King’s belief in the promise of America

Feb 07, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
In a mere 13 years from December 1, 1955, when the 26-year-old Dr. King rendered assistance to Rosa Parks, an Alabama Black seamstress who refused to surrender her seat to a White passenger on a segregated Montgomery bus, to 1968 when he was assassinated, he roused the conscience of America; by exposing the second-class citizenship of American Blacks in public accommodations, housing, voting rights, schools, and transportation.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. firmly internalised his belief in the promise of America; and that belief remains the bedrock of President Barack Obama’s political career; so much so that today it is harvesting time in America for the multiracial and multiethnic civil rights movement. For on January 20, 2009, America inaugurated its first African American President.
But King and Obama’s belief in the promise of America is now socially reengineering a shift in the paradigms of race relations, civil rights, and electoral politics; we have a new America. And the Obama Presidency is a triumph for all Americans in the interest of racial harmony, for his electoral victory symbolised the dividends of the Black American struggle for social equality for nearly 400 years.
President Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009, represents the zenith of African-American struggle from the beginnings of slavery against the shackles of a colour-conscious society; a society which, until now, cast African Americans as strangers in their own homes.
The struggle encompassed the following, indeed, not an exhaustive list: Slavery as human degradation; the Dred Scott Case in 1857 that questioned the citizenship of Blacks; the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 that abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 that reversed the Dred Scott ruling; the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 that gave the right to vote; the Jim Crow laws that accommodated institutional discrimination; the Plessy v. Ferguson case that institutionalised segregation, advocating for the separate but equal doctrine for Blacks and Whites; Gayle v. Browder that reversed Plessy v. Ferguson; the Brown v. the Board of Education US Supreme Court case in 1954 that brought an end to segregation; the national civil rights movement of the 1960s; and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And indeed, King had a stupendous role in the movement from segregation and discrimination in 1955 through January 20, 2009!
Clinton believed that Dr. King meant what he said: that he could not promote civil rights for Blacks without also combating poverty and the Vietnam War.
And it was in April 1967 at New York’s Riverside Church that King condemned the military strategy in Vietnam. He said: “I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart…I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” It was not the American people but the Reagan and both Bush Administrations that purveyed violence worldwide.
Martin Luther King’s birthday is now a Federal holiday in the U.S.; but it did not come easily. Only four days after King’s assassination in 1968, a Black Congressman John Conyers introduced a Bill in the House of Representatives to make King’s birthday a national holiday. President Reagan first opposed the Bill, but later endorsed it. Its first observance was in 1986. And all 50 States did not come on board until 1992.
President Clinton when Governor introduced the proposal to make King’s birthday a holiday in the State of Arkansas.
And at Mason Temple where King delivered his last sermon, Clinton asked all Americans to honour the life and work of Dr. King.
In 2000, Clinton honoured King for his famous voting rights march in Selma, Alabama in 1965, by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, arm in arm with Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Joe Lowery, Julian Bond, Ethel Kennedy, and Harris Wofford.
The Selma march stirred the conscience of the nation. And five months after the Selma march, President Johnson endorsed the Voting Rights Act into law. Prior to this law, there were 300 Black elected officials and only three African-American Congressmen.
The year 2000 when Clinton walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there were about 9,000 Black elected officials and 39 members in the Congressional Black Caucus.
Clinton acknowledged that Dr. King was correct when he pointed out that when Black Americans “win their struggle to become free, those who have held them down will themselves be free for the first time.”
Clinton noted too that “After Selma, white and black southerners crossed the Bridge to the New South, leaving isolation and hatred behind for new opportunities and prosperity and political influence: Without Selma, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would never have become President of the United States.”
Time’s Jack White argues that while Dr. King exposed and removed the yoke of segregation from Blacks, it is White America that owes King a great debt of gratitude “…for liberating them from the burden of America’s centuries-old hypocrisy about race.
It is only because of King and the movement that he led that the U.S. can claim to be the leader of the ‘free world’ without inviting smirks of disdain and belief.” If the civil rights movement only met failures, argues White, large sections of America would continue to be as apartheid South Africa.
Thanks to Dr. King, America commanded some respect around the world after a number of significant civil rights successes. And the new ultra-right political dispensation, with great assistance from the Reagan and the two Bush Administrations clipped some hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement.
And what we saw throughout the 2008 Presidential campaign was an acknowledgement by millions of Americans that there was a void in the nation; and it was time that Americans genuinely invoke King’s allegiance to nonviolence and his persisting belief in the promise of America.
Obama’s campaign conspicuously epitomized this belief in the promise of America, an America for all Americans.
Prem Misir

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