The return of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The return of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Geov Parrish - workingforchange.com 01.16.03
It wasn't too long ago that the newest of federal holidays, the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- annually celebrated, like all birthdays, on a third Monday -- had effectively obliterated the example of Dr. King himself.
MLK's birthday was becoming nothing more than a final installment among two months of holidays, one last merciful long weekend that (even better) didn't carry any obligations for family dinners or gift-buying. It was a great weekend to go skiing or hang out at the mall. In each town, the politicians had some dumb ceremony, and a few scruffy activists marched about something or another. Doctor Who? Fortunately, with President Dubya, King is back.
The words and actions of Dr. King are flooding back to us with each day's headlines: the man, the historical figure, the political and cultural catalyst, the resistance leader and radical critic of the status quo. The Bush Administration is doing nothing post-9/11 if not working overtime to effect the end of the end of irony. Yesterday, on the day in which Dr. King would have turned 74, the White House announced that it would take the unusual and aggressive step of backing the plaintiffs in a reverse- discrimination case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The move is consistent with Bush's long-standing hostility to policies such as affirmative action. The University of Michigan denies its criteria for admissions in the case in question amount to the dreaded "quota" system, but the Bush ideologues have weighed in anyway, on the general principle that remedies for racism -- whether the racism is intentional or a byproduct of other factors -- are, in themselves, racist. In the majesty of the Republican colorblind society, whites and non-whites alike will be free to uphold white supremacism.
The reason folks are particularly noticing this latest in a long line of Bush Administration attacks on anti-racism remedies is that it happens to fall in that narrow window of time, that all-too-brief half-life, immediately after a major story that called into question Republican attitudes toward race and civil rights. The American public's political memory is short, forever being buried under the fresh stories and images churned out 24/7 by an entertainment-driven news industry.
The chilling rhetoric of former Senate Majority Leader Sen. Trent Lott is still, somewhat, recallable -- it was, after all, only last month -- as is Lott's politically opportunistic sandbagging by Republican colleagues who've had years of opportunities to witness Lott's fondness for neo-confederate values.
The vehement denunciations of Lott's words by Republican colleagues raised an obvious question to the public: which Republican Party was to be believed on the matter of race? The entirely white congressional delegation that hounded Lott from his leadership post, calling him a throwback to a shameful past? Or the party with a long, vicious, and ongoing record of opposing even the most basic of anti-racism measures, the party associated with a War on Drugs that has imprisoned a non-white generation, the party that seized the White House last time by keeping black Floridians away from the polls?
Into that void, while the question still hangs in the air, comes the White House -- and, also, comes Dr. King's 74th birthday. First, the White House, submitting once again for Senate approval this week the name of Judge Charles W. Pickering for a post on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Democratic-controlled Senate rejected Pickering when the White House nominated him last year, specifically because Pickering, a long-time crony of Lott's from Mississippi, had a long and disturbing record on race. Among the lowlights: a 1994 case in which Pickering intervened to reduce the sentence of a man convicted of burning a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple and their baby and firing shots into the couple's home.
This is not 1958 we're talking about here, and given that the Republicans now controlling the Senate are more than a little sensitive on the topic of white Mississippians with antebellum yearnings, one has to wonder what the White House could possibly have been thinking. In case the public had any doubt what Bush's team was thinking, it was promptly erased by following up the Pickering submission with the University of Michigan intervention, on King's birthday.
But as it happens, invoking King's legacy this year involves a bit more than the usual token nod to having dreams and ignoring skin tones. Particularly in his last years, Dr. King's political agenda was far greater than civil rights alone. He came out forcefully against not just the Vietnam War, but American imperialism in general. His last great project was the Poor People's March on Washington in April 1968. He died while in Memphis in support of poor, mostly (but not entirely) black sanitation workers in Memphis, struggling for the right to organize as a union.
The exact same confluence of issues represented in King's final years: race issues, war, class, workers' rights -- is once again converging powerfully under the reign of George W. Bush. America finds itself confronted with the prospect of war -- not just an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, which an increasing percentage of the American public is either uneasy about or implacably opposed to, but a White House warning of and seemingly intent on delivering a "New 100 Years' War" that will pit America against the poor and non-white of the entire world. That prospect of war without end is inextricably linked to class, at home and abroad.
At home, the Bush Administration's class warfare during an economic downturn involves not just massive handouts to the rich, but a military budget that soaks up any remaining money once devoted to softening the effects of poverty. Abroad, of the many countries around the world in which the State Department fears local anti-American terrorism, the single factor linking virtually all is wrenching poverty.
Poverty breeds terrorism, and the Bush Administration is creating more of both. Moreover, virtually without exception the poorest countries, and the poorest people in each country, are also the darkest skinned; it is they who will die in the new endless war.
And it is they whose poverty and economic exploitation will, under the new globalization, be guaranteed in part by denying them livable wages and the right to organize. And as if to close the loop, civil liberties at home are also part of this constellation of issues -- particularly among non-citizens and the non-white, in a way not seen since federal law enforcement was controlled by an ideological zealot legendary for his efforts to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King.
It is no accident that, unlike the Gulf War 10 years ago, labor unions, civil rights organizations, and poverty action groups have all come out forcefully against an invasion of Iraq. All will be well-represented at the massive anti-war marches being held this weekend -- the MLK Birthday weekend -- in Washington and San Francisco. There is no overarching word that describes the current entanglement of issues of war, poverty, race, and labor, and the principled and determined resistance now being organized in response.
But there is a precedent. His name is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the voices working for and demanding his dreams -- all of them -- are today as loud as they have been in a generation. Reclaim History! Things that happened on Jan. 16 that you never had to memorize in school: 1893: Hawai'i: Queen Lilluoka'ani's regime is overthrown by U.S. pineapple tycoon Sanford Dole and pro-annexation sugar interests.
With an amazing sense of timing, U.S. troops land, "to protect U.S. interests." With U.S. support, Dole declares himself Hawai'i's president and lobbies for U.S. annexation. It's in the can. In 1898, President William McKinley will sign a joint resolution of Congress authorizing the annexation. 1919: Argentina: End of the "Sanglante" ("Bloody Week") in Buenos Aires.
The general strike begun a week ago was crushed in blood, with as many as 700 dead and 2000 wounded. 1933: Birth of Susan Sontag, American "new intellectual" essayist and novelist. A prominent early intellectual critic of the Vietnam War, her post- Sept. 11 essay in the New Yorker, mildly questioning U.S. government characterizations of the attack, raised a firestorm of criticism and gave the first clear indication of how little tolerance there would be for mainstream dissent against Bush's post-9/11 extremism.
1952: Senator James Eastland (D-MS) introduces resolution to declare a "state of emergency" in the U.S. Allows Congress to invoke a McCarran Internal Security Act provision under which American Communists could be rounded up and incarcerated, also ushers in restrictions on allowing homosexuals into the country. 1968: Founding of the Youth International Party (Y.I.P.), better known as the "Yippies".
1969: Jan Palach immolates himself to protest Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. 1985: Primatologist Dian Fossey killed by poachers, Karisoke Center, Rwanda. 1986: U.S. Energy Department announces 12 potential nuclear waste sites in eastern U.S., including a Penobscot (Native American) site in Maine only re-granted to the tribe six years before, along with four other tribal sites.
1991: U.S. invades Kuwait and Iraq. Several dozen U.S. troops (many victims of friendly fire) and up to 400,000 Iraqi citizens die in the following weeks. At least 1,000,000 Iraqis, mainly young children, have died due to the effects of the following decade-plus of U.S.-led global economic embargo. 1992: El Salvador government and FMLN rebels sign peace accord, formally ending 12 years of civil war.
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