HARDING: "I HAVE A DREAM" 50 YEARS LATER-I, II

[Oscar]

“I HAVE A DREAM” 50 YEARS LATER

BY Jim Harding

For publication in R-Town News August 30, 2012

August 28th marked the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, when 250,000 people gathered to hear Martin Luther King Jr. give his historic “I have a dream” speech. This event was a turning point in the long struggle for civil rights for Afro-Americans who grew up in the aftermath of slavery. And it marked a turning point in politics both in Canada and abroad.

I had just turned 22 when I travelled to the March on Washington, one of the estimated 50,000 “whites” who joined the overwhelmingly black demonstration. The peace and civil rights movements were overlapping with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which did much of the mobilizing for the March, borrowing tactics like the sit-in from peace groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament led by British philosopher Bertrand Russell. When I arrived in Washington I was part of the Quebec-Guantanamo March for peace which was challenging the U.S. trade blockade of Cuba.

HUMANIZING ENERGY

I will never forget the humanizing energy at this massive event. I was quickly adopted by two older black women who grabbed my hands and pulled me along as we walked towards the Lincoln Memorial. That ended all self-consciousness, as I now truly felt I belonged in this monumental step towards a post-racial society. In King’s moving speech he talked of us all being judged by the content of our character, not the colour of our skin.

There, of course, never was any scientific basis for racial categories: we are all members of one human species and we overlap with other bipedal and primate species in an intricate evolutionary web. While racism is not yet dead, we are beginning to question the interrelated speciesism used to justify the domination of nature.

OUR SEGREGATION

At the time I was enrolled in graduate studies in social psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. I had been hired by the Centre for Community Studies to do field research on motivation and education curriculum in the northern communities of Ile a La Cross, Beauval and Buffalo Narrows. The American literature critical of “race” was instructive. Slavery had marginalized, stigmatized and segregated Afro-Americans from mainstream society and political participation and racism had become entrenched to justify the double standards and violence that upheld white supremacy. The reserve system under Canada’s Indian Act had done a similar thing, segregating indigenous people from mainstream society. Pass Laws had restricted the movement of First Nations people off reserves and they had only recently been granted the right to vote. South Africa had learned a lot from us.

The American literature on caste helped me better understand what was happening in northern Saskatchewan. I was learning that slavery and colonialism were two sides of the same historical “coin”, both leading to oppression and rigid stratification which then got justified in racialistic terms. The content and tone of racial slurs about “Negroes” had a lot of similarity to those made about “Indians” and “Half-breeds”.

POST-RACIAL SOCIETY

All speeches at the March on Washington were given by men, mostly from the black organizations that coalesced around this astounding event. Many singer-performers, however, were women: including Joan Baez and Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, along with the powerful black singers Odetta, Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, who softened people’s hearts to hear King’s transcendental message. A majority of the performers, including young and self-conscious Bob Dylan, were white but everything blended into the larger cause of human rights.

At the time I didn’t fully grasp the behind the scene politics. The March was primarily animated by SNCC, originally to protest the assassination of civil rights worker Medgar Evers in June of 1963 and to expose President Kennedy’s weak civil rights draft legislation. SNCC leader John Lewis, the only speaker from 1963 still with us, was cajoled by older, black leaders to change his wording about this legislation being “too little too late”.

Were it not for the idealism and courage of young black activists no longer heeding the warning of their parents about the dangers of challenging segregation, that system might still be in place. And as the mobilization grew bigger, as more and more buses arrived, many of the senior black leaders saw the potential for creating mass, spiritual pressure on the Democratic Party. Kennedy welcomed the March’s speakers back to the White House. The historic proportions of the March played a role in getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voters Rights Act passed but Kennedy didn’t live to see this happen.

VIOLENCE ESCALATED

I was young, adamant and still naïve. When I stopped at an all-white downtown bar in Philadelphia on my drive back to Saskatoon I was still wearing a “March on Washington” button on my shirt. This was a mistake; I didn’t know until later that there was serious local conflict over desegregating the suburbs where blacks had previously been banned. Many hours later I was awakened by a supportive policeman who helped me find my car, while informing me that there had been similar cases of civil rights supporters being drugged in the bars. Parts of the U.S. north, it seemed, weren’t more advanced than the Deep South.

Violence from white supremacist groups escalated in the aftermath of the March; the Birmingham bombing, killing four children, was the Klan’s response. I was to join SNCC’s Freedom Summer in 1964 as a volunteer to help with voter registration in Mississippi. While in Baltimore for nonviolent training, word came that three of SNCC’s visiting student volunteers had been lynched and many of us were turned back. While disappointing, this motivated me to look more closely at racism in our back yard.

NEESTOW PROJECT

I returned to Saskatchewan committed to draw on the experience for local activism and soon met Métis leader Malcolm Norris who took me under his wing. In discussions with him and John Totoosis who helped found the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians (FSI), we envisaged what was to become the Student Neestow Partnership Project (SNPP). Inspired by SNCC’s nonviolent desegregation campaigns (sit-ins and freedom rides), SNPP recruited student activists for placements in willing Métis and Reserve communities in rural and northern Saskatchewan. The project met with great resistance from both levels of government and entrenched community leadership but it was a first, necessary step in educating student activists about the impoverishment, oppression and desire for self-determination in these communities. It helped inspire and build important cross-colonial and extended family networks to better work for human rights.

The March on Washington resonated around the globe. It gave impetus to South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. It’s impossible to imagine Obama as U.S. president or Mandela as the first president of a post-racial South Africa without Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Known affectionately as Madeba, Mandela clings to life by a thread on the 50th anniversary. King of course died years before in 1968, because of the hateful racism that persisted in the aftermath of the huge show of support for human rights in Washington in 1963.

It wasn’t long before the civil rights movement joined hands with the peace movement, especially after the U.S. escalated the bombing of Vietnam in 1964-65. King as well as Malcolm X started to question the U.S. Empire and its racist foreign policies and to revision the struggle as being for human rights and global justice, not just civil rights within America. This struggle for equality will continue to ebb and flow from one region to another. In some ways, 50 years later, Canada is still behind the U.S. but perhaps not for long. From the beginning of the emergence of Idle No More there’s been a familiar feeling in the air and I am again reminded of the energy that flourished at the March on Washington.

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Jim Harding PhD
Retired Professor of Environmental and Justice Studies
www.crowsnestecology.wordpress.com

[Oscar]

WHAT MIGHT WE LEARN FROM THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON? Pt. II

BY Jim Harding

For publication in R-Town News September 6, 2013

I was surprised by the outpouring of interest across Canada on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. This confirmed that the American civil rights movement in the 1960s had a collective impact here too.

It’s not often we get to reflect on important past events. It takes something like a 50th anniversary to momentarily hold back the barrage of information hitting us daily and create space to learn something from the flow of events that we call history.

CBC INTERVIEWS

I was asked to do a series of interviews, as one Canadian who attended this event who was still alive and could be found. All highlighted King’s speech as one of the most important of that century. There was less interest in why the event occurred and what its overall impact was. I tried to “stretch” my answers to address these questions and the more I put King’s speech into the context of living history the more the interest seemed to grow.

I did 10 interviews in a marathon from 4:40 to 6:40 am, Regina time. I talked to radio hosts in Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Iqualuit, Cape Breton, Winnipeg, Victoria, Kamloops, Regina, Prince George and Saskatoon. Things moved so quickly that it was hard to remember what I had said in my previous answers, though I got more practiced as the interviews piled up. Later I wondered if it was significant than no interviews were held from either Alberta or Quebec.

I prepared themes that I thought were vital to discuss: 1) How personally transformative it was to be part of the event; how it had shaped my activism when I returned home. 2) The transcendental nature of the event, not only due to King’s masterful speech but the whole event, including the power of song. I wanted to link the event to the larger tradition of the “social gospel”, which has influenced Canada, including through the CCF and the struggle for Medicare. 3) Finally, substantive justice and the fact that the March was about “jobs and freedom” and the pursuit of economic justice. This was often overlooked by the media’s tendency to lift King’s speech out of its historic context.

KING’S SPEECH

It was helpful to listen to what King actually said on August 28, 1963. So prior to my interviews I listened to the full recording of the event, reminding me of the feeling tone and narrative of the time. I took note when King’s words were received with cheers and great applause.

King created an historic context of how the U.S. hadn’t delivered on the promise to Negroes (the term he used) after the abolition of slavery a century before. He spoke of how blacks were awakening from the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism”, one of many brilliant phrases woven into his moving talk. He reiterated that “now is the time” for change, which is the meaning of the Greek term “Kairos”, the name of an ecumenical group with which I am involved.

He appealed to nonviolence, asking those present to not become “guilty of wrong deeds”, to “not drink from the cup of bitterness and hatred” but to maintain their “dignity and discipline”. King called for the “meeting of physical force with soul force” which is the translation of Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha, permeating civil rights and anti-nuclear peace circles in the early 60s. King talked of the need for unity, saying “we cannot walk alone” and “we can’t turn back” but have to “march ahead” to finally realize the goals of freedom and justice.

King spoke plainly about the conditions facing black Americans, the victims of “unspeakable horrors of police brutality”. Blacks travelling American freeways were often unable to “gain lodging”. The only mobility they had was “from the small to the big ghetto”. He spoke passionately of what racism did to children, stripped of self worth by signs saying “white’s only”.

King spoke of his vision with compelling, often biblical phrases like “justice rolls like water and righteousness like a mighty stream”. He paid homage to “the veterans of creative suffering”, who were leading this movement by example and not wallowing “in the valley of despair”. And then came his dream.

“I still have a dream”, he said, and it is “deeply rooted in the American Dream”. It’s rooted in the Constitution, that “all men are created equal”, the promise that all of us will someday “sit together at the table of brotherhood.” He stayed concrete, talking of Mississippi which had the highest proportion of segregated blacks “sweltering in the heat of oppression”. Huge applause came when King said we will “not be judged by the colour of our skin but by the content of our character”.

King shifted back to talking of the upcoming children. Little “black boys and black girls” would become “sisters and brothers”. We would all become sisters and brothers. The “glory of God” would help create a “country of brotherhood”. We would work, pray, go to jail together all as “God’s children”. So “let freedom ring”, King chanted out, as he began his powerful finale, ending with “free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.”

WHERE ARE WE

We can’t treat this magnificent speech in isolation. Massive commitment was needed to effectively challenge the laws and traditions that segregated blacks from the mainstream society. Nearly 800 civil rights marches took place in nearly 200 cities in the few months after the Birmingham campaign, prior to the March. And while the integrationist movement to which King was such an inspiration had a revolutionary effect on American society, 50 years later we need to ask: how far have desegregation and economic justice actually progressed?

A recent poll suggests that 4 of 10 “whites” are still mostly surrounded by other “whites”. And though it‘s understandable that this in-grouping is lower among minorities, 25% of non-whites (black, Latino, indigenous) still report mostly being surrounded by “non-whites”. While inter-marrying and blended families grow, one-third still report they don’t “mix with other races”. Separation and the false notion of “race” that reinforces this still seem widespread.

The indicators of inequality from King’s time are still with us: even with segregation banned, Oprah’s commercial empire and a black President in the White House, black Americans still have twice the unemployment, 3 times the poverty and 6 times the rate of incarceration, similar to indicators for indigenous Canadians. Black families have only 1/20th of the median wealth of white families according to the August 31, 2013 Globe and Mail editorial. The income gap has greatly widened since 1963.

The watershed March on Washington was about the struggle for equality, which is ongoing. It made very practical demands for economic justice and unbeknownst to many today, the union movement was central to its mobilization. The MC of the event was Phillip Randolph, head of the first predominantly black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Walter Reuther, head of the UAW also spoke. Along with federal legislation banning discrimination in housing and education, the demands read at the end of the March included a call to raise the minimum wage.

The March was not about “race”, but ending the racism used to justify oppression and inequality. It was about human rights, though this language was not yet widespread. And the marchers were quickly becoming aware that “race” is only one defense of inequality and that gender and class differences are also used for this. Since the March on Washington we are seeing some progress in overcoming inequality based on gender discrimination, but we still have a long way to go to overcome inequality justified by the ideology of class. This, too, enslaves and segregates people.

Jim Harding PhD
Retired Professor of Environmental and Justice Studies
www.crowsnestecology.wordpress.com