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Perryman: What changes are
you referring?
Burns: From the supremacists’
perspective, the U.S. now has a black woman as Vice
President, they’ve got Biden, and they’ve got a real
commitment (I hope) to deal with racial justice. The
supremacists also see the looming demographic changes that
probably terrify them. As one commentator wrote, ‘the engine
of history is on the side of this majority-minority society
that we’re moving toward and that these diehard opponents
are going to be sort of overtaken by events that they’re not
going to be able to fight this off.’ This country will be
very different and they just can’t tolerate the fact that
it’s not going to be a white country anymore.
Perryman: None of us can
really speak for King today, but how do you think Martin
Luther King would’ve responded to the insurrection that took
place on January 6?
Burns: You may recall that in
the spring of 1968, just a few weeks before he was
assassinated and in the course of organizing the Poor
People’s Campaign, he felt that we were on the eve of a
fascist takeover, especially if there was another summer of
uprisings and rioting. On the other hand, he was hoping that
the Poor People’s Campaign could be a way to head off
fascism.
Perryman: So, would King
have been surprised?
Burns: I think he saw fascism
even when he went to Chicago and saw mobs in the Chicago
suburbs that were more vicious than anything he had seen in
the South. King definitely had a sense that there was a
white supremacist core that might only have to be a fuse
that would just need to be lit for these white mobs to be
more active.
So, you were facing the
combination of the white supremacist mobs in the North and
the Johnson administration escalating the Viet Nam war and
sending troops to Detroit and Newark and all the repression
that was coming down to quell black protest. When you
combine all of that with the conspiracy trials for the draft
resistance leaders as well as the Chicago 7, Chicago 8, he
could see that this was coming. So, I don’t think he
would’ve been all that surprised. I do think he would’ve
been surprised by the extent of complicity by people inside
the government.
Perryman: That was my next
question. What do you think about the collaboration and
coordination by inside law enforcement and legislators?
Burns: King didn’t have
illusions about the white supremacist’s essence of the
supposedly liberal Democratic government. On the one hand,
President Johnson is pushing legislation that is essentially
social democracy, unlike anything, at least since the New
Deal.
On the other hand,
Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and COINTELPRO and the
infiltration of both the Black Movement and the New Left, we
don’t know how much he thought that the effort to
assassinate him was coordinated or managed from the highest
level.
So, I think in a way he
probably wouldn’t have been that surprised because he
already knew that there were people in the government at the
highest level who wanted him dead. By the time he was
approaching his own death he had seen it all with the death
threats that he constantly got and the maneuvering of Army
intelligence, FBI, and CIA. All of them were out to stop the
black movement and you have to include the killings - the
killings of Malcolm and later the attack in Oakland of the
Black Panthers.
I think that’s partly why
he felt that things were really in a more critical situation
than most people realized, including people even on the
left. He was trying to wake people up and become aware of
how serious white supremacy was.
Perryman: How do you think
King would’ve responded to the events on January 6?
Burns: First of all, King
would do everything he could to explain why there’s all the
difference in the world between a mass nonviolent protest
where they are not going to harm anybody. Instead, they’re
going to respect their adversaries even while they are
trying to maybe block doors or entrances or whatever they
might do. However, make it very clear they will not harm
anybody and that they are going to have compassion for their
adversary. And they’re not going to demonize their
adversary.
Perryman: Totally different
from all the things that the terrorists last week were
doing.
Burns: Last week was an
illustration of how once you engage in violence there’s no
limit to how bestial you might go. Once you open the
floodgates to violence there’s no end to it. Last week, it
was like the violence opened the door to a kind of madness.
Whereas one of the great virtues of disciplined nonviolent
protests is that it will prevent you from doing anything
where you will lose your sanity and your equilibrium.
Perryman: King was able to
bring about a lot of social change due to nonviolent
tactics. Why is nonviolence more effective than, perhaps, a
violent insurrection?
Burns: It’s ironic because
people on the left were saying that after King died
nonviolence died with him and that there was no hope for
that tactic. But in fact, if you look at the next 60 years
there was one success after another, especially in other
countries. Although there were some horrible exceptions
like Tiananmen Square in China, in many other countries, the
Velvet Revolution in eastern Europe and the mass nonviolent
action proved to be incredibly effective even in
overthrowing oppressive regimes.
Perryman: Specifically, in
what ways is nonviolence more effective?
Burns: Part of it was that you
have these nonviolent, sort of a vanguard of nonviolent
activists or protesters. Because of the way they comported
themselves, the way they acted, the way they treated their
adversary, the values that they were living out, you’d win
more and more support from the larger public. What happened
last week, instead, alienated and turned people off those
even who had been supporting Trump.
Whereas with a mass
nonviolent protest, it would snowball and continue to build
support because people could see the contrast between the
virtues expressed by the demonstrators, the protestors and
the brutality of the regimes. That contrast would just build
more and more public support behind their goals so that the
regimes or whoever it was they were up against would realize
that they had to change because they were losing public
support.
Perryman: How about King
and COVID? Can you project a response from King, had he
been here, dealing with COVID’s disproportionate negative
impact on low income and people of color?
Burns: King would’ve been the
leader that we needed. This is where a charismatic leader
can make such a difference. This past year, we didn’t have
anybody remotely close to his stature who could really speak
against the Trumpian narrative. King could have, in his
powerful way, really questioned and attacked the Trump
administration in a way that would’ve built a whole lot of
public support around perhaps an alternative way of dealing
with COVID. There would’ve been a powerful national voice
that would be able to take Trump to task and challenge him
every step of the way.
Perryman: Talk about King’s
response to combat the misinformation, disinformation, the
use of propaganda and lies that has been used to maintain
oppressive power.
Burns: Not only was there so
much force in King’s rhetoric, but he would speak very
clearly and specifically and lay out facts that would be
harder to dismiss as fake news. Today, there is no national
voice that could stand up to Trump. King could have had
rallies too and would’ve been able to rise above the
cacophony of voices on social media and be heard.
Perryman: So, to use the
title of King’s final book, where do we go from here?
Burns: Yes, Chaos or community?
I think that we have to really think about reimagining
American Democracy and think about it in terms of creating
an alternative to the party system, which I think is a big
part of the problem we face. The party system is dying. At
one time it was more participatory, but right now it’s
moribund at the local level and at the top level its
oligarchy. What happened to Bernie Sanders is, case in
point, of how the party system will eat up any kind of truly
progressive voice.
I think we need, instead,
to create an alternative through organizing grassroots
democracy as if it was a fourth branch of government. We
need to organize the grassroots instead of having people
going in all different directions and lacking real
coordination. We need to have that whole force of ‘the
people’ be organized in a way that can serve as what the
party system has been doing for almost 200 years.
I think we need something
new to organize popular forces.
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 |
