84. MLK

 Martin Luther King’s Day is being overwhelmed in this Inaugural week. There are National Guard troops on the mall and surrounding the Capitol and at state capitols across the country. News reports tell us that President Trump will leave town before he’s ex-president Trump and incoming President Biden is sworn in. Trump’s still not conceding. Vice-president Pence is apparently minding the store, and will attend Wednesday’s Inaugural. Trump’s close advisors are—or are being accused of—taking payments to lobby for last minute pardons. There were last-minute federal executions, and there is fear of other last minute deals that will embed Trump loyalists in government agencies and weaken environmental regulations. Safety procedures and troops and more troops—and the fear of right-wingers among troops and police—dominate the news.

 

Biden’s team is putting out word of a million inoculations a day for ninety days—Dr. Fauci says we can do it. With unbounded ambition, Biden announces a ten-day program of executive actions and legislative proposals that will address the four crises greeting him on his presidential arrival: The Covid Crisis; the Economic Crisis; Climate Change; and Racial Justice. 

 

MLK has not been completely overlooked on his day. The incoming president and vice-president worked in food banks—service in honor of King—and King’s granddaughter was on NBC’s nightly news. A rerun of an interview with John Lewis about his relationship with King aired on Oregon Public Radio. 

 

The newsreel images of John Lewis and MLK, Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy and Joan Baez arm in arm, confronting dogs and Billy clubs, are etched in my mind. And 1968, the assassination, and in its wake the continuation of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington D.C. I was there—in a Baptist church with Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy preaching and me and hundreds of others, arm in arm, singing We Shall Overcome… 

 

Two of Biden’s four crises—racial and economic action toward equality—were on King’s list 53 years ago. Biden’s bold plans and the images of today—armed troops bivouacked in the Capitol; flashing reruns of Trump’s inflammatory speech and the mob’s occupation of the Capitol; and of lonely Covid deaths and struggling medical teams—are hopeful and unsettling. 

 

I’m nervous and hopeful, as I guess I was in that Black Baptist Church in Washington D.C. all those years ago. Two fretful days until the inauguration…

 

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64. “Freedom"

 One day after quarantine  

I’m home again, had a nice steak dinner with my two grandsons, who’ve safely quarantined here while I was doing so at a friend’s cabin. The grandson who tested positive and set this whole thing in motion had a few days of mild symptoms, but is healthy now. We’ll have turkey on Thursday, quietly.

This morning the radio news said that a million people each day are crowding into airports and airplanes going somewhere else for Thanksgiving. A piece in the Washington Post profiled a more conservative cross-section of Americans who are making accommodations—space heaters in patios, individual serving plates, zoom Thanksgivings. One woman said her husband would not be joining a smaller, masked group for the traditional dinner because he was “grumpy” that his presidential candidate had lost, and refused to agree to the precautions for the holiday meal.

My first thoughts were with the millions who are traveling, and then to the woman’s husband and the red-hatted people,who’ve become ubiquitous on TV with shouts for “freedom”: freedom to go on eating, drinking, and celebrating—and traveling—like they did in some idealized past. 

What do those freedoms have to do with the Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and the Freedom Marchers we watched on TV last night as I described the Civil Rights movement and the leaders I’d followed and idolized to my grandson! John Lewis wanted the freedom to vote, without having to correctly guess the number of jellybeans in a jar or reciting parts of the constitution. Nelson Mandela waited 27 years in prison for the freedom to participate in the life of his country without the walls of apartheid.

How do you measure those freedoms with the freedom to travel and crowd and breathe close and sing in choruses when solos are healthier and your own freedoms might infringe on the health and lives of others?

Say “freedom” once, twice, and the third time “Me and Bobby Maggee” rung in my ears. And freedom shrunk to a nostalgic hunger for something gone…

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

Nothin', that's all that Bobby left me, yeah

But, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues

Hey, feelin' good was good enough for me, mm-hmm

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee

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28. Standing Rock Sioux

I learned today, listening to the funeral service for the amazing John Lewis, that he did not refer to the 1953-73 period as the “Civil Rights Era,” but the “Non-Violent Era.”

I was reminded this morning, after yesterday’s post about Lewis and the difficulty of non-violent action, that the Indians at Standing Rock have been non-violent—and patient—for years in protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. They have been non-violent in the face of dogs, horses, pepper spray, bulldozers and water, sometimes in freezing temperatures. Their fight started before the pipeline was built, continued as it was being built, was completed, and as it began to move crude oil.

And then, on July 6, US District Judge James Boasberg found that the US Army Corps of Engineers had violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it gave the pipeline company permission to build under Lake Oahe. The court gave the operators until August 5 to empty the pipeline and stop all oil shipments. After years of legal work and the non-violent protests of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its friends, they won a big battle.

But apparent victory has been snatched away before—the Obama Administration paused construction in 2016, and the Trump Administration reversed the ruling and the pipeline was completed—and there will probably be appeals to this ruling now.

* * *

In Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis, he reminded us that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 seemed like a complete victory—no more poll taxes, no more counting the jelly beans in a jar or reciting from the Constitution—but states and localities have suppressed votes by limiting poling places and making registration hard. Obama suggested a new John Lewis Voting Act that would make voting day a national holiday and voting a cornerstone of a revived democracy.

* * *

Let’s do that. And let’s not forget the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, or let their victory slip away.

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27. A Call for Non-Violence

I know that a huge majority of Portland protestors are peaceful people—although I can imagine that some pro-Black Lives marchers are tossing bottles and firecrackers. And I am sure that provocateurs from the right have instigated and/or participated in some of Portland’s destructive events.

I also know that the federal presence has heightened tensions and contributed its own violence—innocent protestors have been shot and jailed; food and medical tents have been disturbed.

That said, I believe the day calls for non-violence, the kind of non-violence that Martin Luther King, John Lewis, thousands of Freedom Riders, Selma Marchers, and Birmingham students used to confront Alabama State Police; angry, screaming, spitting white bystanders; and Bull Conner and his dogs. Their weapon was their cause.

Non-violence is not easy. From Gandhi’s marchers to King’s, non-violent people have risked—and sometimes given—their lives for their cause. John Lewis thought he was dead; Martin Luther King was. But their cause was not, and the most significant Civil Rights legislation since the fourteenth amendment passed because of it.

And yes, just like the bungled reconstruction period after the Civil War led to decades of Jim Crow in the South and segregation in the North, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is under assault. And although Black Lives Matter has brought attention to police abuses, there is not resolution.

And the President is determined to continue the assault and excuse the abuses.

But wait, yesterday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius called Portland his “dream come true… We’ve watched the Portland movie before… The idealistic protesters in the streets overplay their hand, tolerate violent provocateurs in their midst and eventually get crushed. The good guys lose; the bad guys win.”

He’s seen it in Cairo and Hong Kong.

Today, Governor Kate Brown has provided an opening, negotiated at least some Federal withdrawal. Now it’s time for disciplined non-violence, the kind that will take a baton to the head and spray in the eyes, and hunker down to be arrested. The kind that will honor the cause.

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25. Non-violence

E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland, Ore., branch of the NAACP, wrote in the New York Times this week: “What is happening in Portland is the fuse of a great, racist backlash that the Trump administration is baiting us to light.”

Mondainé is worried that the white protestors—even the “wall of moms”—are focusing attention on whites, taking public attention away from Black Lives Matter, and providing it to Trumps’ law and order agenda.

The coverage of Congressman John Lewis’s death and lifework strikes an entirely different note. I tear up when I see the old film of Lewis taking hits to the head at the bridge in Selma, or when he’s  tearfully accepting a National Book Award for a graphic autobiography as he explains that the librarian in his Alabama town did not allow Black children to have books.

Some from that time carry the image of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I carry the image of Joan Baez, then 22 years old, leading that same huge, non-violent 1963 crowd in “We Shall Overcome.” Baez captured my young heart with her voice and non-violent stands for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War.

In 1968, weeks before King was killed, as Washington D.C. was readying for the Poor People’s Campaign, I went to a workshop on non-violence put on by the Quakers. “No jewelry: earrings and ears can be ripped, fingers broken; hunker in a fetal position with head covered if they come to pick you up or beat on you.”

I don’t know when I’ve ever felt stronger.

And I hunger now for a new John Lewis, a Joan Baez, Jessie Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, an MLK to remind us to cut the angry outbursts of violence and keep our “eyes on the prize”—the health, welfare, and fair treatment of all people, based on the “content of their character,” and not the “color of their skin.”

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