MLK: Where do we go from here?

Martin Luther King Jr.’s holiday just passed. During this time we celebrate “The King years”. Of course we’re proud when we hear the “I have a dream” speech and teary-eyed when King announces “he’s been to the mountain top”, but there’s one speech in between those two that’s just as intriguing.

The term “The King Years” is actually the subtitle of historian Taylor Branch’s trilogy on the civil rights movement. King’s career, as a civil rights leader, began in 1955 during the Montgomery Bus Boycott when he was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

But what’s significant about the date 1955?

It was one year after the Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v Board of Education. Now, King was born in 1929 in segregated Georgia. As a child King hoped for desegregation, but thought it would never occur in his lifetime. King’s generation grew up during the depression and World War II. They sensed America was too preoccupied with world affairs to be concerned with its own democratic inconsistencies.

But history finally favored them in the 1954 Brown decision.

Today, we view King as a larger than life figure that transformed society, but we overlook the fact that King, who was 25 in 1954, and his generation was transformed by the landmark historical event of their time, because the Brown decision was a parting of the waters. (The title of Branch’s first book)

Unlike their predecessors, King’s generation had a precedent established by the Supreme Court to desegregate and dismantle all other forms of discrimination. This eventually led to the historic March on Washington, where King delivered his famous Dream speech, and to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In a turbulent decade King’s generation completed the task started by the Brown Decision. But their celebration was brief. They realized that civil rights legislation, as difficult as it was to get passed, was actually the easy part. America wasn’t going to change overnight.

 

At this point a growing impatience among the rank and file led to dissension. There was a rejection of non-violence, a new demand for “black power”, and riots broke out in the cities. And to make matters worse, the White House promised a war on poverty, but the only war waged by the White house was in Vietnam.

The King generation reached a mid-movement crisis. They had to redefine their purpose. This is when King’s youth caught up to him. Internally King probably grappled with the question: What do we do now? And once King worked it out in his mind, he gave a speech in 1967 called: Where do we go from here?

King began by citing statistics to show the state of black America in 1967. The disparities King emphasized are similar to the disparities black activist denounce today. King’s prescription for poverty was a guaranteed annual income. (Now-a-days it’s referred to as universal basic income. It has support on the left and right.) Then King spoke about psychological freedom. King made it clear black Americans had to be able to admit, “Yes, I was a slave through my fore parents and I am not ashamed of that.” Then King discussed power. King said blacks have been “stripped of the right to make decisions concerning their lives and destiny … subject to the authoritarian rule and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure … Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose.”

But what if the biggest problem today is a poverty of purpose?

Now, repeat King’s last question: Where do we go from here?

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 1/17/18