What kind of revolution did Dr. King claim? One of community projects or one of social justice?

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)

In college I was a supporter of the law that made Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. Even then, I understood that there would be a price to pay. Governments and corporations tend to co-opt popular observances for their own self-serving ends.

I continue to be an avid observant of MLK Day, but I am constantly reminded of how its institutionalization has muted and snuffed out most of the radicalism of Dr. King's message. "I Have a Dream" often replaces the nightmare Dr. King said that he found in the nation's slums. Some want to focus strictly on integration (which Dr. King called "a struggle to get rid of extremist behavior") while they ignore what Dr. King called "genuine equality" which involves "hard economic and social issues" and "survival of a world within which to be integrated."

Jeremy Kane volunteers for MLKDay

We continue to see the muffling of Dr. King's message in 2015 in Nashville, especially from candidates running for office. Metro Council candidates are promoting the national day of service, even though voluntarism has little to do with MLK's self-identity: "if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice." Mayoral candidates are joining in volunteer activities without talking about what they would do if elected to curb the excesses of income inequality that lead to what Dr. King called "spiritual death."

Emphasizing a day of service gives politicos and corporations a shelter free of the undue risk of "genuine equality" and the weightier matters of social justice. Public-private partnerships are perfect vehicles for softening the sharp edges of MLK's message while seizing on the glow of his mass popularity. However, they are of no help in joining Dr. King to go out into a hostile world and boldly challenge the status quo. Public-private partnerships are the status quo. By not taking bold stands they have the air of safe neutrality. However, in the same sermon where Dr. King spoke of going into hostile world, he observed with Dante that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.

Ultimately, the co-opting and switch of the MLK brand from economic justice to community service is ironic. Dr. King died in Memphis while supporting sanitation workers striking for wage increases and better working conditions. Not only do community service days do nothing to advance the cause of better pay and safer work for employees, but some clean-up and trash-pick-up volunteer efforts create more work for sanitation employees who haul it off to landfills generally located in poorer communities. Projects can be more of an obstacle to survival in a world within which to be integrated.

I participate in community projects and I encourage others to do the same at any point in the calendar. But let us not confuse and water down Dr. King's revolutionary message with the idea that community service projects authentically commemorate his work.


UPDATE:  I'm not the only one thinking this way. In Philadelphia today 6,000 organized in "a more assertive, confrontational vision of King's legacy" intentionally departing from the national day of service:

"While we recognize the importance of service, Dr. King was not assassinated because of his charity work. He was assassinated because he challenged the status quo," said the Rev. Mark Tyler of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, a leader of the new MLK D.A.R.E. coalition. "We only do honor to his memory if we continue to fight the same fight."

Is the Salemtown neighborhood association prepared for these January rezoning requests?

Salemtown Neighbors does not traditionally hold December business meetings deferring instead to hosting a holiday social. This tradition will hold in 2014, but given news of some requests for rezoning due for public hearing in January, the association officers may want to consider discussing them since they will happen before the January 2015 business meeting:

A seven-home courtyard style project is slated for 1614 and 1616 Fourth Ave. N. Dale & Associates will go before the Metro Planning Commission on Thursday, Dec. 11, to request the SP.

At 1618 Fourth Ave. N., and on the southeast corner of the intersection of Garfield Street and Fourth, an eight-unit development with six attached townhomes to face Garfield and a two-family dwelling to address Fourth is planned. D&A will go before the commission on Thursday, Jan. 8.

And at the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue North and Garfield, a 20-unit attached-townhomes development is being targeted. Seven of the units would face Sixth, eight would address Garfield and five would run along an alley. The project would replace the four existing duplexes seen here in an image courtesy of Google Maps. D&A also will address the commission about this project on Jan. 8.

The project that is before the Planning Commission tomorrow (1614 and 1616 4th Av N) was already vetted and discussed by the association at their October business meeting. The association made no requests for changes, even though an "SP" ("Specific Plan") allows them to leverage changes to the plan in exchange for community support of the plan. However, those developers promised in October to keep the association in the communication loop as plans unfolded. I have not heard anything from SNNA officers on new plan developments since that meeting. Maybe it is time for an update? I would hate to be blind-sided by tomorrow's commission meeting.

The association has not heard from the developers for the larger 8-unit development at Garfield and 4th Av N or what sounds like a massive one at Garfield and 6th Av N. Most of Salemtown is zoned "R6" for medium density single family detached homes or duplexes, so I assume that the developers are seeking rezoning. At the very least, we should be discussing the impact of replacing 8 units with 20 units at 6th Av N and Garfield. The street parking situation on Garfield alone is getting silly with the existing onslaught of new builds.

Since rezoning cases are about the only times the neighborhood can have direct influence or control over what gets built and the plans' consistency with Salemtown's character, I hope the association officers are keeping tabs on this. I have heard nothing from them as an SNNA member. Hopefully, they are considering making more of a social media effort beyond promoting cookies and dog grooming on the association's Facebook page.

In my opinion, Roy Dale's development company has a debatable track record of building in Salemtown and so we need to stay on our toes and vigilant about these proposals. Otherwise, in a few years we may regret letting this opportunity go by without exercising some control over the process. I hope the officers are keeping their eye on the ball despite the distractions of the holiday season. Developers are notorious for sneaking controversial proposals through the Planning Commission when neighbors are distracted by the holidays. We need to keep tabs on Dale & Associates for that reason alone.

Erica Gilmore schedules community meeting on ballpark, but it looks right out of the developers' playbook for discouraging public turnout

Last night I sent an email to all council members requesting a longer time for approval on Sulphur Dell to allow for more community meetings. CM at-Large Charlie Tygard replied to my email this morning by acknowledging my concerns and asking CM Gilmore to schedule a community meeting "convenient" to her and "the neighborhoods" before the council committees consider her Sulphur Dell bill on December 2 and 3. She replied this afternoon by announcing that she is scheduling a community meeting on the ballpark plan for the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, November 30, at 9 in the morning at the Goodwill Industries on Herman Street in Hope Gardens.

There should be no whining out there just because you have been given about a week to change last-minute any family Thanksgiving plans you might have had in order to study up on a bill that was introduced in council a couple weeks ago (some council members may not even grasp it yet). You should come Saturday morning, holidays or not, prepared to ask your questions and then just go away so that the council can move this bill through committee when the Mayor tells them to pass it, as is their "tradition." Jump through the hoop and then move on. What do you expect? A participatory democracy? C'mon.

Never mind that it is a developer's dream to have a community meeting on a controversial bill involving a huge and historic Metro expenditure while everyone else affected is likely on vacation.


UPDATE: no sooner did I post this than CM at-Large Tygard replied to CM Gilmore's scheduling with word that he would not be able to attend Saturday morning because of his family's Thanksgiving plans.

Still an arrogant nation on the wrong side of world revolution: an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam"

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression, which has now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisers" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago, he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."


Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.


A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

Retrospective: a little North End labor history on Labor Day

Warioto Cotton Mills in 1915
(incorporated in 1905; now the Werthan complex)

The labor history of North Nashville is not easy to find but there are some accounts online like this one:

“I got my first job when I was thirteen years old, working from six in the morning ‘til six at night. . .six days a week, making fifty cents a day,” recalled Josie Coleman .... She was referring to the summer of 1914, when she left her family’s double-log home in Spring Hill, Tennessee, to work in Nashville. Her father Jessie, a farmer supporting ten children younger than Josephine, drove the girl and her shawl-wrapped belongings ... to the city in a mule-drawn wagon.

The previous few years had been unfortunate ones for ... Tennessee farmers. Texas fever, a disease caused ... by tick bites, had invaded the state and killed or quarantined most livestock. That calamity, compounded by the summer drought of 1914 and Maury County’s epidemic of hog cholera ... brought the farm to a standstill. Thus, when Josie’s uncle ... reported in glowing terms on the ready market for labor in industrialized Nashville, first-born Josie decided that Nashville was the place to be ....

Her first job was at Hartsford Hosiery Mill on Twelfth Avenue North at Harrison Street [near what what is now Marathon Village]. She and “lots of other young girls” and women worked for fifty cents a day, six days a week, feeding the machinery that turned out long-length ribbed stockings for boys and girls. She threaded loops of cotton and wool on the large needles of a pre-set pattern or form; the needles created “everything. . .the toe, ribbing, and ends" .... The stockings of white yarn were later dyed black ... by sulphuric dyes. This process was performed away from the processing factory, since the dye was extremely toxic. “And that dye really did smell,” Josie laughed ... “I don’t see how those folks stirring the dye vats stood that job!”

.... her father sold the Spring Hill farm and brought the family to Nashville, buying a residence in the 1700 block of Fourth Avenue North [now Salemtown]. Josie moved in with the family and obtained a job with the H. G. Hill Flour Mill on Van Buren Street [Germantown]. At ... sixteen, she acquired a “better paying job” with the Tennessee Manufacturing Company on Eighth Avenue North [now Werthan Lofts]. She began by sewing sacks of starched calico cotton used for packaging flour and meal. “Ladies really loved those sacks,” she laughed. “When they were empty, the sacks were washed and the stitches cut out so that curtains and clothes could be made from them. I’ve wondered if the ‘free’ fabric ladies got when they bought flour wasn’t more important than the product!”

Plagued by agricultural malaise and drought, a rural generation--many of whom were children--were forced to move to North Nashville for wages even lower than those that had already motivated workers in other industrialized cities to strike at great risk because they did not keep up with the cost of company rent a century ago. It is hard to say whether the farm girls moving into North Nashville were aware of strife like Massachusetts' Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, but they may have been so desperate that it might not have mattered.

While the labor movement was not strong 100 years ago (and likely discouraged by company bosses) here in Nashville, a social welfare organizing movement that built and sustained settlement houses for factory workers was robust. The Warioto Settlement House was founded to care for workers' young children (as we saw above Josie was herself a child laborer), to provide education opportunities, and to prevent diseases.

The building that contained another former settlement house designed to aid and socialize laborers, and otherwise provide "mediation" between rich and poor classes in rapidly changing North Nashville still stands at 10th Avenue North and Garfield Street (now in the Buena Vista neighborhood). The "Flower Mission" building was built more than a decade before the Warioto Cotton Mill incorporated and 2 years before the Pullman strikes in 27 other states that resulted in our annual national observance of this day, Labor Day.

It's beginning to look a lot like Crisismas

Many Nashvillians would prefer the joy of the season overcome memories of May flood crisis. However, as long as there is an election campaign coming to town, the Mayor's Office will not deviate from its appointed rounds of jogging local memories of May with shameless holiday greetings in December. Above all the bustle you hear:

The prettiest sight to see is the flood line that will be on your own front door!

Martin Luther King, Jr. discusses love, conscience, and guilt

Salvation Army and Marine Reserve to kids at Christmas: "Achtung! Your papers, bitte!"

But what's most important ... is that the community knows "we're able to validate the information that we receive."

-- Maj. Rob Vincent, Salvation Army Nashville area commander

What she said and more:

The family's papers seemed to be in order, so the Salvation Army gives the tot a toy.

Council Denies Resolution Requesting that Convention Center Financing Legislation Be Delayed until After the Year-End Holidays

Pleas tonight from some for more time to hold community meetings in their districts did not stop Metro Council from tabling a memorializing resolution that would have requested that the Mayor and other Metro leaders stretch the timetable for approving financing for the new convention center until February 16, 2010. In the midst of disclosures that council members were getting lobbied hard by the Mayor's Office to vote against this resolution, an overwhelming majority voted against even allowing the resolution to be voted on.

My own council member, Erica Gilmore, as well as all five of the at-Large members (including Megan Barry who during the 2007 campaign asserted, "I believe one person, one voice can make a difference. I will be your voice on the Metro Council") fell in line with the large pack of other CMs in blocking a vote on the request for more time to inform and prepare communities for the largest capital project in Nashville history. According to bill sponsor Michael Craddock, tabling motioner Rip Ryman supported the delay resolution in committee the night before. Emily Evans encouraged all of the CMs who wished to stop the vote on the measure to hold community meetings with constituents regardless. Mike Jameson asked Finance Director Rick Riebeling for assurance that a claim--that the vote could actually be held in January without the resolution--used to justify tabling was true. Riebeling deflected by denying that the Mayor's Office has any control over council scheduling.

In the end, it looks like the Mayor and his drones on the Metro Council are going to call an audible right out of the developers playbook, by holding controversial municipal meetings during the holiday season when people are busy, distracted, absorbed with family life or on vacation. Between Halloween, Thanksgiving, & Hanukkah/Christmas, it is going to be difficult for people to attend community meetings. That gives convention boosters, who are locked in like zealots in the Crusades, the upper hand.

We need to keep tabs on which council members hold community meetings before the bond issue to finance the project is approved and signed by the Mayor. Will Karl Dean's supporters on the council accommodate their constituents by holding meetings to prepare them? It will be interesting to see who does and who does not. A month ago I requested that Salemtown Neighbors Neighborhood Association contact CM Gilmore and ask for a meeting on the convention center proposal. No word yet on whether it will happen. But now that CM Gilmore has voted down a request to hold public hearings, she really should meet with us and discuss the ramifications of this project for our future.

Kingston's Going to Smoke the Ash Spill Today

Wouldn't holding an Independence Day roman candle to your face be a quicker form of death than rafting and swimming through TVA's spilled arsenic, mercury, and selenium? Roane County is also farming their ash spill out to other less fortunate communities for their own future holiday fun. TVA's Christmas gift just keeps on giving during any holiday.

Jeremiad Day

While many see today's MLK Day celebration as complement to this week's Inauguration of Barack Obama, I tend to see it more of a contrast. Hardly a perfectionist, I shy away from the euphoria of the Inauguration and the chants that "we are one. " This week's "other" celebration, MLK Day, gives me pause to consider the ways we are still not and may in fact never be one, conditions as they are in America.

From beginning to end, this week is about civil religion, so I'll put it in religious terms: Dr. King was (and still is) a prophet rejected in his own land. He may have his day in the national pantheon of holidays, but his ideas are selectively retrieved. I do not have any objections to President-Elect Barack Obama trying to bring this land back together, but I do not believe that we should ignore prophetic dissent for the sake of priestly unity (keep in mind that the word "religion" comes from a Latin root, which means "to bind together," or "to tie fast").

Cornel West underscored King's prophetic resources among several others:

The last major resource for King's thought was American civil religion--that complex of religious ideals of deliverance and salvation and political ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality that constitute the evolving collective self-definition of America .... [King's interpretation of civil religion] lead him creatively to extend the tradition of American jeremiads--a tradition of public exhortation that joins social criticisms of America to moral renewal and calls America back to its founding ideals .... King did not support and affirm the bland American dream of comfortable living and material prosperity. Rather, he put forward his down dream--grounded and refined in the black church experience, supplemented by liberal Christianity, and implemented by Gandhian methods of nonviolent resistance--rooted in the American ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality.

Today to me is much more like King's jeremiad and less like the benediction-like quality of the Inauguration of Barack Obama. It is separate and apart, and it is not easily bound together. Today is about our failings and our society's sin that not even the most arrogant rationalist can deny. It should be more of a national Lent, a day of sack cloth and ashes, when we reflect on and consider the ways that only some of us have reached the mountaintop but left others behind.

This Christmas Dedication Goes out to Rick Warren and the Saddleback Church

Not your exactly your parents' Hallelujah Chorus:

HT: Monkey Cage

If They Start Playing Tormé's "Christmas Song," I'm There

Kimu tweets that the Bicentennial Mall carillon now plays Christmas carols for the benefit of pedestrians.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Consumer war games over computer games means that the 2008 version of Christmas is here:

Almost makes me wish I could be a guitar hero.

The True Spirit of Christmas

The real war on Christmas:  "savage" suburban shoppers rush a Wal-mart at its 5 a.m. opening like a pack of frenzied wildebeests and kill a store worker who couldn't clear their stampeding.  Wal-mart of course said that the safety and security of its customers is a top priority.

Aren't marketing and consumerism wonderful things?

Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.

End of the Ice Sculpture Age?

AIG won't be giving 7 of it's 60 executives bonuses this year to prove the bailworthiness of their failing company to taxpayers.  How inspiring.  If only they gave awards for doing a tiny fraction of the right thing.

And only 81% of offices are going to have holiday parties this year.  Ouch.  20% of all offices are making the supreme sacrifice.  I just hate this war on Christmas, don't you?

Further Evidence that the Editorial Voice of the WSJ is Nuts

When the implosion of the American economy is blamed on the "war on Christmas," the culture warriors have nothing left in the tank:

You got that? Mortgage lenders engaged in questionable lending practices because they could no longer wish people, "Merry Christmas." AIG backed up dubious loans and sent their executives to expensive resort- and spa-based conferences riding first class or on company luxury jets because they could no longer wish people, "Merry Christmas." GM made some stupid purchases of foreign car companies with they were raking in huge profits instead of investing in green technologies of the 21st Century because they could no longer wish people, "Merry Christmas." The federal government deregulated instead of defending the welfare of Americans because we could no longer wish people, "Merry Christmas." And no one misbehaved when wishing "Merry Christmas" was popular.

It all makes sense to me now. Why couldn't I see the connection earlier? Probably because I'm not nearly as wacked out as the opinion editors at the Wall Street Journal.

"Thank you for correcting my English, which stinks"

The Nashville English First website was down for a while today (or at least I couldn't access it), and it looks like the wait has paid off as they've updated it with their special patriotic July 4th edition (okay, it looks exactly the same as the pre-patriotic July 4th edition).

Merry Independence Day, English speakers everywhere, even though English is said to unite us even more than independence!

And now for your English language learner fact of the day, which is intended to correct popular misconceptions about ELLs:

A Pew Hispanic Center analysis of public school data from key states finds that English language learners (ELL) students tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students.

These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of characteristics associated generally with poor standardized test performance--such as high student-teacher ratios, high student enrollments and high levels of students living in or near poverty.

When ELL students are not isolated in these low-achieving schools, their gap in test score results is considerably narrower, according to the analysis of newly available standardized testing data for public schools in the five states with the largest numbers of ELL students.

UPDATE: More positive PR for and scant investigative reporting of Eric Crafton at the Nashville City Paper. They simply relay what he feeds them.  He's playing them like a cheap Strativarius knock-off.  They're so mastered.

An Important Day in the History of Human Emancipation

Facing South reminds us that today is Juneteenth, a celebration of the day in 1865 when Union troops rode into Galveston, TX bringing with them news that the Texas slaves had been free for 2 years (a fact that white Texan slaveowners kept secret, along with news of Lee's surrender two months before).

When I was growing up in Texas I remember Juneteenth being a quasi-holiday that got a lot of publicity. When I was in high school it became an official Texas holiday. I've rarely heard anything of it since moving to Tennessee.

Happy Juneteenth, freedom lovers! Even in Tennessee!

Remembering the Militant Moderate

An uncompromising call to arms:

[A] strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist .... This is why nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing you and say, "Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong," then you wield a powerful and just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever this weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community's, or a nation's, anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause.

- - Martin Luther King, Jr., Playboy Interview, 1965