A lot of the debate around these NFL players kneeling seems to occur in a historical vacuum. The history of athletes and protest is seldom mentioned. And, what’s worse, the reason why Colin Kaepernick and his comrades began protesting during the national anthem has been drowned out in the shouting. Last week, I saw an image circulating online that showed Martin Luther King, Jr. with his hand over his heart in respect for the American flag. It was accompanied by a message from a Trump supporter saying, “MLK didn’t take the knee in protest of the flag or anthem, he took the knee in prayer to God.” That was followed by the hashtag #boycottNFL.
In fact, a lot of people on the right seem to love using King to defend all sorts of things — to defend guns, would liberals have wanted, you know, King to not have been able to have a gun after a house was firebombed. They falsely claimed that Martin Luther King was a member of the Republican Party. Martin Luther King has become a malleable symbol for rampant deployment by people trying to tell protestors and black people today to shut up.
One of the biggest problems with all of this is that it’s based on complete fiction. And total ignorance of who Martin Luther King, Jr. actually was and what he actually believed. It’s also particularly vile when used to try to suppress dissent against police killings. The same thing that happens a lot with King, also happens all the time with Rosa Parks. It happens with the civil rights movement in general. Caricatures have been created, after being sanitized, historically revised, and made palatable for mass consumption and abuse by crass politicians. An important and groundbreaking new book coming out in January digs deep into this manufactured mythology surrounding Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and other figures and movements. And it provides a nuanced portrait of the truth. It’s called, “A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.” Its author is Jeanne Theoharis, she’s a professor of political science at Brooklyn College in New York. Jeanne Theoharis, welcome to Intercepted.
Jeanne Theoharis talking:
what we’ve seen, and this has happened over the past number of decades and I would argue since really Reagan changes his position and signs the King holiday, is the kind of creation of a national fable of the civil rights movement.
And so now the civil rights movement is used to make Americans feel good about themselves. You know, from 50th anniversary commemorations of the March on Washington, to the Selma to Montgomery march, from the dedication of King’s statue on the Mall, from the statue of Rosa Parks in Statuary Hall. All of these events have become places where we now celebrate the United States, where we feel so good about the progress we’ve made.
And I think in the process, these kind of dangerous ideas about what the civil rights movement was, what it entailed, how it went forth have become cemented. And so as you’re implying, politicians, citizens constantly invoke the civil rights movement in the present to justify certain kinds of positions. To chastise contemporary movements, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, whether it’s Colin Kaepernick’s stand that has now turned into a much broader stand by athletes. We’re constantly being bombarded with, “This is not what King would do.” You know, “Be like King, be like Parks,” that strip and utterly distort what the civil rights movement was and what people like King and Parks actually did and stood for.
– the last year of King’s life, where King was basically disinvited to everything. He was no longer embraced by the mainstream of the civil rights movement and he was increasingly denouncing U.S. imperialism talking about how “my own government is the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”
I think we also need to remember that even the King at the high water mark of 1963, is not popular. So, in Gallup Poll, the week before the March on Washington, two-thirds of Americans don’t support the March on Washington. You have Congressman denouncing it as un-American. And in the wake of the March on Washington, the FBI, and the Kennedys, this is the moment when you see the escalation of surveillance of Martin Luther King, to kind of wall-to-wall surveillance of him. They call him a demagogue, the most dangerous. Even in this moment, right? We’re not even at ’67 King with the public speech against the War in Vietnam, we are at King and the March on Washington, and that King is seen as dangerous, and that King is surveilled. Right? It’s not just ’67 and ’68 King.
if you look at polls in the early 60s, most Americans do not agree. They don’t agree with the Freedom Rides, they don’t agree with the sit-ins, they don’t agree the civil rights movement is the way to go. They’re constantly paranoid about violence. They constantly talk about violence, even though there’s no violence.
I’ve been particularly interested, partly because of my own work, which focuses a great deal on civil rights movement outside of the South, how King is received outside of the South. And if we look at how King, for instance, is received in California in the early 60s, and this is before 1965 Watts Uprising.
In 1963, after much work and much civil rights activities, you see California pass a fair housing law, and white people go crazy, realtors go crazy. And they get on the ballot, Prop 14 in 1964, on the November ballot which is going to be the presidential election, and basically trying to repeal this law.
And King comes multiple times, right? There’s a massive civil rights campaign in the state to try to keep the law and to vote no on the proposition. And King is repeatedly called a communist, King is picketed, King is denounced for that work in California in 1964. And then we will see, white Californians by 3:1 margin vote for Prop 14 in 1964, and they sent Lyndon Johnson back to the White House, but they, still, like in my home, I don’t want any fair housing laws. And what King will call this is a vote for ghettos, right? Because that’s what it’s about.
He writes this really beautiful thing that most people have not read in the couple months after Watts, where he’s basically like, “You invite me to your cities, and you sit up there with all this regalia, and you praise the actions of Southern black people but you know when talk turns to condition — local conditions, basically it’s polite but firm resistance.”
– when King went north into Illinois, you had this famous incident in Cicero, Illinois where you had this white mob come out and they were physically assaulting King and his fellow marchers. And King was then blamed for bringing the violence into the Chicago area. And, in fact, King’s message after that was, “We only unmasked the violence that was there. We didn’t bring the violence.”
again repeatedly when King starts to talk about conditions, let’s say in New York City, right? After the 1964 Harlem Uprising, King is talking about a civilian complaint review board, he’s talking about needing to reform the police and New Yorkers won’t want anything to do with that.
The biggest civil rights demonstration of the 1960s is not the March on Washington, it is a school boycott that happens in February, 1964, here in New York City.
After a decade of parents, students, civil rights activists have tried to get the New York City Board of Ed to come up with a comprehensive desegregation plan and they’ve continued to stonewall and say, “We don’t, this is not a problem here.” And we have committee after committee, and so, basically for a decade after Brown, nothing has happened in New York.
And so finally, in February of 1964, they decide to have a school boycott. About 460,000 students and teachers stay out of school, so this is almost twice the number of the March on Washington.
A month later, in protest of this, about 15,000 mostly white mothers march over the Brooklyn Bridge in protest of a very modest school desegregation plan that the Board of Ed is floating.
Pictures of that march end up being played over and over as Congress is debating Civil Rights Act. One of the things the Rights Act does is the ties federal money for schools to school desegregation. But Northern and Western liberal sponsors of the bill write in a loophole for their schools, which is evident the time, Southerners are furious about this, that basically says school desegregation shall not mean, you know, having to change racially imbalanced schools. Because that’s what northerners call their schools: racially imbalanced schools.
Over and over, you see northerners unwilling and angry and furious when sort of the lens comes on their own practices.
Rosa Parks has this huge life what she will call a life history of being rebellious, that really begins in her 20s when she meets and marries the person she describes as, “the first real activist I ever met.” And that’s Raymond Parks. They fall in love. They get married. And Raymond is working on Scottsboro. This is 1931.
Scottsboro is nine young men, ages 12 to 19, get arrested for riding the rails. Basically, they’re riding the train for free. These are young black men. But in the midst of this arrest, police also discover, in a neighboring car two young white women doing this. And that charge quickly changes to rape. These young men are quickly tried and all but the youngest, who is 12, sentenced to death.
And so, this local movement grows in Alabama to try to prevent the execution of these young men. And Raymond Parks is one of the local activists on the ground working on that movement. They get married in 1932, and she joins him.
By the 1940s, she’s wanting to be more active. She’s galled by the fact that black people are serving in overseas in World War II and they can’t register to vote at home. She wants to register to vote. So, she goes to a local NAACP meeting, she’s elected secretary that very first day, she’s the only woman there. And she will spend the next decade with one of Montgomery’s most militant activists, a man by the name of E.D. Nixon, transforming Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter. Working on issues of voter registration, and issues that we would consider criminal justice. The wrongful accusations and convictions of black men and the unresponsiveness of the law to white brutality against black people, in particular, white sexual violence against black women.
So, she spent more than a decade, when we get to that day in 1955, working and trying and over, and over, and over, and largely they get nowhere. They can’t get convictions or they can’t even get indictments. She manages to get registered to vote because she tries over and over, but most black people in Montgomery don’t, and can’t. You have to take a test but that test is different for white people than for black people.
In 1945, she’s angry. She’s convinced she should register. So, she writes down all the questions and all the answers on her test, because she’s thinking about filing suit. Now, just, where we are in history, this is ten years before she’s going to make her bus stand. So, the notion that Rosa Parks comes out of nowhere, you know, her feet are tired, or this or that, bears no relation to Rosa Parks’ actual life.
I kind of began to locate this with Reagan’s flip-flop around the King holiday. Basically from the minute that King is assassinated, John Conyers introduces a bill for a federal holiday for Martin Luther King. A couple years later the SCLC delivers a petition with 3 million names on it. No action from Congress. There’s huge resistance.
Throughout the 1970s, people are trying to get Congress to act. They won’t act. I think couple things happened.
One, in trying to convince Congress, what you see is the images of King are getting more universalized. Right? Stevie Wonder writes the song, “Happy Birthday” King, right? It’s sort of how American King is.
Meanwhile Reagan, in 1983, he’s about to run again, he’s getting some criticism and he’s worried about keeping moderate white voters. And he comes to see the idea of signing the bill for the King holiday as useful to show kind of how progressive he is.
Up to this point, he comes in saying it’s costly; he comes in saying he can’t rule out that King was a communist.
Then, in 1983, he doesn’t veto the bill. The change is he starts to see how this could be politically useful for him, and we start to see in the language that he uses this mythology about how the civil rights movement, in many ways, proves how great America is. Or, so this idea that I talk about in my new book, of America as a kind of self-cleaning oven. Right? That the civil rights movement, we were destined to have a great civil rights movement because we’re such a great country. Right? And this just shows like all the progress we’ve made. And I think we see a similar thing with Rosa Parks. Right? Both in the national funeral rehab for Rosa Parks following her death in 2005, less than two months after Hurricane Katrina. Why do we have a national funeral for Rosa Parks? Partly it’s to paper over those much more unsettling images from Katrina that are raising these questions of enduring racial injustice and so, a funeral for Rosa Parks sort of saying, “Look how far we’ve come, right? Look, look who we are! This woman who was denied a seat on the bus! Look, she’s now in the capital, right?” And I think the ways the civil rights movement is now used as a kind of tale of American progress and it makes us feel good about ourselves.
And that reaches this apex with the election of Barack Obama. Right? There’s all sorts of movement symbolism, right? And that this is the dream being fulfilled and there’s a kind of feel-good nature to that.
And I think there’s a way that we all like to think we do the right thing and it’s so hard to do the right thing. It is excruciatingly hard to act in the moment. It’s excruciatingly hard to act again and again and again and again, which is what the story of the rights movement is. It’s not: one day you sit down and the people rise up. It’s like: you do it over and over and over for years, and then you get fired, and then you have to leave your home, and then you have to do it more, and you’re super poor, and you, you keep fighting, and it’s just, you know, and fighting and fighting for like 60 years of your life. That’s Rosa Parks’ story, right? It’s not one day on the bus.
I mean, in this sort of crazy, absurd moment, the second Republican debate, they get this question, “Who would you pick on the $20 bill?” Trump, Rubio and Cruz all say Rosa Parks.
And you’re like, “Wow!” I think that we’d be tempted to say, “They don’t know who she is, right?” And I think that’s absolutely true. But it’s also like how interesting that just sort of saying the name of Rosa Parks becomes politically useful. I mean I think we saw that a few months ago.
What did Trump take to the Pope? He took first edition copies of all of Martin Luther King’s writings. Right? An extraordinarily gorgeous present. I would like to take that to the Pope, too. Right? But, it’s like Donald Trump, whose policies sort of stand really against why King is writing about in those books, and yet there he is like trundling to the Vatican with his first edition copies of Martin Luther King.
Last summer, as the protest after Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police and we see this upsurge of protests all around the country, and we see Atlanta’s Mayor, Kasim Reed, basically talk about how Atlanta is the home Martin Luther King. They believe in free speech, but then to justify this massive police presence that we’re seeing in Atlanta, but also all across the country he says, you know — “And Dr. King would never take a freeway.”
And you’re like: what do you think the Selma to Montgomery March is? What? They’re not marching in somebody’s field. That’s a freeway, right? This is what the civil rights movement was. It was disruptive. It was meant to disrupt civic life, government life, commercial life, one of the things that I find sort of ironic, is all of this like, “We want you to be more like Martin Luther King. This constant telling of young people, “Be like King, be like King.”
And I think what this history shows is, “Be careful what you wish for.” Because if, you know, what it means to be like King is disruptive protest. What it means is understanding that U.S. domestic and foreign policy are linked. What it means is calling out not just sort of Southern conservatives but Northern liberals. What it means is making a moral and religious witness against racism and poverty and interlinkages between those two in the United States. What it means is getting arrested over and over and over, 30 times, right? What it means is having to call out your allies. What it means is using a whole variety of strategies that people call violent, that are actually disruptive.
So, when people say to young people, “Be more like MLK,” what I want to say is: “Be careful what you wish for.”
— source theintercept.com 2017-11-08