The End is Not in Sight Yet

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editorial, Jr., March on Washington, Martin Luther King

It has been a momentous week in Washington. That’s saying something, given the gridlock that is the norm there.

If you are not old enough to remember the March on Washington in 1963, well, there was plenty of history to learn from last weekend onward. I was thirteen at the time, so I was aware, though surely not the way I am now.

PBS did a great job, giving us the “music of the March” followed by a great little history lesson of the organization and the organizers, followed by an informative look at Whitney Young, one of the major players who was neglected by the later power players as a “tom”, although nothing could be further from the truth.

Wednesday of course offered us the original speech and those of many others, along with the President’s.

One should not avoid the other “issues” of the March. Women, many of whom had significant jobs in the March organization, were shoved to the back, kept off podiums, and marginalized. (There is probably a whole psychology that could be explored here.) Bayard Ruskin was a major organizer of the march, yet he was completely marginalized given his avowed Communist beliefs and his open homosexuality.

Yet, given that, it was a monumental undertaking and a phenomenal success. It turned the tide of public opinion, and put politicians in a box from which they could not escape. They tried to, to be sure, but after the Kennedy assassination, it was like a deck of cards had collapsed, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 65, followed quickly.

I wonder how our Republican brothers and sisters viewed the events of the past week. It is unquestioned that they have done all they can to co-opt Martin Luther King, Jr. as their own, calling him a Republican, and announcing or rather pontificating that he would be opposed to much “liberal” legislation.

If I hear, “I believe like MLK did, that you shouldn’t judge a person by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” one more time,  I shall vomit. This is always in connection to some anti-African-American statement. Whether it be to vilify another Black actor for “playing the race card” (speaking up for justice for Blacks in whatever venue it is absent), or vilifying anyone who dares defend the “unfair” practice of affirmative action, a quick reference to MLK seems sufficient to establish one’s bona fides as a “non-racist.”

Of course their take on Dr. King is anything but correct. There is no evidence that King was a Republican, and his words suggest that he was a member of neither party. He considered the 1964 Republican platform to be racist, and actively campaigned against Goldwater. He thought little of Ronald Reagan.

What the uber Right refuses to remember is that King was murdered while in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers. These workers were union men. King spoke out again and again against the economic inequalities that existed and favored redistribution of wealth. He was no fan of capitalism as it existed denying workers reasonable compensation for their work.

At least two of his closest aides had ties to the Communist party. One was an avowed gay man. These are not the signs of a TEA Party wannabe surely. People like Alan Keyes, Allen West, Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas would not have been in his camp, now would he have remained silent to their kowtowing to the white conservative element.

The usual lies about this week were rolled out by the usual players. Billo the Clown O’Reilly blatantly said that Republicans were denied a part in the festivities. This was not even remotely true. Both Bushes were invited, as were Boehner and Cantor. All declined for various reasons.

Such is to be expected of Fox of course, which routinely spouts lies, knowing that a minority of Americans watch them to the exclusion of all else, and will continue in their neighborhoods and blogs, and Facebook walls, to convey the lie to even more unknowing, unthinking individuals. With that Fox’s job is done–the lie will become “truth” to a minority of ignorant-loving TeaBirchers.

Meanwhile, nothing much changes. Fox and other crazy sites will continue to pretend that the Australian athlete who was gunned down, was killed by a couple of “black kids” when in fact there were three, and one was white. They will continue to bellow “why has the President not expressed his outrage?” when of course the two situations (this and the Trayvon Martin case) are in no way linked. Police in Oklahoma have stated again and again that race played no part in the shooting.

But something has indeed changed. John Lewis reminds us that voting rights continue to be a challenge, given that Republican-held state legislatures across the land pass law after law that limits the right to vote–of only those who typically vote Democratic. They are quite blatant in their explanations. There is no racial motivation they proclaim, but only political motives! They thumb their noses at us, claiming that they “have every right to make it hard for their opponents to vote”. Nothing illegal in that.

If voting is our most precious right, then people of color, seniors, students, and all those who threaten to power base of the modern Republican party, will rally to the cause. We will not stand still for this. And the modern NAACP and other battle-savvy warriors in the equality battle will lead us. They are rejuvenated by the behavior of the white power players. As Colin Powell said, this plan will surely backfire on the party. We mean to see that it does.

Dr. King would be proud of not where we are today, for we have much yet to do, but he would be proud of our determination to “let freedom ring”. We will get to the mountain top Dr. King, we will.

The Legacy of Race

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Jr., Martin Luther King, Obama, racism

It is a stunning bit of serendipity that the President’s second Inaugural falls on this day we celebrate as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It gives me pause to reflect upon the legacy of Dr. King, and how far we have traveled, and how far, sadly we still have to go.

Because our President is African-American, it is almost inevitable that the rabid minority who detest him with a fervor that reaches to at or near real hatred, are quick to point out (almost always unasked of course) that they are not racists. But they also go further, attempting in some drug-induced phantasmagoria to capture Dr. King as their own. They quote with self-satisfaction two facts: one, that Dr. King was after all, one of them, a Republican, and second they quote from his “I Have a Dream” speech, that they “judge a person by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.”

To them, this settles the question. If anyone pursues the issue further, they are “race baiting” or “playing the race card”, trying to blame their circumstances not on their own limitations, but rather on a non-existent barrier that prevents them from reaching their goal.

Race still matters in America. No matter how politically correct we are, or how politically correct we witness others being, the ugly face of racism seethes just below the surface. My own father, a man as racist as any could be, became politically correct, dropping the “N” word from his speech, but he could snarl out the word “black” with the same venomous disgust as the other word. There was no mistaking his true views.

History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals. (MLK Letter from Birmingham Jail)

Race matters when those on the extreme Right refuse to legitimize the present office holder of the Presidency. Race matters when posters are painted of the Commander-in-Chief as a African Voodoo artist. Race matters when the emphasis is placed on Mr. Obama’s middle name. Race matters when the only African-Americans deemed acceptable are those who uphold the views of the Right that “everyone” now has an equal chance. Race matters when the majority of black Americans are “victims” of the Plantation Democrats, unable apparently to think for themselves, but need the Right to explain to them that “handouts” aren’t real progress.

When Planned Parenthood is attacked as a genocide upon the black race, rather than what it is, an organization that provides the only health care available to millions of women of color and otherwise, race matters.

Race matters when undocumented workers who pay taxes, and work for low wages doing the jobs that most white folks won’t do, raising their families to be hardworking, and law-abiding citizens, are called “Illegals”. When we seek to strip citizenship from their children because they are “anchor babies”, racism is dripping from our lips.

Race matters when our sisters living within the reservations still can be assaulted by non-Native men and get no justice.

Race matters in this country and we refuse to see it and deny it at our peril. For racial hatred is deadly, it eats at the fabric of society and destroys it from within. It keeps us from embracing each other with full acceptance, but mires us in the mud of distrust and suspicion.

We are not a society that is free of racism, any more than we are free of sexism, any more than we are free of our own versions of what is moral and what is not. We are not tolerant about many things, and there are those who say that to be tolerant is  to be accepting of that which we know to be wrong merely to get along. That is not true. To be tolerant is to recognize that we, each of us, do not have a corner on morality. Our version is not THE version necessarily. Being tolerant is being open to the possibility that there are other ways, ways better than ours. For the religious, it means we are open to the work of the Spirit to enlarge our world and to our understanding of Right.

Martin Luther King Jr., was not a Republican because he believed in the tenets of the Republican party, surely not as it exists today. He is not yours, Tea party adherents. He was a Republican because that was his only choice given the Dixiecrat Democrats, who were thoroughly opposed to civil rights for black people.

Martin Luther King Jr., was not in favor of simply having an even playing field, which you Tea party adherents claim. Such doesn’t exist in the first place. And secondly Dr. King spoke often about the inequality of wealth in this country and its dangers. In fact he wondered whether capitalism was a viable economic model if it resulted in such inequality and poverty at the bottom of the pyramid of society.

Martin Luther King Jr., died while engaged in support of sanitation workers in Memphis. He supported unions and knew that they were the only viable means of securing fair wages and safe working conditions for all workers.

Look within yourselves. We must each look within ourselves. Racism is insidious. Find it. Eradicate it.

   

 

 

‘nuf said?

Who Announces the Good News?

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Billy Graham, Good News, Gospel, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King

I can’t say that over my life time that I’ve spent much time thinking about Billy Graham. His brand of tent revival evangelizing is not my cup of tea frankly. His  “crusades” were often televised, but we certainly didn’t watch them.

Basically, my impression was of a kind of “pastor” to the presidents, a person with a good heart, and one who was committed to bringing his version of Jesus to the masses. He seemed scandal free.

I’ve, in the last few years, had reason to amend and revise my opinion. His publicized bigotry toward Jews was certainly shocking and unsettling. This from the man who had advised twelve presidents and was always in the top ten of “most admired” Americans.

Last night we watched the last of a three-part series on PBS called “God in America“. It focused on the post WWII time to the present. It focused on the rise of Billy Graham in the first hour. I learned a lot.

Graham owed his rise nationally to William Randolph Hearst. Graham was “crusading” in Los Angeles, and giving his usual “atheistic communist” speech wherein Americans were called to combat the red scare by turning their hearts over to Jesus Christ. Hearst was a rabid anti-communist and went out of his way to feature Graham in his newspaper. From there, Graham took off like a rocket.

But there was a dark side. Graham apparently couldn’t reconcile himself to a Roman Catholic in the White House. He sent JFK a lovely conciliatory letter during the campaign, and then promptly went off to Switzerland where he met with others on how to stop Kennedy from winning the Presidency.

Part of this may have been his great fondness for Nixon. And from those meetings with Nixon come the rather infamous tapes in which Graham clearly refers to Jews in a negative fashion. He claimed they held a “stranglehold” on the media and referred to the “synagogue of Satan.” When these surfaced, Graham claimed not to have recalled using these words and protested that he was not bigoted in any fashion.

A possible reason for his animosity toward Jews may have come from the “prayer in school” issue. It was a group of New York Jewish parents who sued to remove a “generic” prayer from the school their children attended. When it reached the Supreme Court of the land, such prayer was banned throughout the US.

Although he publicly condemned segregation, he privately wrote to Martin Luther King telling him that it would be best to “slow things down a bit.” He rather consistently opposed civil disobedience, although he counseled accepting the laws once passed. He couldn’t see human affairs improving in a real way until Jesus returned to earth. His vision was small. And oddly he never saw it seems, civil rights as a natural cause that Jesus would have embraced.

I guess what I come around to on Graham is that he had very strong beliefs about what he thought was right, and like most fundamentalists, sometimes the means are not so important as long as the ends seem correct. This kind of attitude seems to have filtered through to Franklin his son, who sees nothing unChristian in his vilification of Islam as an evil religion.

Graham was not without his white Protestant standards it seems.

On the contrary, Martin Luther King’s greatness seems to grow the more I learn about him. His stature as a true prophet and preacher of the Good News astounds one with each new revelation.

This man, at great personal threat to himself, refused to back down, and refused to strike back, returning evil for evil. When his home was bombed, a crowd of sympathizers appears with guns to seek vengeance. He sent them home, after tempering their anger.

He of course was jailed for his marching,and some of his most famous words come from that time in the Montgomery jail. He correctly, I believe, situated civil rights in the ministry of Jesus Christ. He saw, as do most African-Americans, segregation as the American Egypt, and the civil rights act as the equivalency of the parting of the Red Sea and the escape from captivity.

He read Gandhi and, saw his model of pass resistance and peaceful civil disobedience as perfect models for how Jesus conducted his ministry and life. He embraced it as the only way. He was mindful of the same arguments advanced by Henry David Thoreau.

Johnson, took up the cause as the new President, following Kennedy’s assassination. And he counseled King, after its passage, to slow down. But King would not. As much as he must have been grateful to Johnson, he was more dedicated to the Gospel. He pushed Johnson to submit a voting rights bill.

And then he turned to areas of general poverty. And then he turned to oppose the Vietnam war, something that certainly put him at odds with Johnson. Yet, he remained true to the Gospel, supremely focused on “putting on the mind of Christ.”

When I view these two men, I can see quite clearly who really announced the Good News. What do you think?

Related Articles

• How the cold war reshaped Protestantism in America (economist.com)
• Martin Luther King (time.com)
• Marilyn Mellowes: ‘God in America:’ Faith and Politics (huffingtonpost.com)
• “Graham: Obama born a Muslim, now a Christian” and related posts (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• 4 reviews of Billy Graham (Christian fundamentalist to borderline relativist) (rateitall.com)