Another Dr. King holiday has come upon us. Another weekend full of movies, documentaries, and audio and video clips of speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Finally, another weekend where people contemplate Dr. King's contribution to the forward progress of the United States of America.
That last sentence brought to mind something that Sista Souljah offered on one of Public Enemy's albums. The track By the Time I Get to Arizona starts off with her giving a summation of what Dr. King's contribution was and is. She ends by saying that Dr. King tried to teach white people the meaning of civilization. Indeed, for Dr. King to thrust into the Civil Rights movement the teachings of Mahatma Mohandes Ghandi was revolutionary in and of itself. As it stands, America is and always has been a nation seething with agression. It was founded on agression, when Europeans landed here and declared war on the native Amerindians and, worse, their culture. The agression continued when Afrikan people were kidnapped and dragged to America to be enslaved and forced to build this country.
That agression continued when European American men set out to subjugate and oppress women (white, Afrikan and otherwise), preventing them from exercising their inherent rights as well as their very humanity. Lofty dreams, pronouncements, and declarations notwithstanding, this was a nation founded upon oppression, genocide, and pillage. History will bear this out even when apologists seek to deny it.
Such oppression, genocide and pillage continued down into the twentieth century, though not in the same fashion as in the sixteenth century. And the oppressed, whether they be Afrikans or women or Latinos, or other non-white groups of people, have had to struggle to secure their very humanity. The struggle of Afrikan people, for example, began when the first Afrikan stepped on these shores and continues to this very day. Our struggle has never ceased from that day to this.
Our oppressor (and even many of us) have this vested interest to encapsulate a people's struggle into one single person. Maybe that is so that when that one person is killed (in one way or another), the masses are left to feel as though there is nothing left to do, to struggle for. Although Afrikan people do not control what is presented to them, they do not have a say in how things are presented to them. Sure, we can disagree on the corner or in the barbershop or the hair salon or the barroom, but unless there is some mass, organized reaction, how things are presented to us will remain the same, with the oppressor deciding how and what is presented to us.
The so-called Civil Rights movement is an example. Our struggle for desgregation (and not intergration) is presented to us in way that sometimes defies logic. According to mainstream (read, white) historical analysis, the Civil Rights movement began in 1955, when the Montgomery bus boycott began. This follows logic, especially for those who wish to make the movement into one man. According to this same historical analysis, that struggle ended in 1968, with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That's a period of thirteen years. This analysis leaves out hundreds of years of movement and struggle, as well as hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who struggled alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and many other so-called leaders.
Of course, the names of the hundeds of thousands (if not millions) of those who struggle(d) for the humanity of all Afrikan people will never be known. But this shouldn't stop us from at least acknowledging them. Too often, just a few are mentioned and, because of the extremely sexist society that we live in, many of those few mentioned are men. We know very little of the scores of women who struggled alongside men. In movie after movie after movie, it's always made to appear as though Dr. King was the Civil Rights movement. Dr. King was no more the Civil Rights movement than Oprah Winfrey is the barometer to measure all Afrikan people. Dr. King was the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist church, the Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, and the founder and executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That's it.
I know that that may come as sacreligious to those who have canonized Dr. King, but it is the truth. Dr. King didn't defeat the oppressive segregationist forces in Montgomery Alabama. He alone didn't force the owners of the bus companies there to change their position on segregated seating arrangements. The masses did this. Had Dr. King attempted to overturn segregation in Montgomery, he would have been lynched almost as soon as he had tried. It was because the masses of Afrikan people had gotten to a point of anger and frustration regarding their treatment on the buses. They were sick and tired of the mistreatment, the disrespect, and the neglect they encountered on a daily basis. This anger, more than anything else, sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.
This isn't an attempt to dismiss Dr. Martin Luther King's contribution to the Black Freedom Movement. Far from it. His contribution could never be dismissed or downplayed, no matter how much some people try to. It is, however, an attempt to place a greater emphasis on the masses of Afrikan people, who were instrumental in forcing change. The point is that Dr. King nor Malcolm X nor Barack Obama couldn't have done any of what they did alone.
Hero worship doesn't benefit anyone but the oppressor. The oppressor's history and culture promulgates this "cut off the head, the body will whither" ideal. They assume that if the general is cut down, the army will disperse. This is exactly why, in America, movements are promoted as one person (usually). It serves as a means to dissuade the masses. Dr. King needs to be looked at in this light. Again, he did contribute and ultimately gave his life for the forward progress of America in general and Afrikan people in particular. He made the ultimate sacrifice when he refused to allow cowardly bigots to scare him into 'non-action'. This will never be taken from him and we will defend him against any such attempt no matter where it comes from. Let us not, however, place him on a pedastal that he shunned while he was alive. He didn't want to be a hero. He wanted to, as he said often, "do God's will." That, to me, meant comforting the suffering masses.
This was and is his extraordinary contribution to this world.
Now Get Up.
Tarikh Tehuti Bandele'
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