Reclaiming of a King
“ — 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
As decades pass, we as a country have made a tradition out of striding on the third Monday of January, every year. We saunter in the spirit of the hundreds of people whose bodies became bloody on a gloomy Sunday in 1965, in Selma, Alabama. Our feet step with the same vigor of the thousands of people who gathered below the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to demand jobs and freedom. I went to Washington D.C. last August, and placed my heels in the very steps where Martin Luther King Jr. stood, demanding America cash our checks — in return, our “freedom and the security of justice.” Every year of marching in the January cold, on every third Monday, never felt as powerful as my feet absorbing the energy of that spot where Dr. King stood, and with conviction, shared his vision.
It’s interesting. Ridiculous actually, that the speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave in 63’ has been weaponized against Black people who believe in making justice a reality; not just an ambitious fantasy. There have been people who view Critical Race Theory (CRT) — a lens in which to understand the permanence of racism in the Untied States, and how law constructs and sustains racism — as a tool to scold white children for their role in slavery, and use King to justify their points. Republican politician Kevin McCarthy, shared on twitter “Critical Race Theory, goes against everything Martin Luther King has ever told us: ‘Don’t judge us by the color of our skin,’ and “now they’re embracing it. They’re going backwards.” McCarthy’s claim trended on Twitter with five thousand plus likes, and one thousand plus retweets. There have even been people who believe their “hesitancy” to get a COVID-19 vaccine is lauded by King. Aaron Rodgers, NFL quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, invoked King’s name when addressing why he doesn’t get the Vaccine: “ — the great MLK said, you have a moral obligation to object to unjust rules and rules that make no sense.” Many people, of all phenotypes and ethnicities, assert King’s name when it is convenient for them. They skim through his works, specifically the “I Have A Dream,” speech, and select phrases that can be sanitized. They — rightwing politicians and voters — co-opted King’s legacy as a radical civil rights activist, and molded him into a softer figure who meekly desired a color-blind world for “little black boys and black girls — to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
This year we’re not celebrating what Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleagues were able to accomplish at such an intense time in this nation’s history. His family asked for there to be no celebration of MLK day while millions of Americans’ accessibility to vote is being suppressed. No, we’re not celebrating at all. However, we are honoring their legacy of struggle through demonstrating and marching to restore and expand voting protections that King and his colleagues fought for. King’s family asked that there be no celebration of MLK day unless federal voting rights legislation is passed by President Biden’s administration, and Congress: The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancements Act would fight voter suppression and restore an aspect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that blocked certain jurisdictions with a history of voter discrimination from changing their voting rules. The Freedom to Vote Act: would make it easier to vote, make Election Day a federal holiday, also bolster security on voting systems, and overhaul how congressional districts are formed.
I can’t help but to wrestle with Malcolm X’s argument that fighting for a Civil Rights bill was a waste of time because we have the Constitution, which is supposed to grant Black people freedom. I’m wrestling with Toni Morrison expressing how racism’s function is to distract us from our work. I feel, through the white gaze, we are being distracted, but our Blackness (which is our work) must be protected through the accuracy of our stories. Our stories are our work.
The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act — combines the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — is a basic human right. But the bill hasn’t even made it to the Senate floor to be debated. The bill has been filibustered; prevented from moving forward, consequently silencing all deliberation and consideration of the bill. The filibuster is anti-democratic and allows the losing party of an election (Republicans) to have power to disrupt the winners (Democrats) of passing any legislation. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a fan of the filibuster. He expressed in a 1963 interview about the civil rights act president John F. Kennedy wanted to pass, in order to end racial segregation in public spaces and to strengthen voting rights, that “the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.” King understood how politics could get in the way of peoples’ basic needs being met. He understood the irony of politics disrupting democracy. But no one will quote this from King. They will suppress peoples’ accessibility to vote, and justify it with his words.
When society discusses Martin Luther King’s legacy, they often leave out his evolution from a man whose politics were rooted in reforming racists institutions, to a man who demanded an end to global anti-Black racism, imperialism, and excessive materialism — a revolution of values as he called it; they leave out the people who mentored and challenged him to have a broader analysis: Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Mays, Ella Baker, and his wife, Coretta Scott King; they leave out how paranoia consumed him, like most Black folk who are committed to the basic needs of marginalized people, as he was murdered on that balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, and how the US government was found guilty of conspiring to murder him.
This MLK day we’ve inherited the struggle that he and other civil rights activists have bled and died for. I’m not sure if we can secure voting rights for generations, but we can commit ourselves to struggling for freedom everyday like the great Ella Baker declared. I believe this struggle for accessible voting is, in the words of King, “forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws — racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are deeply rooted in the whole of our society.” But not just the struggle for accessible voting. The struggle for health care for all, affordable housing, the struggle to end poverty and state-sanctioned police violence.
As generations pass, and our bodies become ingrained in the soil, our ancestors will know our legacies not just through the words that we proclaim, but through the actions we provoked. And when they stand in our footsteps, they will feel as empowered as we did knowing we were standing in a legacy of people who also resisted. So we must march, this year, and every year going forward, to reclaim the legacy of Dr. King and work towards the dream — the actual dream where Black people cash their checks and the three evils are erased from society — that he shared so long ago.
