April 4th
Anniversary of the Death of Martin Luther King is a Time For
Accounting
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- When Martin Luther
King died 30 years ago this weekend the outlook for
America's race relations looked on the surface unredeemable:
a future of more urban riots, further polarisation of the
races, white reaction feeding black reaction in ever
ascending spirals of bitterness and hate. There seemed to be
little on the horizon to give ground for hope. The south was
fighting what appeared at the time to be a successful
rearguard action against the 1954 Supreme Court decision to
desegregate schools and the 1964 Civil Rights Act that
outlawed discrimination in public places. The north was
becoming increasingly segregated. The electoral drift was
towards the right, soon to bring to power Richard Nixon and
the end to any thought of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society".
Black revolutionary militancy was becoming more bold and
confident.
Yet within only three years the picture
had changed dramatically. Polarisation didn't worsen. Blacks
en masse didn't become more militant and revolutionary. The
South began to change out of all recognition. Political and
economic opportunities for educated blacks increased at an
astonishing rate. All this happened in spite of economic
recession and, supposedly, the ultra-conservative leadership
of the black's bete noire, Richard Nixon.
Why were the omens of the time wrong?
I think for three reasons. First, the impact of what Martin
Luther King achieved was often seriously underestimated. The
last two years of his life were so overshadowed by the rise
of the militant Black Power movement--in the words of one of
its leaders, H. "Rap" Brown, "if the honky (the white man)
wants to give me a hand he should give me some guns"--that
it was easy to overlook the incredible revolution Dr King
had wrought and the deep foundations he had laid. Not only
had he made black America politically conscious but with the
winning of the 1965 Voting Rights Act he released a
tremendous political energy that transformed the south and
enervated the north.
The second reason why the situation
didn't deteriorate as was widely predicted at the time is
that we were taken in by the "images"-- the images of Black
Power in 1966, of the big city riots in 1967, of the
gun-toting Black Panthers in 1968, images that were picked
up by the press and magnified out of all proportion to the
true feelings of most blacks.
Certainly, in the late 1960s there was
a groundswell of opinion among young blacks that something
more militant than King's non-violence was necessary. But
the press made it more frightening and horrific than it was.
Young blacks, having found they could scare white society if
nothing else, stepped up their game of "putting on whitey"
and escalated the rhetoric. Now we see in retrospect that
the situation was rather like that of the 1840s, when a
small group of intellectuals advocated slave insurrections
but stopped short of organising them.
The third reason is that by the late
sixties America had become immeasurably different from the
America Dr King first confronted in 1955. Then McCarthyism
put even the vaguest liberals on the defensive. By the end
of the sixties, after a decade and a half of the civil
rights movement and five years of the anti-Vietnam War
movement, America's institutions had never been so openly
questioned by such a broad spectrum of political opinion,
even though the right was strong enough to win the
presidential election.
Seen from today's vantage point we can
see that all these early trends have gathered impetus.
Blacks, if educated, have never had it so good. Violent
protest of a political nature has withered to insignificant
proportions. White opinion is more accomodating. Blacks
politically now pack a punch. Indeed, there would have been
a black president by now if Colin Powell had been prepared
to stand--and what a difference that would have made to the
current sleazy, inept and unnecessarily arrogant image of
America abroad that the current incumbent is responsible
for.
The debit side, needless to say,
remains huge--a seemingly unshifting black underclass of
broken families, alienated children, random violence and a
youth, totally without prospect, even in this time of low
unemployment, of holding down any job other than the one
proffered by the ubiquitous gang leaders who have become,
for so many of them, substitute fathers.
This underclass simply has no parallel
in any other industrialized country. America may
statistically bring down its unemployment level to lower
than Europe's by locking up at any one time 1.5 million
young black people and keeping another 8.1 million on
parole, but it cannot by any stretch of the imagination
solve either its residual race or omnispresent crime
problems, which are so tightly interlinked, by such tricks
of accounting. The job outstanding is immense. Left untended
it continues to coarsen, corrode and roughen all of American
society. America has still to make King's choice between
"chaos and community".
*Jonathan Power is
a former member (1966) of the staff of Martin Luther
King.
April 1, 1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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