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There were some good speeches Monday, on our Martin Luther King holiday.
One, by former VP Al Gore, blasted the Bush administration for its unilateral exercise
of executive power. He also shamed
the Congress for not performing its duty of oversight, and challenged the
people, especially when the three branches of government are not working in
checks and balances, to do what they must to ensure that it does. A second good experience for me was to hear a panel discuss the impact
of JFK, MLK, and RFK. Broadcast following Gore’s speech on C Span, it included
Marian Wright Edelman, Elaine Jones and Peter Edelman, reviewing what the gains
of the civil rights movement contributed to the freedoms we have today. Dr. King’s campaign for civil rights in
the 60s was a necessary embodiment to fulfill the Constitution and Bill of
Rights. MLK Day is a day to honor democratic
process and the hard work it sometimes requires. There were frequent reminders that the people, when
leadership is missing, must demand the Constitution and Bill of Rights be
upheld, that vigilance and leadership are required by each generation. The author here has written a trilogy on King’s life and considered an
authority on the civil rights movement.
Globalizing
King's Legacy
OpEd by Taylor Branch, NYT, Monday, January 16, 2006 Baltimore - Official celebrations of the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.'s birthday turn 20 years old this week. Like that of Dr. King's late
colleague Rosa Parks, the name behind our 10th national holiday carries more
resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time. The annual King event draws tributes to
the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied
appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite our high-stakes national
commitment to advance free government around the world, we consistently
marginalize or ignore Dr. King's commitment to the core values of democracy. His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for
freedom. "No American is without responsibility," Dr. King declared
only hours after the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" repulse of voting rights
marchers in Selma, Ala. "All are involved in the sorrow that rises from
Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life," he added.
"The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our
land." His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many
states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to
death with impunity, Dr. King responded with prophetic witness against the
grain of violence. "Out of the wombs of a frail world," he assured
mourners, "new systems of equality and justice are being born." Selma
released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary
citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience
and engaged all three branches of government. After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965,
Dr. King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had
revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution.
"The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is
not a peculiar device for Negro agitation," he told the Synagogue Council
of America. "Rather it is a historically validated method for defending
freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the
whole society." This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste.
As Dr. King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists
themselves. The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in
racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to
spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a
region of historic poverty. In
elections, new black voters generated the 20th century's first two-party
competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of
segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner's chances for high national
office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national
parties. Parallel
tides opened doors
for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges,
then the military academies. In 1972, civil rights agitation over doctrines of
equal souls produced the first public ordination of a female rabbi in the
United States, and the Episcopal Church soon introduced female clergy members
in spite of schismatic revolts to preserve religious authority for men. Pauli
Murray, a lawyer who was one of the pioneer priests, had pursued a legal appeal
that in 1966 overturned several state laws flatly prohibiting jury service by
women. "The principle announced seems so obvious today," Dr. Murray
would write in a memoir, "that it is difficult to remember the dramatic
break the court was making." Overseas, as an amalgam of forces suddenly dissolved the
Soviet empire atop its mountain of nuclear weapons, Dr. King's message echoed
in the strains of "We Shall Overcome" heard along the Berlin Wall and
the streets of Prague. Likewise, South African apartheid melted without the
long-dreaded racial Armageddon, on miraculous healing words from a former
prisoner, Nelson Mandela. Students shocked the world from Tiananmen Square with
nonviolent demonstrations modeled on American sit-ins, planting seeds of
democracy within the authoritarian shell of Chinese Communism. These
and other
sweeping trends from
the civil rights era have transformed daily life in many countries, and now their benefit is scarcely
contested. Yet the political discourse behind them is atrophied. Public service
has fallen into sad disrepute. Spitballs pass for debate. Comedians write the best-selling books on
civics. Dr. King's ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged,
and for two generations his voice of anguished hope has given way to a dominant
slogan that government itself is bad. Above
all, no one speaks for nonviolence. Indeed, the most powerful discipline from the freedom
movement was the first to be ridiculed across the political spectrum. "A
hundred political commentators have interred nonviolence into a premature grave,"
Dr. King complained after Selma. The concept seemed alien and unmanly. It came
to embarrass many civil rights veterans themselves, even though nonviolence
lies at the heart of democracy. Every ballot - the most basic element of free government -
is by definition a piece of nonviolence, symbolizing hard-won or hopeful
consent to raise politics above anarchy and war. The boldest principles of
democratic character undergird the civil rights movement's nonviolent training.
James Madison, arguing to ratify the Constitution in 1788, summoned "every
votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of
mankind for self-government," and he added that no form of government can
secure liberty "without virtue in the people." By
steeling themselves to endure blows without retaliation, and remaining
steadfastly open to civil contact with their oppressors, civil rights
demonstrators offered shining examples of the revolutionary balance that
launched the American system: self-government and public trust. All the rest is
careful adjustment. Like Madison, the marchers from Selma turned rulers and
subjects into fellow citizens. A largely invisible people offered leadership in
the role of modern founders. For an incandescent decade, from 1955 to 1965, the
heirs of slavery lifted the whole world toward freedom. Weariness and war intruded. In the White House, President
Lyndon Johnson wrestled the political subtleties of sending soldiers to
guarantee liberty at home. "Troops leave a bitter taste in the mouths of
all the people," cautioned Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The
president moaned simultaneously over predictions of bloody stalemate if he sent
troops to Vietnam, saying the prospect "makes the chills run up my
back," but he succumbed to schoolyard politics. The American people, he
feared, "will forgive you for everything except being weak." Lamenting religious leaders who accommodated the war, Dr.
King defended nonviolence on two fronts. "Have they forgotten that my
ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died
for them?" he asked. "What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to
Castro, or to Mao...? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with
them my life?" In politics, Dr. King endorsed a strategic alternative to
violence. "We will stop communism by letting the world know that democracy
is a better government than any other government," he told his
congregation, "and by making justice a reality for all of God's
children." Pressures intensified within Dr. King's own movement. To
battered young colleagues who wondered why nonviolence was consigned mostly to
black people, while others admired James Bond, he could only commend the burden
as a redemptive sacrifice. Change was slow, however, for a land still dotted
with lynching, and frustration turned to rebellion as the war in Vietnam
hardened the political climate. When offered incendiary but fleeting fame in
1966, the leaders of various black power movements repudiated nonviolence along
with the vote itself, which they had given so much to win. Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson steadily lost his presidency at
home before he could forge any political order in Vietnam. Although casualty
figures confirmed the heavy advantage of American arms, Johnson fell victim to
a historical paradox evolving since the age of Napoleon: modern warfare
destroys more but governs less - one reason military commanders seem, in my
limited experience, more skeptical than civilians about the political use of
lethal force. Dr. King grew ever more lonely in conviction about the
gateway to constructive politics. "I'm committed to nonviolence
absolutely," he wrote. "I'm just not going to kill anybody, whether
it's in Vietnam or here." When bristling discouragement invaded his own
staff, he exhorted them to rise above fear and hatred alike. "We must not
be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now," he told them
on his last birthday. His oratory fused the political promise of equal votes with the spiritual doctrine
of equal souls.
He planted one foot in American heritage, the other in scripture, and both in
nonviolence. "I say to you that our goal is freedom," he said in his
last Sunday sermon. "And I believe we're going to get there because,
however much she strays from it, the goal of America is freedom." Only hours before his death, Dr. King startled an aide with
a balmy aside from his unpopular movement to uplift the poor. "In our next
campaign," he remarked, "we have to institutionalize nonviolence and
take it international." The nation would do well to incorporate this goal into our
mission abroad, reinforcing
the place of nonviolence among the fundamentals of democracy, along with equal
citizenship, self-government and accountable public trust. We could also restore Dr. King's role
in the continuing story of freedom to its rightful prominence, emphasizing that
the best way to safeguard democracy is to practice it. And we must recognize
that the accepted tradeoff between freedom and security is misguided, because
our values are the essence of our strength. If dungeons, brute force and
arbitrary rule were the keys to real power, Saudi Arabia would be a model for
the future instead of the past. Gunfire took Dr. King's life, but we determine his legacy.
This holiday, let that inspiration remain our patriotic challenge. Taylor Branch is the author, most recently, of "At
Canaan's Edge," the third volume of his biography of Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/opinion/16branch.html Related Taylor Branch http://literati.net/Branch/ Al Gore: Constitution in Grave Danger http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0116-34.htm |
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