Rebel's Guide To Martin Luther King , livre ebook

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35 pages

English

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Publié par	Bookmarks
Date de parution	12 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781910885772
Langue	English

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Esme Choonara for cajoling and editing, and to Weyman Bennett, Sally Campbell and Brian Richardson for reading and helpful suggestions.
Also to Simon Basketter for fantastic picture research and
Simon Guy, Lina Nicolli and Mary Phillips for production assistance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yuri Prasad is a soul and jazz fanatic living in east London.

COVER IMAGE: 27 year old Martin Luther King photographed by Alabama cops following his 1956 arrest during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The picture was rediscovered in 2004 by a deputy cleaning out a Montgomery County Sheriff s Department storage room.
INSIDE FRONT: Marchers in Harlem, New York, carrying a banner supporting civil rights protesters facing police violence in Selma, Alabama, 1965.
INSIDE BACK: Striking sanitation workers assembling for a solidarity march in Memphis, 28 March, 1968.
Published by Bookmarks Publications 2018
ISBN print edition: 978-1-910885-75-8
ISBN Kindle: 978-1-910885-76-5
ISBN ePub: 978-1-910885-77-2
ISBN PDF: 978-1-910885-78-9
Printed by Melita Press
Series design by noeldouglas.net
1: INTRODUCTION
T here are few people today who openly criticise Martin Luther King and the struggle for civil rights that he helped lead. Indeed, King s life is celebrated by the establishment, both here and in the US. David Cameron, the former British prime minister who helped inject hatred of migrants into politics, declared in 2015, King remains an inspiration to millions of people Let his dream never die. Even US President Donald Trump agrees, testifying, apparently without any sense of irony, that King was a man I have studied, watched, and admired for my entire life .
Such odious characters praise King today in part because they regard the issues he fought over as settled. Like the plantation slavery from which America derived its early wealth, the system of racial segregation that King opposed is now the stuff of history books, they insist. But King is also regarded as safe because his preaching of Christian forgiveness and the doctrine of non-violence is thought less threatening than the radical rhetoric and strategies that later came to dominate the movement for black liberation. But this caricature of a man, bold in language but meek in action, a liberal rebel, bears little resemblance to reality.
Where in the establishment s vision is the King who stood out against the Vietnam War in the period before that stance was acceptable in the mainstream? Where is the King who pledged to organise a poor people s march on Washington, saying, People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, We are here; we are poor; we don t have any money; you have made us this way...and we ve come to stay until you do something about it . ? What about the King who mounted an ever more devastating critique of the system and talked of revolution, or the King that the government and the FBI labelled the most dangerous Negro in America ? And where is the King that was gunned down at a Memphis motel while supporting refuse workers who were on strike in the city?
The answer is that the radical interpretation of Martin Luther King, especially the King that he came to be in the final years of his life, cannot be absorbed by the system easily, and as such must be rubbed out by reams of platitudes and ceremony-by sainthood. King did not come to the movement a fully-formed leader ready for action, in fact, in his early years in Montgomery he didn t even see himself as a leader at all. His experiences in the struggle helped develop his ideas and caused him to question and change his views on many subjects, not least on the economic and social system.
The establishment today takes for granted that the Jim Crow racial segregation that King opposed in the 1950s and 1960s was an aberration, something alien to modern capitalism. Certainly the laws which prevented inter-racial mixing, the crude signs demarking coloured and white areas, and the days of relentlessly regular lynching of black people are indeed gone-but the racism that King fought remains.
Today unarmed black men are seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire, African-American women earn less than 64 percent of the pay of white men, and there are more than a million African-Americans in prison, with black men being jailed at six times the rate of white men. This has been the context for the spectacular rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The problem of racism and oppression is far from restricted to the US. It is a global problem facing billions of people, a problem that appears to thrive in the countries that first gave it life-the former colonial masters that have never accepted the loss of their empires.
Looking back at the early civil rights struggles, King admitted that he had conceived of the fight as being for reform of the system. He thought that, faced with the realities of black rebellion and racist resistance in the South, Washington could be persuaded to act to outlaw segregation, enshrine voting rights and create the conditions in which a true brotherhood could grow. His was, at that time, a patriotic vision-an endorsement of the American Dream even. But towards the end of his time, with the White House liberals silent as one black ghetto after another exploded in rage, it became clear to him that the oppression of black people in the US was hard-wired into the system. That realisation had major implications. If capitalism breeds what King believed to be the nightmare of racism, poverty, militarism and materialism , what kind of system, and what kind of movement, are needed to replace it?
The answers were not entirely clear to King at the time of his assassination on 4 April, 1968, but the questions would continue to be central to the movement against racism that continued after his death. Indeed, they are the most important questions for everyone fighting racism today.
2. FROM BOYCOTTS TO SIT-INS
I n the wake of the Second World War millions of colonial subjects in Africa and Asia renewed their fight for freedom and were soon rewarded with a
flood of victories. But black soldiers from the American Deep South returned from war not as conquering heroes who had beaten the menace of fascism, but as the second class citizens they were when they left. The democracy they fought for in Europe was denied to them at home. The laws and customs that segregated Southern society and enshrined white rule were largely intact. The land that was once tilled by black slaves was still tended by the black poor. Jim Crow was made up of state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the former Confederate states of the US Civil War. They mandated that all public facilities be divided for blacks and whites, with black people invariably receiving worse treatment and limited services. Schools, colleges, and many workplaces across the South were subject to Jim Crow. Officially sanctioned segregation in the armed forces didn t end until 1948.
Yet beneath the surface there were changes, and soon they would coalesce into the beginnings of a movement. As the demand for factory labour grew in the war years and during the post-war boom, many black families abandoned farming and sharecropping and headed to the cities, mainly in the North. Away from the plantations, in the factories and workshops, many found not only a collective voice but also a new anger. Here it wasn t the law that stopped them eating in a restaurant; it was lack of money.
The black middle classes also grew, chaffing at the restrictions placed upon them because of their colour. Why, given their status and wealth, were they denied the respect that they were entitled to, they asked. The two trends taken together gave rise to what some termed the New Negro . Their growing frustration was behind a series of legal challenges by black organisations in the mid-1950s which ultimately led the Supreme Court to overrule the Southern states and declare racially segregated education illegal. Many now asked, if racism could be outlawed in education, could the same method be applied across the board?
But the Southern establishment was not going to give in without a fight. It declared that it would put up Massive Resistance , both legal and illegal, to the federal instructions. The pace of change, despite a string of legal victories, was agonisingly slow. If segregation were to be overturned there would have to be action not only in the courtroom but on the streets. The changing class character of black people fed into a new spirit, meaning such action was not far off.
In December 1955 the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger sparked a year-long boycott that began the Civil Rights Movement in earnest. Parks is often presented as a simple seamstress, tired and frustrated-someone who acted spontaneously, rather than out of commitment. In fact, she was a long-standing activist who had spent time in the company of Communists during the 1930s and more recently with left radicals at the Highlander Folk School. She said of herself, I had almost a life history of being rebellious about being mistreated because of my colour. (Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement , Indiana University Press, 1987, p132)
Jo Ann Robinson of the Montgomery Women s Political Council immediately took up Park s case, overnight producing 52,500 leaflets calling for a bus boycott, and spreading the word through Montgomery s churches.
But it was a 26 year old, newly-arrived, preacher called Martin Luther King who shot to prominence as the leader of the 40,000-strong movement. The Atlanta-born reverend was only recently out of college where he had studied divinity and was now the pastor of the city s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.