August 28, 2010

“This is our day, and we ain’t giving it away,” Rev. Al Sharpton declared Saturday at a rally and march that his National Action Network sponsored in Washington. Also prominent were leaders of the NAACP, the National Urban League, labor unions, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Council of Negro Women, Martin Luther King III and many of the usual allies on these occasions.

I heard no oratory that came even close to that heard at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963 – 47 years ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., dissatisfied with the reception to his prepared speech, riffed the “I Have a Dream” portion for which he and the day are known.

Not far from Sharpton’s rally at the nation’s oldest public high school, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, or where the marchers ended up, at the site of the proposed King Memorial, the conservative, Tea Party, TV and radio huckster, Glen Beck, was making a fool of himself and, as I saw it, of the thousands who came to join him at the Lincoln Memorial to “restore” America. What they heard – if they listened – was a lot of hot air about God and love. As if his and Sarah Palin’s Christian followers (yes, she was a keynote speaker and, yes, they specifically made this a Christian event rather than an interfaith one) have a monopoly on that. Theirs was essentially an evangelical revival meeting without the communion sacrament and the passing of the collection baskets. “America today begins to turn back to God,” Beck declared. “God is not done with you yet, and He’s not done with man’s freedom yet.” In many ways his rambling, unfocused “sermon” at what also was clearly a politically-motivated power play, reminded me of Louis Farrakhan’s during the Million Man March – but Farrakhan did pass the collection baskets.

Before an overwhelmingly white gathering, blacks were featured as singers and prayer deliverers and – shamelessly – a niece of Dr. King gave her own “I have a Dream” speech, mixing her uncle’s cadences and various scriptural references. Alveda King, whom some apparently thought was King’s daughter, said: “I have a dream that one day soon God’s agape love will transcend skin color and economic status and cause us to turn from moral turpitude. I have a dream that America will repent of the sin of racism and return to honor. I have a dream that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God. I have a dream that America will pray and God will forgive us our sins and revive us our land. On that day we will all be able to lift every voice and sing of the love and honor that God desires for all his children.”

At his rally, Sharpton said of Beck’s gathering: “They may have the Mall, but we’ve got the message. They may have the platform, but we have the dream.” Actually Alveda King’s dream seems to differ mainly with that of Sharpton and others of the traditional civil rights coalition on abortion rights, gay marriage and prayer in schools. She’s against the first two; for the last.

While the Beckians were talking of taking back America, Tamika Mallory, the executive director of the National Action Network, was urging her audience to “take back our communities one by one.”

“We must not wait for others to do for us what we can absolutely do for ourselves,” she said. Tea Party supporters would not disagree with that.

In his last book, Dr. King asked: “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?” August 28, 2010, seems to answer: both. One group was “Restoring Honor”; the other’s aim was to “Reclaim the Dream.” Both groups were motivated to get off their butts and do something. But obviously, with leaders whose motives and messages can be questioned by people from all political spectrums, there is a great desire to build “community” – whether around God or a Tea Party movement or what’s left of the old civil rights coalition – but getting there without recognition of that fact is chaotic and probably doomed to failure.

Dorothy Height

Fox News chose not to cover the homegoing services for Dr. Height, even though -- or maybe because -- President Obama was one of the eulogists.

But this is what he said, and we should not forget Dr. Height, the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a pioneer in so many areas during her 98 years on this earth. She helped integrate the YWCA in Harlem in the 1930s. That's when two of my great aunts were involved in the YWCA, so I'd like to think they were involved with her efforts. She was the lone woman at the table when the big men of the Civil Rights Movement were organizing the March on Washington in 1963 and when major legislation -- public accomodations, voting rights, etcetera -- became the laws of the land.

"Look at her body of work," the President said. "Desegregating the YWCA. Laying the groundwork for integration on Wednesdays in Mississippi. Lending pigs to poor farmers as a sustainable source of income. Strategizing with civil rights leaders, holding her own, the only woman in the room, Queen Esther to this Moses Generation -- even as she led the National Council of Negro Women with vision and energy, vision and class.

"But we remember her not solely for all she did during the civil rights movement. We remember her for all she did over a lifetime, behind the scenes, to broaden the movement’s reach. To shine a light on stable families and tight-knit communities. To make us see the drive for civil rights and women’s rights not as a separate struggle, but as part of a larger movement to secure the rights of all humanity, regardless of gender, regardless of race, regardless of ethnicity.

"It’s an unambiguous record of righteous work, worthy of remembrance, worthy of recognition. And yet, one of the ironies is, is that year after year, decade in, decade out, Dr. Height went about her work quietly, without fanfare, without self-promotion. She never cared about who got the credit. She didn’t need to see her picture in the papers. She understood that the movement gathered strength from the bottom up, those unheralded men and women who don't always make it into the history books but who steadily insisted on their dignity, on their manhood and womanhood. She wasn’t interested in credit. What she cared about was the cause. The cause of justice. The cause of equality. The cause of opportunity. Freedom’s cause.

Civil Rights: The Changing of the Generations

At the recently concluded National Action Network convention in New York City, hosted by Rev. Al Sharpton, two things were evident in the context of present civil rights leadership. First: Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson are increasingly moving into the elders status. Second: The heads of both the NAACP (Ben Jealous) and the National Urban League (Marc Morial) are younger, more vibrant. But those two don’t yet have meaningful measurable track records.

What really hit home is that many of the civil rights legends from the MLK days, and even before, are at the end of days. Benjamin Hooks, longtime leader of the NAACP, a preacher, a lawyer and the first black to serve on the Federal Communication Commission – died last week at the age of 85. When I saw him a couple of years ago in Memphis at the commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of MLK’s death, he was very frail. Dorothy Height, the chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, is very ill. She is 98 years old. And, according to Sharpton, Rev. Joseph Lowery sounds very weak though in a conversation he tried to assure Sharpton that he was OK. Lowery was an MLK contemporary and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with him. Lowery eventually became president of the SCLC. And last year he delivered the benediction at President Obama’s inauguration, beseeching the Lord “to help us work for that day when black won’t be asked to get back; when brown can stick around; when yellow will be mellow; when the red man can get ahead, man; when white will embrace what is right…”

Maybe because they don’t see such rather expensive gatherings as priorities or maybe because they have other outlets for mobilizing around social justice issues, there were not lots of young people present at the convention. Interestingly enough, it was 50 years ago that young people founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which gave us, among others, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Julian Bond, who recently stepped down as chair of the NAACP.

ADDENDUM: Dorothy Height died Tuesday morning, April 20, at the age of 98.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I think the Kennedys have it right. Rather than dwelling on the anniversaries of assassinations, they mark the birthdates of JFK and RFK with family rituals.

Having said that, I will share with you here some of the remarks I made at the 2004 birthdate observation of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The place was The Central Synagogue in midtown Manhattan, New York City. The hosts were Jews and blackfolks.

“When he was 18 years old, in 1947, he became his father’s assistant at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was ordained Feb. 25, 1948, a few weeks after he turned 19 and a few months before he graduated from Morehouse College.

“Fifty years ago, when King was 25, the civil rights revolution began in earnest when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that separate was not equal in the nation’s public school system and declared segregation unconstitutional. We as a nation are still grappling with the import of that decision. Even when I went to the ‘white’ high school, months after King’s death, my hometown was just getting around to implementing the Supreme Court’s decision of so long before to integrate ‘with all deliberate speed.’

“1954 was not only momentous because of the Brown decision, but that is also the year when MLK became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama – 25 years old! 14 months later he was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was leading the bus boycott that began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus. For the remainder of his life he was blessed and burdened by a role that, by Aug. 28, 1963, had made him as A. Phillip Randolph said in introducing him to an audience of hundreds of thousands in Washington, ‘the moral leader of our nation'….

“I come today not to presume what a living 75-year-old MLK would be doing other than going to church and enjoying birthday cake with his family. But I come to encourage all of us – myself included – to do as King did in his short life, which saw landmark litigation, marches, sit-ins, pray-ins, wade-ins, freedom rides, anti-war demonstrations.

“To me, it’s irrelevant whether King was a saint or not. He was a doer. When called upon to work to change what was wrong with the world, beginning in Montgomery, he took on the job, despite the sacrifices that entailed….

“Around Easter we Christians often sing, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ Of course, we were not. That was thousands of years ago. But we can update that question to ask not just where we were during various stages in the struggles for justice and peace, but where we are and where we will be.”