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In honor of Black History
Month, I spoke with Stewart Burns, the noted Martin Luther
King, Jr. biographer in order to obtain a sense of the
historical experiences felt by leaders on the frontlines of
the Civil Rights Movement. My aim was to glean lessons for
today’s generation of activists who also are attempting to
“save America from America” and who operate on the ground in
communities that have been most marginalized.
According to renowned
scholar Lewis V. Baldwin, Burns’ new 2018 edition of To
the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Mission and
Meaning For America focuses on King as a “divided soul”
and, according to critics, is one of the best ever
treatments of King’s faith.
This is the conclusion of
our two-part discussion on King’s Civil Rights activism.
Perryman:
We talked previously about the sense of community and
camaraderie among those involved in the movement of the
1960s and 70s that you have also described as a healing
experience.
Burns:
Yes, for those activists involved it was camaraderie and
close friendships like I had never had before. Sharing our
inner lives, really making ourselves very open and
vulnerable and simply having real friends with whom we
shared political values, but also sharing other values,
including the value of being good to each other despite our
having plenty of personal flaws. One of the most important
lessons from King and the movement, as a whole, is how vital
it is to treat each other with respect, understanding and
compassion.
Perryman:
There seems to be a noticeable lack of civility today.
Burns:
When I see the kind of divisions that are happening among
progressives now, the divisiveness over the women’s marches
for instance, where some black leaders being accused of
being anti-Semitic when people aren't making a clear
distinction between being anti-Semitic and being
anti-Israeli government. I’m anti-Israeli government
myself, but I’m sure as hell not anti-Semitic, but those
distinctions are getting lost. But all this inciting that’s
going on, we can’t afford this kind of divisiveness.
Perryman:
Realistically though, wouldn’t you have to also say that
there were personal and “ideological conflicts,” if I can
use that phrase, in King’s time too?
Burns:
Yes. However, King himself was a real role model because he
wanted a united movement of people of color and poor whites,
which was the idea for the poor people’s campaign, but above
all he wanted black people to be united.
An example is when King
was helping to lead the Mississippi March Against Fear in
June 1966, about the time when Stokely Carmichael and Willie
Ricks first articulated “black power,” a slogan King did not
agree with. King and Carmichael had a so-called Summit
Meeting in Yazoo City to try to come to some kind of
understanding. Even though the tempers were hot and there
was a lot at stake, they did come to an understanding that
they would restrain themselves somewhat when it came to
using the slogan on the march and not try to drown out the
protesters who were still saying freedom now. But mainly
the two were able to talk, they were able to communicate and
they were able to sit around in a room and really hash
things out and communicate, even if no resolution was
found. Even that kind of communication is rare. But King
and Carmichael remained friends through it all and maybe
even got closer during the times, especially, when Stokely
was openly publicly lambasting King, but King never returned
it. King did criticize the black power slogan, but not the
essence of it and he was never going to disavow SNCC or
break his ties with SNCC activists and he continued to have
a close friendship with Stokely. And Stokely in his own
memoir talks about how he revered King, even though he
strongly disagreed with King’s nonviolent philosophy but he
did not reject King and they continued to be close.
So it may be that King was
the only one who was determined to preserve black unity and
not break relationships, no matter how much you might
disagree about very important things. Those relationships
were crucial to him and the essence of his nonviolent
philosophy. You fight but talk things over and talk things
out.
Perryman:
You mentioned earlier that King wanted to see this as a
black movement, yet it was multiracial, multicultural, and
multi-faith, wasn’t it?
Burns:
Well, it depends how you define “movement.” I like to
define it with a capital M. I like to think of it as a
peace and justice movement. I like to think of it as the
way King was starting to talk about it in the spring of
1967, that we’ve got to join the peace movement with the
freedom movement, that it has to be both. So I like to
think of it as one big movement like that. And King
certainly saw it as, at least potentially, a broad
multiracial, multiclass, movement but it was pretty far from
that. I remember being part of it then and the leaders in
the Civil Rights Movement as well as those in the draft
resistance, we were all trying to figure out what do we
prioritize? Is it going to be peace in Vietnam or is it
going to be racial justice? And we prioritized peace in
Vietnam, but there were others, Students for Democratic
Society (SDS), in particular, white students who prioritized
racial justice even though they were in a position to lead a
national anti-war movement they decided they didn’t want to
do that, that they wanted to support the black movement.
But that caused a lot of division within SDS. So there was
a lot of division over what comes first or whether we could
do both? King’s belief was that they could do both Civil
Rights and peace, but also do economic justice as well.
Perryman:
Today, with racial justice, Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ
movement, the Me Too and others, there seems to be a similar
historical context.
Burns:
It’s certainly gotten more complex, more complicated, but
also I think more hopeful because with this multiplication
of issues, concerns, demands and goals, it at least
potentially can broaden the movement and I think it has. So
now, if studies were done, I think you’d see as many or more
participants at the grassroots than ever before or at least
more than in the 1960’s. So King was also struggling to
figure out how to link and support these different
movements. It can get very, very difficult.
At the very least, it
seems to me that what King would call a true alliance would
have to include…from taking it from his concept of triple
evils and sort of bringing it up to date - racism, poverty,
militarism and climate change. So those might be the big
four issues that a coalition would have to build itself
around, but its extremely important to incorporate how we
treat each other and extremely important to incorporate not
just women’s rights, but commitment to eliminate gun
violence, violence against women and LGBTQ people as well.
Today I think there would be five or six major goals or
areas of agreement whereas 50 years ago there were only two
overriding issues. There was the Vietnam War and there was
racial justice.
Perryman:
Scholar Walter Fluker has a model of ethical leadership from
the black perspective that includes three elements –
community, civility and character. Conceptually, you have
talked about community and civility within the Movement.
What about the importance of character?
Burns:
I think that there’s so much narcissism, selfishness and
narrow mindedness and that’s something else that King
struggled with and has a lot to teach us about. He gave
sermons - and was always speaking to himself more than to
anybody else - asking ‘How do I overcome my
self-centeredness, my selfishness?’ Because he knew that no
one could be a movement leader or a serious movement
participant who would let his or her ego run the show and he
would even talk about how even self-sacrifice could be an
egotistical thing if you don’t kind of keep it under
control. I’m sure he was speaking about himself, and King
was not a positive role model in every way, as we know. His
hierarchical philosophy of leadership, his authoritarian
leadership, his attitude toward women, his extramarital
relationships, yes, there’s a whole lot, but he would be the
first to admit, and would publicly say ‘I’m a sinner like
all God’s children.’
Perryman:
Young people were at the core of the Movement’s leadership.
King, himself, was only 26 years old when he took the
reins. Does the prominence of young people in the Civil
Rights Movement indicate that maybe it’s time for older
activists to perhaps pass the baton?
Burns:
There are lots of new leaders emerging and I think that
there just needs to be a process of mutual give and take and
learning and education. So I would hope just the younger
folks would be more willing to learn and the older folks
would be more willing to share what lessons they have to
offer, but not in a way that’s overbearing or arrogant, but
to realize that the younger folks are the ones who really
are going to have to carry the torch.
Perryman:
And finally, women like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and
others were leaders of the Movement who were seldom
acknowledged. However, that seems to be changing, as women
leaders today are much more highly visible.
Burns:
Yes, I hope that a majority of the new leaders are women and
there are an awful lot of incredible role models out there
and there are qualities of leadership that women tend to
have, being more collaborative, less ego and all that kind
of thing. However, on the other end there are lots of
problems that female leaders are having with those issues as
well, and some feminists might say that to the extent that
women are replicating some of the bad aspects of male
leadership. I think that we all have struggles with our egos
and with our ambitions, and I think women might have less of
a problem with that, in general. But I do think that women’s
leadership is going to be very important and at the
forefront of multiracial, multiclass collaborative
leadership.
Perryman:
Thank you.
Ed. Note: Highly regarded historian of the Civil Rights Movement,
author or editor of eight books, Stewart Burns served as an
editor of the King Papers at Stanford University, where he
also taught U.S. History. His first book Social Movements of
the 1960s (1990), still in print, has been the most widely
used college text on the subject. His documentary history of
the Montgomery bus boycott, Daybreak of Freedom (1997), was
made into the HBO feature film Boycott (on which he
consulted), winner of the NAACP Image Award in 2002.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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