#116

CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER GALVANIZED GHETTOIZED AMERICAN BLACKS

By Peter Thomas Busch

J

ustice seems to drop down like raindrops from the clouds above Washington as a ubiquitous concept that produces different results for different people.

The cause for justice had been apparent for nearly a century, though.

Little black boys and little black girls still running barefoot through the streets of the inner city ghettos needed hope.

The method was evident to everyone.

The resilient power of the word and the solidarity of non-violent freedom marches raised the consciousness of blacks for too long living in despair.

The black Christian pastor from Atlanta had been rallying his followers almost everyday to raise the poor blacks out of the systemic economic depravation caused by segregation and move them toward the recurring ring of equality chiming throughout America for everyone else.

Blacks had voter rights with greater freedom in a less segregationist society, but erasing poverty that had formed around the racial injustice would take a bit longer.

Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, began in earnest the campaign for the 40 million black Americans living in poverty by moving to live with the people in one of the northern ghettos, in Chicago in 1966.

The Chicago Freedom Movement drew 30,000 people to Soldier Field to hear King speak about the other way forward standing up to violence before marching to City Hall on July 10, 1966.

In the backstory, blacks had migrated from the non-redemptive work of slaves on the plantations in the south, following emancipation, only to find economic deprivation in segregated inner city housing projects of the north, with no jobs and no future.

Those blacks who did find a way of life with work in the northern factories were now confronted with the possibility of being displaced by the mechanization of assembly lines.

King and the Black Freedom Movement had already been successful in ending segregation in the public service system with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the defiance of black passengers like Rosa Parks.

The United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, after over 250,000 Americans, including six major competing civil rights groups, participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.

King’s message of non-violent civil disobedience was recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in 1964.

That little black child was still so poor, though.

Economic and racial injustice prevailed in America despite the promise of equality reiterated by the passage of legislation. Medgar Evers broke the color barrier at the University of Mississippi. But many blacks were unable to afford the price of admission.

And the inner cities remained tinder boxes because blacks, young and old, could not reconcile the promise of equality with the unequal effect of that decidedly American promise.

Not everything else went according to plan, either. The inner cities burned in clusters across 30 major cities.

The groups marshalling for peaceful disobedience competed with black militant groups espousing violence as a quicker means to justice, while the Neo-Nazis and KKK white supremacists often infiltrated the marches to cause unrest, and the police often incited violence with their brutal treatment of blacks.

This black man was dragged from his taxicab and beaten. So this city burned. That black man was gunned down in front of his family. So that city burned. Those black men were lynched. So those cities burned.

The 14 year old black boy, Emmett Till, was dragged from his home and hung for allegedly looking at a white woman the wrong way inside a grocery store in Mississippi.

Issues of inequality became all the more complicated with the government conscripting poor blacks into the war against Communism.

Young black men from the poor northern ghettos were sent to the jungles of Vietnam only to be returned to America deconstructed or otherwise in body bags. United States President Lyndon B Johnson had sent 500,000 American troops to Vietnam from 1963 to 1967.

King surmised that the war money could have better been spent at home on social reconstruction. But the teachings of the gospel underscored something far more unjust, the clear manipulation of blacks evident in their death in the jungle for Vietnamese civil liberties when the blacks dying in Vietnam had not enjoyed those very same civil liberties in Southwest Georgia, East Harlem, Detroit and Cincinnati.

King, with the good conscience taught to him by the Christian gospel, had become so beguiled by the injustice of having young black men die across the ocean for racist white power in America that he began to speak out against the war despite the political whirlwind that inevitably resulted from such an opposition.

In a speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 4, 1967, King called the war a cruel manipulation of the poor with black American soldiers fighting beside white American soldiers when they would not live together in the same neighbourhood in Chicago.

The content of the message had always been about the lack of black jobs and the systemic racial inequality of a segregated society, but now the southern Baptist preacher directly challenged the white power establishment that amassed power through war.

The recruitment of blacks to fight in the Vietnam War created what King called a triplet of American injustice that involved racism, extreme materialism and militarism.

King would join 200,000 people assembled for an antiwar rally in New York City on April 5, 1967.

The White Hippie Movement turned the Summer of 1967 into the Summer of Love with a dope fueled rebellion against the conservative middle class values of their parents.

But while the hippies celebrated, black American families continued to disintegrate, having been locked out of the higher paying jobs in many cities, and left with the lower paying service jobs that all too often provided insufficient means to raise a family.

On November 22, 1963, United States President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The sudden act of violence seen in the public and messaged to black families and white families through their television sets in living rooms around America became a flash point for the recurring ghetto riots that would begin in Harlem New York the following summer, and that would continue to cycle through in clusters across the nation every summer until 1969.

Race riots erupted in thirty cities, with 159 riots in total by the end of the ‘Long Hot Summer of 1967’, including a riot that lasted for six days in Detroit after city police beat a black cab driver on July 23, 1967.

America had 40 million poor, many of whom were persecuted by a segregationist mentality that kept them from fair wage jobs but that also made them eligible to be sent off to die in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia.

During March of 1968, King had been in Memphis to support black union labour who were so ill treated by their employer that they could not afford food for their family despite working full-time for the city.

On March 31, 1968, King delivered a speech at the Washington National Cathedral telling the overflow crowd of the mobilization of the poor he had been organizing for Washington DC that coming summer.

King described to the congregation how he had seen firsthand hundreds of poor little black boys and poor little black girls running in the streets so poor they could not afford to wear shoes on their feet.

In early April, everyone was there again in Memphis to participate in another strike march through the deeply segregated town of rich whites and poor blacks on April 8.

Authorities were in a tither though after a march in Memphis in support of black labour turned into a riot on March 28. The violent factions of the black protest movement showed up in Memphis again in April, even staying at the same motel as Martin Luther King Jr.

The fight for economic justice was always part of the freedom campaign, with the success of one part, such as voter rights and the desegregation of public services, making success in the other part more likely.

But then, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 pm EST, while on his way to dinner with his closest advisors, Dr Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was freed from his earthly bonds by the Good Lord Almighty.

One moment the Great Soul was there. Nary the very same moment the Great Soul was gone.

Martin Luther King Jr would become the personification of the black struggle toward the promise of equality in America, with his eloquent insightfulness still resonating with each new generation of like minded black humanists and white humanists from around the world – the content of his message of peace still being necessary going on now some 57 years.

King’s Dream, by Eric J. Sundquist, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009.

Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours, by Joseph Rosenbloom, Boston, Beacon Press, 2018.

To The Promise Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, by Michael K. Honey, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.