Justice Plus Dignity Equals Freedom
It’s Martin Luther King’s birthday today and time to celebrate service, diversity, and inclusion in America. But it is difficult to celebrate this year because of a racist President, and his followers, that have disrupted not only the holiday, the 2020 Presidential election, and literally everything else in our country for the past five years.
America does not surprise me today. 400 years after the first African humans were brought here as enslaved people, we still haven’t truly integrated non-Whites into our society in a way that gives everyone equal rights, freedom and opportunity.
The MLK holiday has helped us, but it wasn’t easy to get this holiday.
It took Congress 15 years to pass legislation to create a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., but it wasn’t celebrated as a national holiday until three years later in 1986. It took many more years to designate the holiday in all 50 states and in local communities such as Arizona who passed the holiday before it’s Governor took it away again. In my home town of Hanford, CA we didn’t recognize the holiday until 2006, 20 years after it became a national holiday.
In the spring of 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his last speech in Memphis during a strike by sanitation workers in the city. In the speech he referred to attempts by the White controlled local government to prevent the Black community from marching in the streets. Jim Crow at work in America.
“We have an injunction and we’re going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction.” said King in his “Mountaintop Speech” that also served as his own eulogy because he was assassinated the next day.
“All we say to America is, “Be true to what you said on paper.” If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”
On January 6, 2021, during an international coronavirus epidemic someone issued a permit for the President and his followers to hold a rally in Washington D.C. and stir up the people for an attack on Congress intended to disrupt the final certification of the 2020 Presidential election.
The fact that local officials all over the country allowed him to hold that event and dozens of such virus spreading events over the past year (including the first one in August 2020 attended by former Black Presidential candidate Herman Cain who went without a mask and died 9 days later), should not be understated in these times. In his article about Cain and his passing, David A. Graham said:
“Cain was not a stupid man, nor ignorant of science; he was a trained mathematician, after all. But by 2020, Cain — a man who’d joined the Republican Party out of a sense of contrarianism — was ready to risk his life to show his lockstep conformity with party dogma. At one time, Cain seemed like a model of how an individual can live the American dream. Today, he seems like a cautionary tale about how an individual can be destroyed by American politics.”
However, in my view, the biggest problem with the President’s insurrection event and all these other events he was allowed to have, is that is shows the real divide in our nation between a shrinking White majority clinging to power and non-Whites who still do not have the equal right to say what our Country should and could be doing for it’s people. And, it will take much more than denying Whites the right to hold a rally in America, or giving Black people the right (without protest) to hold a rally — for true freedom to reign in America.
“There is no Negro problem” said President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, “there is only an American problem. Rarely in any time, does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth, our welfare, or our security. But rather to the values, and the purposes, and the meaning of our beloved nation.”
As you think about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the future today, please take the time to remember that America (and Democracy) is about Justice, and it’s about Dignity. Only with those “inalienable rights” can America truly provide Freedom to all its people. And, only when all of us have that Freedom, will we truly be a light unto the nations.
