As happened in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, the way is opening for fundamental social change. Police reform is in the air, but so much more is possible. We should be aiming at the defeat of white supremacy, and organizing for a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights that will frame domestic and global policy and programs for the next 25 years. It is a fight we can win.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, I was living in Toronto. I was 20 at the time, just a couple months shy of my 21st birthday.
A hot, personal anger over the Vietnam War had derailed my college career during the previous two years. I had turned toward a lifestyle based on occasional anti-war activism, confrontational politics fueled by adrenaline, part-time jobs, hours of playground basketball and regular use of marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs. In the process, I had quit school, burned my draft card, and regularly demanded that my draft board halt their complicity with the war crimes inherent in invading Third World countries.
Not surprisingly, they were unreceptive to my demands and hot to punish me for my insolence, so they drafted me. Believing that resistance to the war included refusing to acknowledge the authority of the board to draft me and of the state to prosecute me, I went to Canada.
King was shot at roughly 6 p.m. on April 4; but absorbed with the trivia of my life in somewhat voluntary exile, I knew nothing about his death on the day that it happened. When I woke up the next morning, I was stunned to hear that King was dead and cities, including Chicago, my hometown, were burning.
The Moral Authority and Visionary Leadership of Dr. King
I believed then, and I believe now, that King was the most important American leader in my lifetime. I also believed that racism was the original sin in American history and that the Vietnam War was the most extreme example of how militarism destroyed lives, shaped policy, and robbed the country and the world of the resources necessary to build a society based on reconciliation, redemption, equal justice and equity. King, I believed was the person who might lead us to such a benign place.
On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination, King delivered a speech at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC) at Riverside Church in New York City. The speech, which King titled “A Time to Break Silence,” was the first time that he publicly announced that the pursuit of civil rights in the United States required firm opposition to the Vietnam War.
As he spoke King noted that the gathering at the church was “…surely … the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”
But while celebrating the stirring of conscience as a new and positive factor in national politics, King was not kidding himself or his audience about the country’s failure to address the desperate needs of the poor. In explaining why he would no longer separate the struggle for civil rights from opposition to the war, he told his audience that, “there is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America.
“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle,” he said. “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both Black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
There were others around at the time who were speaking out against the war and framing it as a very specific threat to African Americans. World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was drafted and refused to fight in the war, famously saying “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
The white radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), many of whose own youthful leaders were themselves schooled in their activism by the civil rights movement, routinely connected the destruction of Vietnamese villages to the ongoing destruction of African American neighborhoods in the United States. But no opponent of the war could bring to bear the combination of celebrity and eloquence that King could.
“We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor,” King said at Riverside Church.
King’s address to CALC on that April day was heavily covered by the mainstream media and earned him new celebrity and unusual criticism from both longtime allies in the civil rights movement who rejected his broader focus, and from high-level national politicians who greatly feared the possibility that the civil rights and anti-war movements might join forces in an all-out attack on the status quo. Undaunted, King was relentless in articulating a comprehensive critique of US politics and policies that mobilized overwhelming force against developing countries, denied fundamental human rights domestically and globally, and distributed social benefits unequally.
Welding evidence, economic analysis, history lessons and moral perspective into continuous teaching on what the country could become, his persistence was an inspiration and a consolation for activists of all sorts. He reminded us all to stay the course and of the new world we could build.
The Elements of Movement and the Obstacles in the Way
Waking up to the somber reports of King’s death and the images of cities on fire shattered me emotionally. I made my way to a pay phone on a corner near my basement apartment. In tears, I called my father.
He and I were often at odds politically and would continue to be in years to come, but it was my father’s love for Chicago, and his refusal to live anywhere else, that shaped my own strong feelings for the city. I don’t remember much of what he said to me. It is my own incoherence and uncontrollable sobbing, the images of burning cities and the abject misery I felt, that stands out in my memory. What was I doing in Toronto while King died in the struggle for a cause I believed in? And what would we do without him?
At the time, I was too inexperienced and too unversed in the history of the United States to recognize that the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1965, of which King was the most prominent leader, had been arguably the most successful organized effort to rollback white supremacy in all of United States history. And even though I was demoralized by King’s assassination, I did not yet grasp that by that time the radical movement for social change that began with a decade of civil rights activism and was promising to grow into a force that would radically transform the culture and the economy had already come undone.
After all, as King reflected at Riverside Church, the poverty program, an effort to finally begin addressing the most severe examples of income and wealth inequality in the United States, was already “broken and eviscerated” by a government decision to spend a billion dollars on the “War on Poverty,” while simultaneously appropriating 50 times as much on weapons and expanding military capacity. That disparity guaranteed that the poverty program would stagger forward to swift failure. The War on Poverty lost almost at the same moment it had been declared.
Further, John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 had made Lyndon Johnson president. I will make no argument here that Kennedy might have pursued a more radical political course in the latter part of his presidency, but despite Johnson’s decades of political experience, he became deluded by his own power. On his way to absolutely routing conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in his reelection campaign, Johnson also engineered the defeat of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in its struggle to be seated at the 1964 Democratic convention as a replacement for the old school Mississippi Democrats who for years had blocked full participation by African Americans in Mississippi politics.
Such outcomes were the very beginning of the 50-year counterattack by both corporations and the right against the victories of the civil rights movement and the liberation movements that followed. Yes, the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act would pass a year later, but they represented the furthest advance of the movement and would be undermined and undone in numerous ways in the decades to follow.
Small Victories and Unfinished Business
By August of 1968, Johnson’s miscalculations had saddled him with responsibility for an unpopular war. Reelection was out of his reach.
Meanwhile, I was back in Chicago, unpursued by a government that could not corral the thousands who had refused to serve. But I felt a new call to action in the anti-war organizing effort aimed at confronting delegates to that summer’s Democratic convention as they gathered to nominate Hubert Humphrey as their standard bearer against Republican Richard Nixon. Accordingly, I showed up to join the crowds that massed in Grant Park and Lincoln Park in preparation for a number of actions, including a massive protest in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where many convention delegates were housed.
But the protests deteriorated into a police riot when cops beat and chased protesters throughout the downtown and the north side. Unable to effectively express the rage we felt against the escalation of the war, many of us threw ourselves into the pitched battles with the police, or into smashing windows and setting cars on fire through the downtown. Though the escalation of the use of force by police had already become a common element in confrontations with protesters in Chicago and in other cities across the country, few white protesters were prepared for such brutality. It was, however, just a taste of the police brutality that African Americans experienced in their own neighborhoods on a daily basis.
But all the assassinations, the police beatings, the political counterattacks—like the passage of right-to-work laws in many southern states (undermining the power of the big industrial unions), the institutional obstacles to voting rights and ballot access, and the increasing limits on women’s right to control their own bodies that swept through various states—have failed to erase all the gains of the 50s and 60s. Grassroots understandings of fundamental human rights denied, of the unrealized promises of democracy, and of memories of movement mobilizations endure, even if such persistent awareness was not enough on which to base successful resistance to the right-wing counterattack.
As SDS founder Tom Hayden wrote in his essay “The Way We Were”: “The idea [of participatory democracy] was to challenge elite authority by direct example on the one hand, and on the other to draw ‘ordinary people,’ whether apathetic students, sharecroppers, or office workers into a dawning belief in their own right to participate in decisions.
“This was the method—call it consciousness-raising—of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which influenced SDS, the early women’s liberation groups, farm workers’ house meetings, and Catholic base communities, eventually spreading to Vietnam veterans’ rap groups and other organizations. Participatory democracy was a tactic of movement-building as well as an end in itself. And by an insistence of listening to ‘the people’ as a basic ethic of participatory democracy, the early movement was able to guarantee its roots in American culture and traditions while avoiding the imported ideologies that affected many elements of the earlier left,” Hayden wrote.
I do not mean to suggest that there were no real and unreversed achievements of the ‘60s and ‘70s struggles for full human rights for women, working people, African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, lesbians, gay men, immigrants and others. However far voting rights and choice have been rolled back, the record shows that some changes are irreversible.
The Radical Mission to Reclaim a People’s History
One milestone has been the field of African American Studies, which did not exist as anything but an activist vision in the early ‘60s but is now institutionalized as a fully accredited course of academic study at most universities and colleges across the country. Perry A. Hall described the decades of collective activism and relentless scholarship it took to fully legitimize African American Studies in his book In the Vineyard, Working in African American Studies.
“The issue of whether to work within or outside of ‘the system,’ intensely debated among militants and activists in the 1960s, resolved in the 1970s to a commitment to change from the ‘inside.’ Our aim was to make the system work for us rather than against us—that is, to make it function more legitimately by broadening its foundations to include African Americans,” Hall wrote.
In beginning the work of agitating for curriculums in white universities that acknowledged the social and cultural contributions of African Americans as an equal and fundamental element of American history and culture, Hall and his peers were following in the work of the civil rights movement, in the footsteps of King, Malcom X, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and others. And they, too, would permanently advance the struggle for human rights in the United States.
Writing about his experience as acting director of the Black Studies Center at Wayne State University in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Hall notes that “the established faculty [of the university] denied the center the ability to grant tenure to its own faculty. Structurally, it was neither a real department nor a real field of study in institutional terms … Later it presented serious career problems for those who became more than nominally involved with the development of African American Studies. The competing interests created by the ‘contradiction of double aims’ presented the alternatives of either marginalizing oneself within an established discipline or ignoring, deferring, or subordinating the objectives of the new academic enterprise.”
Hall, of course, neither marginalized himself nor compromised the work. When he died this past April, he had spent the last two decades as a tenured professor in the African American Studies department at the University of North Carolina. He also lived to see the publication of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a comprehensive history of African American achievement and struggle against 400 years of white supremacy in the United States.
And, just as Hall and his colleagues had built on decades of civil rights struggle and the spirit of Black pride and Black power to create and solidify an entirely new field of scholarly production, the 1619 Project owes its ability to tell a coherent and comprehensive story of oppression and resistance to their scholarly efforts to “mainstream” the study of African American history and culture. The lessons that the Black studies movement taught over the last 50 years will never be unlearned.
The Gathering Elements of a New Movement
Now, in 2020, we are living once again in a period of open rebellion that bears real similarities to the ‘60s; similarities that include the continuous outrages of police brutality toward and police murders of African American men and women, and mass expressions of political rage and, sometimes, violence. Many more protests are guaranteed as is the possibility of further and, even, premeditated violence.
But there are welcome and important differences between the two eras. Perhaps the most important is the role that Generation Z will play going forward. Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generation in American history, eclipsing the Baby Boomers in both size and diversity, and is just now coming of political age. I am not suggesting that a majority of that cohort is done with the status quo, ready to resist white supremacy, and to carry the fight for social justice and equity forward; but the Boomers were by no means united in support of civil rights or opposition to the war in Vietnam, either. And history (including polling data) does suggest that a far larger percentage of Gen Z is ready for an entirely new social contract.
Into the bargain, the percentage of older white folks who recognize that white privilege has been a major cause of the unfair distribution of the fruits of the country’s great wealth is growing. Covid and the higher infection and death rates in black and brown communities connected to the fact that so many people of color are essential workers, are underpaid and often uninsured, has highlighted the costs of white privilege.
The Shifting Media Environment
Fifty-two years ago, an overwhelming majority of seniors voted for Richard Nixon in a decisive repudiation of the liberal social agenda. Yes, many of them voted for Donald Trump four years ago, but polls now suggest they are increasingly disenchanted with Trump’s divisive political style and his failure to productively address the pandemic we are suffering through now. Moreover, it seems that many no longer believe that occasional vandalism and looting destroys the credibility of the protests. And though somewhere around 40 percent of poll respondents (most of them white, to be sure) continue to support Donald Trump, contrast this to the fact that 61 percent of poll respondents opposed the Freedom Riders in 1961.
And with the exception of Fox News, no major networks or prominent publications are using their influence to effectively terrorize moderate voters into applauding Trump’s law and order rhetoric. On the contrary, it has become a commonplace to hear both politicians and talking heads defend the legitimacy of protest even when they are condemning looting and vandalism.
Activists annoyed by the media’s coverage of, say, Black Lives Matter, should contrast the refusal of major media to blanketly condemn the current protests to Life Magazine’s major two-part coverage of “the critical new phase of the Negro revolution” in June 1966. The second issue in that series featured a lurid cover headline: “Plot to Get Whitey: Red-Hot Young Negroes Plan a Ghetto War.” Of course, there are plenty of legitimate critiques to aim at reporting on contemporary activism, but coverage today is downright tame compared to the headlines that helped to transform white Americans into “law and order” voters in 1968.
From the mid-50s through the end of the '60s, there was an infrastructure of progressive social organizations, most particularly civil rights groups. That infrastructure was key in developing strategy, mobilizing resources and sustaining momentum for the long fight. There were also a variety of liberation movements that developed in the '60s, but not many that built solid or enduring organizations to carry the work forward.
Though it is far from clear which organizations will grow in stature and the capacity to lead and sustain a movement against white supremacy and economic injustice, there are groups, like Black Lives Matter, that are direct descendants of the liberation movements of the 1960s. The North Carolina NAACP, the second largest NAACP chapter in the country, led by Rev. William Barber, has organized and sustained a network of 93 activist and advocacy organizations across the state. As a result, the NAACP’s 110-year history of struggle and long reach are available to help sustain a new movement capable of taking on the challenge of this moment.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with roots in the ‘70s, has grown recently into an organization capable of electing its own members to Congress and swinging substantial weight in the Democratic party. And though some labor unions played critical roles in getting the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed in the ‘70s, they will need the changes a new movement can achieve to restore the right to organize and the strength they once had. DSA and other groups will play necessary roles in moving the Democratic party out of the way, if not into becoming reliable allies of a new movement for social change.
I have neither the knowledge nor the ability to come up with a comprehensive list of the broad range of organizations that could provide significant leadership in what is shaping up to be a historic struggle; but the point is that every movement must rely on a variety of organizations to help it to grow and mature, gather resources, develop strategy, and capture hearts and minds. In the ‘60s and ‘70s some of those critical organizations exhausted themselves, SDS for example; others, like the Black Panthers, came under withering attack from police and the FBI and found themselves struggling to survive. And many big labor unions found themselves shrunk by a declining manufacturing base and legal assaults on the right to organize.
The Counterattack of Capital
But one other factor is critical in assessing the opportunity to make fundamental change: The role of capital and the capacity of capital and major corporations to drive the counterattack against any significant gains by a social change movement.
In the ‘30s capital was unable to effectively resist New Deal programs that created Social Security, jobs programs, income subsidies, and new areas of social investment. It took a war to finally restart the economy, but the New Deal persuaded ordinary Americans for the first time that government could work for them.
Capital’s capacity to fight back was far less limited in the ‘70s. The early part of that decade was characterized by something of a stalemate between capital and labor, but the big corporations in major sectors of the economy had the wealth to whether that standoff. By the end of the decade, the purchasing power of the average wage had eroded considerably, and factory jobs were disappearing or beginning to move to right-to-work states in the south. It was at that time that big cities in the north, where working families had been supported for almost two decades by wages and benefits earned in union jobs, began experiencing a decline in their standard of living that has lasted into the new century.
But Covid, which has revealed the high cost of white privilege, has also unbalanced significant sectors of the economy. Working people, of course, will suffer the consequences worst and first; but if an electoral strategy develops that focuses on turning red districts purple and purple districts blue, a more progressive majority in Congress could help the developing movement fight off the counterattack of capital.
Five Factors That Open the Way
These five factors:
1. A new generation agitating for realizing the promise of democracy, and
2. Older generations woke to how damaging their privilege has been, and believing that a new social contract could improve their quality of life as well as the lives of the exploited and left behind, and
3. The development of new organizations and the revitalization of older organizations with a commitment to fundamental social change and the capacity to sustain a movement, and
4. A national media that is actually showing signs of a new commitment to journalistic integrity,
5. And fundamental weaknesses in capital’s ability to fight back,
suggest that we have arrived at a moment when a movement can build a new society organized around equity and equal justice. Such a thing cannot possibly be achieved instantly. It will take time. And energy. Patience. And a strategy that mobilizes millions.
Imagine the Democratic Impact of Elections in Which Everybody Votes
It would seem that in the United States that any strategy that could dismantle white supremacy and fundamentally change governance must include democratic elections. And not the familiar kind, in which somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of eligible voters show up to vote. But a strategy that aimed to get, say, 70 percent of all voting age adults invested in the real value of participating in the electoral process, organizing, registering, educating, voting, holding elected officials accountable, and engaging each other constantly, would be elections with outcomes far different than the ones we live with now.
Over time, elections like that could be the force that dismantles structures like the Electoral College and the US Senate, institutions created to limit democratic governance by a constitution that specifically declared that African Americans were only 3/5 of a person and only white men of property could vote. How to get to such a place? Again, such a thing cannot possibly be achieved instantly. It will take time. And energy. Patience. And a strategy that mobilizes millions.
So, even if we are talking of changes years in the making, we are also talking about a country shaped by 400 years of racism and dominated by wealth and privilege. Getting there in our lifetimes would be a monumental achievement and would honor the patience and struggle of the 20+ generations that preceded us.
It’s worth noting that the Left in the United States has been divided for decades over whether the Democratic party can be a vehicle for social change. A significant percentage of white leftists has sat on the sidelines during national elections, including the 2016 election, which ended with the catastrophic victory of Donald Trump. Many of those on the sidelines have argued that only a third party, a true workers’ party, can change a system that favors capital over labor, and victimizes especially communities of color and low-wage workers. But it seems clear that Trump is among the worst presidents in American history and that his presidency has been a disaster for every group that a left-wing third party might aspire to organize and serve.
In any case, dreams of building a third party do not make a strategy. But a mass movement for social change that endures could also create educational and organizing structures that pursue vastly increased participation in elections and provide a means to push elected officials to enact legislation that invests in underserved communities, ends the unequal distribution of income and wealth, and invests in universal health care, quality public education, affordable housing and ending poverty. Such a movement could easily transform the Democratic party into a political force that serves the vast majority of Americans. The movement that gets there must necessarily set goals that include 70 and 80 percent participation in elections by all voting age adults in the United States, not the kinds of elections we are familiar with now in which records are set if the participation needle reaches 50 percent of registered voters.
And when the opportunity develops to secure equity and equal justice for everyone, enduring as long as those who came after us continue the struggle to maintain that happy state, we could pass a Bill of Fundamental Human Rights that would serve as a declaration of permanent intent and would guide policy and program both domestically and globally.
The first one on the last is “Innate Freedom and Equality,” elaborated this way:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
The declaration outlines 30 basic (and unalienable) rights altogether. The twenty-fifth is “The Right to an Adequate Standard of Living,” which is described this way:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”
By this point, it is likely that most people who read this will have concluded that such goals are too idealistic and beyond our collective reach. But the notion that such goals are unachievable, it turns out, is a measure of the true genius of our wealthy, white founding fathers. They designed a system that would hold up for hundreds of years against the work of individuals and movements who struggled for more and better.
But if there were not flaws in their design than the slave regime would not have been brought down, women would not own property or vote or hold office, and everyone would not have the right to marry and raise children. Of course, there is so much more to do. And it is a very heavy lift. But we are at a moment of opportunity. A moment where we might collectively be the instrument for realizing the dreams of the liberation movements whose work got us this far.
The Earth Itself Is Waiting For Us
How urgent is the work of this moment? So urgent that without equity and equal justice, we will not be strong enough to do what comes after the revolution—the challenge to save a planet from the worst of climate change and the damage that populations world over, especially poor communities and countries of color, are and will sustain.
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