So many people are traumatized by the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Not a day goes by that we aren’t reminded of his unfitness for the office.
Racist. Sexist. Xenophobe. Demagogue. Liar. Hypocrite. Oligarch. Trump’s presidency represents a coup d’état by the same folks who brought us the flight of jobs to the maquiladoras in the 80s for which workers’ and their unions’ demands for fair wages were blamed. The same folks who brought us NAFTA, which increased capital’s mobility but not labour’s, the sub-prime lending fiasco, America’s mass incarceration crisis. Trump and his cronies would have us believe that “a giant iceberg with an area equivalent to Trinidad and Tobago” which “is poised to break off from the Antarctic shelf,” according to UK scientists, is a mirage.
The scrutinizing of who will and will not perform at Trump’s inauguration on Friday, January 20, has become a litmus test to distinguish between those who are decent and those who are not.
Many opposed to Trump in the U.S. are determined that there will be no “new normal” created by this presidency. Important protests are being planned for the days around the inauguration. That is laudable, and it’s a marvellous turn in these political times that Martin Luther King Day on January 16 – observing the birth of the man who possessed the ultimate moral authority in post-World War II North America – almost coincides with the swearing in of Trump.
I was traumatized by the assassination of Dr. King on April 4, 1968. It shook me more than the separation of my parents some years earlier. It was more traumatic than when I first saw my birth certificate at the age of 16 (I needed it to apply for my driver’s licence) and found the word “colored” in the space for race.
By the time of King’s death, I was a second-semester freshman at Howard University, transitioning from a solid yet smothering Southern Baptist upbringing to absorbing the lessons of the lives of Frederick Douglass and A. Philip Randolph, of W.E.B. Du Bois and the thinking of the extremely militant older Brothers-Off-the-Block, some of whom had already been to Vietnam. The group convened at the New School of Afro-American Thought at the 14th and U Streets hub of Black socio-cultural life in Washington, DC. In a predominantly African-American city, they riffed off the rising tide of the African anti-colonial movement. They called DC the Crown Colony. None of that stuff was on the curriculum of any school I attended.
Still, it’s fair to say that in that spring of 1968 I didn’t believe in anything – not religion, not any coherent ideology and certainly not patriotism. But I did believe in King. He was more than a mere mortal. He was the sunshine of brilliant truth that you just knew would always rise in the east and set in the west.
He did not shine only because of his advocacy of turn-the-other-cheek activism. His affirmation of the power of love over hate was a powerful motivating force that spurred rival African-American street gangs to consider that they were really brothers and allies in a struggle for self-determination, among them the street-gang-turned-political-organization the Invaders, and an older group called the Deacons for Defense and Justice. The latter, many of whom were World War II veterans, had organized in a few of the worst Southern states to protect civil rights activists and leaders from harm.
I witnessed MLK’s effect first-hand, having known or spoken with the leaders or members of David Barksdale’s Black Disciples, Jeff Fort’s Black P-Stone Nation, Cha-Cha Jimenez’s Young Lords and Fred Hampton’s Black Panther Party – not to mention my own work with a Chicago group called Umoja, all of which came together to form the original Rainbow Coalition, a group that predates Jesse Jackson’s.
As professor Jakobi E. Williams wrote after the Democratic Convention protests and demonstrations in Chicago in 1968, the original Rainbow Coalition “embodied the intersectionality of the critical issues of race, class, gender, anti-war, student, labor and sexuality. It fused these various forms of identity politics into one group with one ideal form of identity – an identity that transcends differences and focuses on commonalities.”
The coalition provides a useful point of study going forward as the masses confront the Trump oligarchy. King, too.
When President Obama speaks, I hear strains of both King the preacher and Malcolm X the teacher. Robert Draper, in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do, has chronicled the Republican conspiracy in Congress that obstructed Obama from the moment he was elected. And it cannot be forgotten that members of his own party – at a rare moment in Democratic history when for the first two years of Obama’s presidency the Democrats controlled not only the executive branch, but both houses of Congress – obstructed him. The U.S. is arguably more racially divided than it has ever been. There were 750 murders in Chicago last year. As a New York Times headline suggested last month, “Violence Has Become Normalized” in the U.S.
What would MLK say?
Most are all too familiar with the I Have a Dream speech. But a far more important speech was the one he delivered a year to the day before he was assassinated, at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. There he pointed out “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago.”
On February 23, 1968, at Carnegie Hall, King made one of his last major speeches. The occasion was the centennial of Du Bois’s birth. He spoke of the great march on Washington planned for that spring, the Poor Peoples Campaign.
“We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until the administration responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we will embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination.”
I was part of the street insurrections that occurred in Washington, DC, on the day King was assassinated. The pain that tore our guts apart fuelled the fires that burned well into the next day. It was inconceivable that the United States government, with all its resources for surveillance, had not known what was to occur. But it had not protected him. We were crushed that such a bright and shining light had been snuffed out before some zillion candles could be lit from it. But that was the purpose of killing him, wasn’t it?
What I remember most about the aftermath of his assassination is how aimlessly people seemed to wander about. As I walked toward the Lincoln Memorial to hear speeches, a very pretty little molasses-skinned girl locked eyes with me, came right over and put her head on my shoulder and started crying. I knew why. A powerful dream had indeed been destroyed, and our world had been turned upside-down. We held hands and walked together for the rest of the day. We hardly spoke. I never saw her again.
Later, during that summer of 68, I was frequently at Resurrection City, a symbolic encampment on the Washington Mall constructed to draw the world’s attention to the plight of the impoverished and oppressed in America.
Lots of people volunteered, from doctors and lawyers to college students like me who offered talks or book-readings on Black history. It felt like a place of purpose. But I carry the inner scars of the memory of the police raging through like the paddy-rollers of slavery, riding roughshod through the mud, knocking over the little clapboard and lean-to dwellings, not caring if their horses harmed anyone. They beat people who didn’t move fast enough or offered verbal resistance with billy clubs. They cared nothing for the people there, who were essentially poor and working-class.
In late 2011 and January 2012, my wife and I visited the Occupy encampments in Washington, DC, at Farragut Square and Freedom Plaza. They felt very different from Resurrection City. We watched a fight break out over nothing. And when an action was called for, it was a quick march for a few blocks with full police escort, concluding with a cliché-laden speech.
I wondered why this “movement” was devoid of any representation from the real Washington working class and the African-American poor. There was an obvious disconnect. And I thought about what King had said at Carnegie Hall: “It is not enough for people to be angry. The supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”
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