic picture of what we’re up
against.
Perryman:
And maybe King’s undoing is that he saw it, and not only saw
it but also spoke it, and people were awakened to the
magnitude of the injustice.
Burns: Yes. He clearly saw it, and we’re seeing it more and more vividly
every day. And he saw how it was all interwoven.
Perryman:
They were connected
Burns: King was criticized by those who complained: “for how can you try to
combine the Peace Movement and the Freedom Movement?” Well,
there’s no hope for either of those movements unless they’re
combined. And one of my favorite quotes is where King said
that he refuses to segregate his moral concerns, and I just
think that is just so vital. And yet that’s what we’re all
brought up to do. When something happens like the police
violence, the police murders, or whatever it is out there,
those things have to be dealt with in a very powerful way.
But yet, that’s only part of it.
At the same time that we’re
dealing with those immediate crimes, we also have to see how
they’re tied in with all the rest of it and not lose sight
of the forest for the tree. We get too hung up on the tree,
and we never seem to see the forest until a forest fire
comes along. By then it’s too late.
Perryman:
OK. Thank you for your time.
Burns: You are very welcome!
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 |
