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."

Civil rights not quite enough for Cooper?

Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 3, 1968)

Conservatives never seem to fail to express themselves awkwardly toward Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. We have seen it before among red-state Republicans, but it is no less true for Blue Dog Democrats. Nashville's Jim Cooper reportedly attended a local law firm's annual MLK fellowship breakfast today and asked one of Dr. King's comrades the following question:

What I hear driving questions like this is the Blue Dog assumption that market-based principles generally provide solutions for social problems better than government action does. The fiscal conservativism at the heart of the logic of Democrats like Rep. Cooper ideologically dresses down every other priority. Hence, "economic opportunity" is code for never binding an economic system that hums along on inequality, on inequities, on profound imbalances of power and influence, wealth and privilege, because the market fixes everything if allowed to.

Left wanting more?

To tell the truth there was rarely the bifurcation in the Civil Right Movement between economics and politics that Jim Cooper seems to be insinuating in his question. In fact, black history is filled with attempts to advance economic opportunity beyond the movement that showcased Dr. King's work, but that is a subject for another time.

The question of economic opportunity for people of color and poor people runs like a distinct thread through Dr. King's speeches and writings. All Rep. Cooper has to do is listen to or read them. Take the last speech MLK gave before his death on behalf of 1,300 striking sanitation workers in Memphis. The last half of that speech has two primary expressions. One is well known because it is recited over and over due to the tragedy of April 4, 1968: Dr. King tells his audience that despite threats, he does not fear anyone because he has been to the "mountaintop", looked over and "seen the Promised Land".

But the second aspect of the second half of that speech contains express appeals to the people's practicality and economic power to make the changes necessary to bring them greater freedom. Dr. King encourages them to stop buying Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread. He tell them to quit the banks of Downtown Memphis for ones that treat workers more equitably. He mentions black-owned insurance companies that would be more worthy of his movement's money than white ones.

His last speech prescribes economic opportunity. It expresses solidarity with underpaid, mistreated city workers. It constitutes a jeremiad against the city of Memphis and its mayor, who prohibited a union, refused to raise wages and allowed African-American workers to toil in unsafe conditions. The only way you could insinuate that this civil rights speech is not about economic opportunity is to ignore the speech (as well as every other speech that gives this one broader context).

I was not at this morning's breakfast, so I do not have knowledge of everything that Rep. Cooper said. Tweets are notoriously unreliable, even when posted by a pro journo, for judging comments in their entirety. However, I do understand the flawed Blue Dog logic. I have also been exposed to political hemming and hawing about Dr. King's beliefs, especially in January when it is politically expedient to seem pro-MLK with no strings attached.

However, when Metro Nashville Schools destroyed its custodians union by outsourcing service work, we did not hear a word from fiscally conservative Jim Cooper. Some might argue that collective bargaining is a civil right. Regardless of that question, others prey on my mind: does Rep. Cooper believe that cutting and outsourcing school custodians gives them greater economic opportunities? Does he believe that Dr. King was not striving toward economic opportunity for sanitation workers by standing by their strike? If we honestly strive to be like MLK, shouldn't we stand by unions in their hour of economic need?

The Civil Rights Movement did not need an economic opportunity movement to complete it. It was always about economic justice as much as it was committed to nonviolent dissent and political reform. It supported unions who fought for greater economic opportunities. For any Democrat to insinuate that it was incomplete without the Blue Dog brand of snake oil is in poor taste on this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

Arguably, the Blue Dog could have done worse. At least Mr. Cooper did not hijack the commemoration to pimp a new bus rapid transit plan.

RIP, Ernest Campbell, civil rights academic and long-time Germantown preservationist

I just learned that the former Vanderbilt sociologist who contributed so much to North End preservation died last Sunday at his Germantown home. This is sad news about a man who was a catalyst in our community, a professor who cut a figure in US civil rights history:

While at UNC, the Campbells welcomed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to their home when the civil rights leader visited Chapel Hill. Campbell studied the educational aspirations of white and black students in North Carolina in the early 1960s and received a call from the U.S. Office of Education asking him to serve as co-director of a project resulting from a mandate in the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 to study the effects of discrimination on race, sex and religion.

The scholars focused on education achievement and race, and the resulting large-scale study of nearly 800,000 students documented huge differences in test scores and achievement by race. The research additionally documented that the Southern region lagged significantly behind the rest of the nation in terms of education, especially in regard to race. The resulting study was dubbed the “Coleman Report” after its principal author, James S. Coleman, and was published in 1966.

Germantown has changed drastically in the decades since Ernest and Berdelle Campbell launched the preservation initiatives there. Those of us who live around them enjoy the fruits of their legacy, and rest assured that some here will not fail to recall their contributions to and influence in North Nashville.

Thank you, Ernest, and goodbye.

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.

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

Mark It, Dude

Eric Crafton's English Only charter referendum, coming for a vote in January, will live or die on the votes of the African American community, just like California's Proposition 8 resolution did last week. It will be ironic if Eric Crafton wins his fight against Nashville's immigrant community the same week we commemorate the contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the American civil rights struggle.

Civility Warning: This Video Includes Conservatives Cussing

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily support every interview tactic used by Max Blumenthal in this video. For example, chasing down Michelle Malkin after she walked away bordered on harrassment. Plus, it was more powerful just to watch her take off.

HT: American Prospect

An Alternative Story on Muslims and Klansmen

Like News 2 before it, NewsChannel5 has joined the Christmas Wars over Phil Bredesen's choice of personal (as in "unofficial") Christmas cards. Details after the jump. In his latest interview, pastor Maury Davis again links Islam and the Ku Klux Klan and he demands cultural purity from Bredesen's personal choice.

However, one comment that Davis made hit me:

If on Martin Luther King day you sent a picture of a Klansman and said, "Martin Luther had a dream that this guy would one day get along with the people he is trying to kill," I'm not sure that the African American community would handle that very well.

That comment in particular called to mind a miraculous story told by Will Campbell; it is an impossible possibility that might not ever haunt the ungraceful mind of Maury Davis.

From Forty Acres and a Goat:

Word circulated among the black prison population [in Danbury, Connecticut] that the Grand Dragon of the [North Carolina] Ku Klux Klan [J.R. "Bob" Jones] was there [after being convicted of contempt of Congress]. Further word had it that he wouldn't be there long because he would be dead in the yard. A mutual friend [of Campbell's] in New Jersey, Pete Young, knew a Black Muslim minister who had members and numerous contacts at Danbury .... The word then became that if anything happened to Bob Jones while he was in prison, the one responsible would have to answer to Muslim justice. Jones continued in good heath, his best friend in prison a Black Muslim. Mysterious ways ....

A few years later Pete Young's house caught on fire .... His wife, their three-year-old daughter, and his wife's mother were killed. Pete lay in critical condition from burns he received when he tried frantically to save them. Pete was a Protestant. They were Catholic .... [The funeral had] twenty-four pallbearers. At the front of the line was the former Grand Dragon .... Beside him was his Muslim prisonmate.

While Rev. Davis--an ex-con himself--sees a world at cultural war, Rev. Campbell tells us a story of truce and of the laying aside the issue of cultural purity for the sake of a closer fellowship. Which one would Martin Luther King, Jr.--or, I daresay, Jesus--prefer?

We May Have Convergence

All I ask for sometimes is a little love for my political instincts. A week ago I passed on the good news about MLK High School's national ranking and the need to bring the surrounding northwest Nashville neighborhood up to the magnet school's impeccable stature. In today's Tennessean comes a report that there is controversy in the Metro Council over whether to send an unanticipated tax windfall to Metro schools via a private group affiliated with the school district or, as already decided by a previous Council, to send the money to MDHA, which would spend the funds on the continuing revitalization of John Henry Hale Homes.

You'll remember that John Henry Hale sits next to MLK. I'm seeing a convergence of two competing issues that I previously argued should be taken together: by my estimation, directing the money to MDHA to spend as has been determined would in fact help MLK, even if indirectly, by enhancing the quality of life in MLK's neighborhood. Solving the larger problems across the school district needs a more comprehensive answer and plan on the part of our local leadership than a one-time windfall surplus.

For A Hero: No One Can Take Away Dr. King's Day

Well, the local conservative bloggers have made their predictable attempts to piss on this day commemorating one of the greatest Americans of the last century, Martin Luther King, Jr. I do not know why they feel the need to try to bring Dr. King down a couple of notches rather than just blog on other subjects and completely ignore the day. I am not going to honor their malarky, their balderdash, their drivel by linking them, which only raises their cache in the blogosphere. If you really want to read their hooey, then look through Nashville Is Talking's weblog aggregator.

To honor the memory of Dr. King, warts and all, I offer the thoughts of Alan Wolfe (via TPMCafe):

Our century's identity has been to insure that the ideal of civic equality announced to the world in 1776 would become a reality. Just to help make that come about, King had to overcome the determined resistence of terrorists without conscience, politicians without backbone, rivals without foresight and an FBI director so malicious that he would stop at nothing to destroy a man who believed in justice....
For all the tribulations his enemies confronted him with, it is not those who foolishly and vainly stood in his way whom we remember, but Martin Luther King, Jr., our century's epic hero.

Heroism, when any of the rest of us would shrink away. Thank you, Dr. King, for helping a country find its soul. We honor your memory even while others choose to pummel it.