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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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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Pandemic 12--Fountain of Praise Church

Once, a very long time ago, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference struggled to carry on the “Poor People’s Campaign” and Resurrection City grew on the soggy Washington D.C. Mall, I found myself in a Baptist Church listening to Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and a large white woman from South Carolina. It was the kind of event that should have been captured in a diary or a saved church bulletin, but I was young and out to do good that day, with no notion of saving things so that I could think about them a half century later.

Listening to the service for George Floyd in the Fountain of Praise Church in Houston this week sent me back to that night, to another time when white Americans were caught up in the emotional truths of Black Americans’ struggles.

Last night I tried to explain the emotional surge—and truth—of singing “We Shall Overcome” in that church that night to my granddaughter. I remembered peace marches and civil rights gatherings, and Joan Baez marching arm in arm with MLK in Montgomery in 1965. I can hear her now singing—and hear myself singing—“We Shall Overcome some day…”

The white woman that night said that she knew that looking down on n….s was a way of keeping poor whites down, that she knew that she and her kin were the n….s now.

You can mount every rational argument about justice and equality, argue and negotiate your way to legislation, bring new textbooks to the classroom and body cams to the police forces, but in my book the hope for real transformation is in white Americans grasping once again the emotional truths of brown and black experiences.

George Floyd’s service in that black church in Houston brought that home.

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