The Best of America: 1963 in 2023

Monday is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.  It was commemorated Saturday with another march and speeches in front of the reflecting pool.  It's been duly noted in some of the media. 

On Friday, the Hill website had a story related to the 1963 march, with a photo that showed demonstrators near the reflecting pool, but it was not of that march.  The signs were different--those in 1963 had a uniform style, having been printed in union shops.  Unions were big backers of that march.  And as an indication of how long ago that march was, the attire of the demonstrators was different in this photo--the casual clothes we're used to now.  In 1963 the women wore dresses and the men wore suits and ties, though jackets did come off in that hot sun.  I know these things not just from period photos, but because I was there.

The Guardian story was interesting in adding big picture information I didn't fully know--particularly the active participation of the President John F. Kennedy Administration in making the march a success, and partly through union leadership, encouraging white participation.  Attorney General Robert Kennedy worked closely with march organizers, and even brought black police officers down from New York because at the time there were no Black police in Washington.  The Kennedys also helped with the sound system, calling on their campaign expert. (Even so, it wasn't great.)

The story also quoted some participants' recollections today, and I was pleased to see they remembered how extraordinary the day felt, as I did.  It's my strongest lasting impression.  As one put it, "I felt like I witnessed the best of America." This is worth remembering now, when we too often see the worst, like the deliberate slaughter of defenseless Black people this weekend by a coward with the Nazi insignia etched on his semi-automatic.

So I'm repeating my post from the 50th anniversary. slightly expanded.  I remember a few more details, but this gets to the essence of it.  Here it is: 

 

I was 17 when I participated in what was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. I was a student at a Catholic high school, and heard my own beliefs expressed by President Kennedy in his television address that June: “We are confronted primarily by a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

In the weekly newspaper for the Greensburg, Pennsylvania diocese, the Catholic Accent, I read about an organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that was inviting people to go to the March. I contacted the priest who was named and he talked to my parents. He must have been convincing because I got permission to go.

But I got my first indication of just how small this group was going to be when I attended a meeting, and it was two priests and me. A photographer from the Accent snapped our picture as I pretended to paint the already completed banner we would carry.

As it turned out we were the only three people from the diocese to march under that banner. We would meet other people from the Pittsburgh area, organized by religious groups of various denominations as well as by labor unions and civil rights groups.

Many traveled to the March from all over the country by bus, and a few by plane, including celebrities from Hollywood and legendary entertainer and activist Josephine Baker from Paris. I boarded a special train from Pittsburgh, one of the twenty or so originating from various places that were added to take people to the March. Recently reviewing video from that day posted on YouTube, I was amazed to see a few frames of my 17 year-old self arriving at Washington’s Union Station (at about the 11:32, 11:33 marks), walking towards the camera and trying to look appropriately serious, in my best suit, white shirt and tie.

I also looked alert. Vigilance to the possibility of violence was universal that day. From police commissioner Bull Connor unleashing police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, to the murder of Medgar Evers outside his home in Mississippi, it had been a brutal summer in the South. It’s been estimated that over 14,000 demonstrators across the South (including high school students) were arrested during those months, with at least one death.

When I got home I wrote (in the Catholic Accent) of the “dedicated and dignified fervor” around me at the march. But high spirits were also part of that day’s rhythm. From Union Station to the Lincoln Memorial there was always singing. For me it started even earlier, when I restlessly explored the train, wandering through one quiet car after another until I suddenly pushed open a heavy door to a car literally packed to the rafters with young people. Some were perched in the luggage racks. Several at the far end of the car were playing guitars, and everyone was singing.

The march itself was like one long song. It is more powerful in my memory than the hours of speeches at the reflecting pool. Looking into the faces of the people nearest me, and all of us looking around, my feelings became a reflection of what we felt in common.

From the Lincoln Memorial, Peter, Paul and Mary sang the Dylan song I loved--it was still new then--"Blowin in the Wind."  Later we--all quarter-million of us--sang "We Shall Overcome" with them, Dylan, Theodore Bikel and the Freedom Singers.

We were astonished by our numbers, by the fact of us all there, of the reality that was completely new. The overwhelming mood was wonder. It was a sustained altered state, a living dream.

We had a sense of unanticipated numbers on the march, but the dimensions of the day weren’t clear until we got to the reflecting pool. So many people (since settled at 250,000, the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that date) and yet the transfixing feeling of peace—I don’t think anyone had foreseen this.

I saw the joy and wonder and the tears as black people of different ages and from different parts of the country saw each other there. I was also aware that in this context they could see a young white face undistorted by hate or contempt.

We’d marched and sung together, but even as an audience for the program at the Lincoln Memorial, the interactions didn’t stop-- interactions that in the mid-1960s were still rare.

Now we stood in line together at portable water fountains and toilets. We bunched and sprawled on the grass together, sweating under the same steamy sun, both drowsy and responsive to the inspiring words and music coming through the not always comprehensible fuzz of the sound system. We felt careful courtesy becoming a release into a common regard. We looked at each other.


We listened to Dr. Martin Luther King together, quoting an American hymn—“From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” We heard his American litany reach its crescendo: “Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!...Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!”

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring... from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’"

When a subjugated people are freed, everyone is freed--that's the message behind this day, that informs the most famous part of this speech, when he describes the dream--a dream that in some ways he saw reflected in the water in front of him.  (He'd used the "I have a dream" refrain before, and at the time I thought I had already heard it. That seems unlikely, so maybe it was just so right that it seemed like it had always been there.)

The official intent of the March was to support passage of the Civil Rights bill that President Kennedy sent to Congress a few days after his June speech. Immediately afterwards I recall commentary in the press calling it a failure because that bill was stalled in Congress (it would pass in early 1964.) Today the march is better remembered than the political reason for it.

Race has still not been erased as deep separation, nor has full racial justice been achieved. But sixty years after that day, my memories aren’t of politics or even history. They are physical. They are of a possible America glimpsed by being lived.

copyright 2013, 2023 by William Kowinski

April 1968: Martin Luther King

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968,  I was a senior at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  I see myself getting the news in the Gizmo, the campus coffee shop, that night.  I was in some early part of the process of directing a play I'd written.  It had a large cast and involved multimedia, so there was a lot to think about.  I wanted to being thinking about it, to be in that creative cocoon and not naked to the daily onslaught of painful information and images, warping the present and endangering the future, including my imminent one.  I didn't want to think about the killing of the man who shaped nonviolent protest and the civil rights movement.

 I'd been among the thousands who heard him speak at the March on Washington in 1963, when I was still in high school.  As some of the articles that appeared this past week noted, things had changed amazingly in those few years, and I was aware of it at the time.  King had to defend his nonviolent tactics and his goals to more militant new leaders and organizations outflanking him within the world of black activism.  Their grievances and goals were larger, more culturally expansive, and some advocated violence.

At the same time, King had lost support within the Lyndon Johnson administration as well as among many white voters by coming out strongly against American involvement in the Vietnam War.  His new emphasis on economic justice for blacks rather than civil and political rights confused, irritated and alarmed many.

Fifty years later his "I have a dream" speech at the March on Washington is linked with his instant image.  (JFK's face flashes on the screen, a two word soundbite: "Ask Not," followed immediately by MLK "I have a dream today.")  The last speech of his life was in Memphis and referred back to the dream but in the language of the promised land, in which he uttered the eerie words "I may not get there with you."

He clearly did not mean simply that the fight for true equality would take more than his natural lifetime, although if he had, he would have been right. He would be 89 now, and despite a twice-elected black President, inequality and pernicious racism still exist--and black people are still dying, still being killed because of it.

He clearly was talking about the possibility of his early, perhaps imminent death. I recall my reaction the first time I saw a clip of that speech: that's a man who knows--or at least suspects--that he's going to be killed.

One of the 50th anniversary stories last week, by Tom Jackman in the Washington Post, stated that the King children and other family members do not believe that James Earl Ray alone killed Martin Luther King.  He also writes: Until her own death in 2006, Coretta Scott King, who endured the FBI’s campaign to discredit her husband, was open in her belief that a conspiracy led to the assassination."

I know that's what she suspected, but I also know she wasn't always open about it.  In 1976 I was the editor of Washington Newsworks, a weekly alternative newspaper in DC.  (In fact, our offices were in the Adams-Morgan area, parts of which still bore obvious signs of the rioting and burning that followed the King assassination in several cities.)  One of our reporters made contact with investigators who were presenting their evidence to a congressional subcommittee on the King assassination.  It outlined a conspiracy.

We were given an advance look at that report.  We were also told that Coretta King was so interested that she was in Washington to attend these hearings, but in secret. Not publishing this fact was a condition of our getting this exclusive.

I edited and arranged this material into a narrative and we made it our cover story. At the last minute before we went to press the investigator-contact got cold feet about publication. I suggested that if we were prevented from publishing the story, any agreement not to reveal Coretta King's presence in Washington would be nullified.

So he relented and we not only published, but several of us from Newsworks personally delivered a copy of that issue to every congressional office on Capitol Hill.  We may have caught a glimpse of a few Members but we were unable to make personal contact with any.

This stuff was toxic then and even fifty years later is considered out there.  But here's the thing: just because most conspiracy theories are crazy, doesn't mean they all are.  It used to be said that such conspiracies could never happen because the secret couldn't be kept, sooner or later someone would talk.  Well, lots of people have talked and none have been believed.  (Once again, just because there are a lot of crazy people who claim to know something, doesn't mean that some people don't really know something.)

Now of course it's all safely in the "no one will ever know the truth" zone, especially in our era when factual evidence has no special standing.   What we have learned (as Jackman's story outlines) is the antipathy and extra-legal surveillance of King by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, along with the violent antipathy of southern white extremists, who didn't need much encouragement to act.  King must have known something about this.  He may have seen danger to his life in an upcoming protest or he may have sensed something else, but clearly he foresaw the possibility of being killed.



In April 1968 I would have also read or seen the story of how Robert Kennedy spoke to a largely black audience in Indianapolis that same night, and was the one who broke the news to them of King's assassination.  His short heartfelt speech is credited with the fact that no rioting happened in that city that night.  A Washington Post story this week called it "one of the most compelling and overlooked speeches in U.S. political history."

I was not surprised by his speech. For me at that moment Robert Kennedy was the last beacon of hope.  He'd started his campaign for the presidential nomination.  By the time my spring classes and comprehensive exams were over, the primaries would be as well. If he got the nomination,  I looked forward to the possibility of somehow working in his presidential campaign, assuming I would be free to do so--which was, given the draft calls, a large assumption.

But that of course is another story.

That Other Shithole Country

Almost as disheartening as the anti-president himself is his success in corrupting the Republicans in Washington.  It has suddenly struck two of them that he didn't say "shithole countries" at all (describing the homelands of Haitian and African immigrants) and it was a horrible distortion for anyone to say so.  For according to the conservative National Review, he might actually have said "shithouse."

No, you can't make this shit up.  Andy Borowitz, get your shit together.

But as Martin Luther King Day passes, we can at least try to see as clearly as he did.  In this time it is that a lot of Republicans, particularly the antipresident's "base", thoroughly agree with the antipresident's characterization.  Moreover, they are most upset about another shithouse (or shithole) country he didn't name.

That country is the United States of America.  They cannot face that it is rapidly becoming multiracial and more equal.  They would rather side with the avaricious rich out to loot the country including them, as long as they feed their fears of this country.  They have lost more jobs to foreigners who stay in their own countries than they ever will to immigrants, but they don't see them.  

Nothing else matters but that it's not their America anymore.  I imagine some of them are saying this out loud, and many others would agree: This is what happens when you let people from shithole countries in, even if a bunch of them are descendants of unwilling immigrants dragged over as slaves.  Give them equality and what do you get?  A shithole country of your own.

Perhaps President Obama is correct and Fox News covers a different planet, but certainly it covers a different country.  All actual news about the United States as well as the world is fake news because it's not about the country that does not exist that they want to believe they live in.  When you live in a fake country, news about the real country is always fake.

Nobody likes to feel invaded, or powerless, or a victim of injustice.  But beyond empathy, we're looking at a segment of the electorate that hates their own country. Together with those who made deluded or just plain stupid decisions, they voted for the antipresident, and they're more than fine with his reflexive racism and racist vulgarity.

So this is what Republicans are counting on, as they ever more corruptly cozy up to the antipresident, and incidentally, make a dismal authoritarianism more likely: the support of voters who like those in power in the federal government, but hate the shithole country that government is supposed to govern.

The Faith of Martin Luther King

            Martin Luther King, with Rep. John Lewis on right

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality...I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."

Martin Luther King, Jr.
1964
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

The Faith of Barack Obama

On Martin Luther King Day we're apparently allowed to talk about race in America.  (Also in February, I guess, if it's historical.)  This is a simply produced but clear public access video of Barack Obama in 1995, talking about his first book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.  He reads an excerpt and then answers questions.

For some of us, 1995 doesn't seem so very far away, but Barack Obama hadn't even run for public office yet. (You used to have to do that before you run for President.)  He'd been a community organizer in Chicago, gone to law school at Harvard where he achieved the prestigious position of editor of the Law Review, and had begun practicing as a Civil Rights lawyer.

This was filmed at the Cambridge Public Library, which I'd frequented twentysomething years before.  I post it today because of what the future President says about race in America, including quoting Dr. King, and the reality of his own journey to a racial identity.

But of course it's fascinating in light of what became of him.  Everyone will have their own impressions but here are a couple of mine...

In the brief reading when he assumes the voices of black friends and a black mentor, it sure seems he could have had a career as an actor.  August Wilson would have loved to have him for his plays.  Perhaps that's partly why Obama won a Grammy for his audiobook reading of this book.  

Otherwise, when he's introducing the book and especially answering questions, the Obama we came to know is there.  There are pre-echoes of sentiments we heard in his campaigns and presidency.  And even his facility in answering questions, he already looks and sounds like the President at a press conference.  This is pretty fascinating stuff on all levels.

Young Obama's faith in America to work through racial issues, as he worked through his racial identity, remains at his core.  Aside from legal or political efforts,  the cultural inclusiveness he and his family brought to the White House, particularly the recognition of African American cultural expressions as essential to American culture, helped to bring more of MLK's dream to life.

Yet let's face it: all the things that some of us love, from his family to the inclusive White House to how he deliberately inspired young African Americans and other children of color, these also inflamed hatred, and helped bring racism not only into the public spotlight but into power.  America has still not worked through this.

 As young Obama says in this appearance, and as President Obama said in his farewell speech, there has been improvement.  But we're not there yet.  And--to state the obvious from the weekend's headlines--in racial justice as well as related issues, there are hard times ahead.

The Guaranteed Income 2016

For the past 40 years, nobody wanted to hear from the Guaranteed Income, which was once a live proposal and even a live possibility in the 1960s, as a way of circumventing the social disaster in the likely future of large numbers of people losing their jobs and income, because of what was then called automation.

But some folks--mostly academics and Europeans--kept up the conversation, though it could also be uncharitably characterized as a lot of academic noise with some signal.  Then this year, somewhat in response to growing wealth disparity, the idea resurfaced.

There are various names for it--Basic Income Guarantee (BIG, which holds an annual conference and has a website), Universal Basic Income, Guaranteed Income, etc.

One version of it actually made it onto the ballot in Switzerland, not because politicians proposed it but because the idea got 100,000 Swiss signatures.  The proposal was soundly rejected, though the vagueness of the proposal as well as its novelty probably didn't help.  But pilot project versions are proposed or in the works elsewhere in Europe.  There's also a pilot project for the very poor in Kenya and Uganda.

The Swiss debate did recycle basic arguments for the idea--the impact of automation, the economic consequences of large drops in consumer demand due to lost incomes.

In many ways it is still such a novel idea that the New York Times got the topic of the Swiss measure wrong, and it's a good bet that even well-informed Swiss citizens didn't fully understand it.  It is however getting some hearing in the US.

Though initially proposed by economists with no particular political ax to grind, it has usually been supported from the left, most notably by Martin Luther King, Jr. From the right the objection was easy: it's money for nothing, sapping initiative, etc.  (Although the actual objection might be closer to making wage slavery and almost free labor a thing of the past.)  But certain rightists, such as Charles Murray, are now behind their own version.  However, his proposal is basically an efficiency measure aimed at replacing all existing social programs, including Social Security.  No hidden agenda there.

There are Libertarian versions, and the idea is reportedly percolating in Silicon Valley.  But once again, it depends on what's actually being discussed.  In the NY Times, columnist Eduardo Porter argues against a "universal" income proposal--i.e. giving everybody in the country a set amount --regardless of their current wealth.  Which is the easiest proposal to destroy, so it's almost a straw man.   (His other objections are in this dialogue.)

What the idea originally meant I believe was a guaranteed minimum income--that is, a guarantee that annual income won't be less that a certain amount.  Billionaires wouldn't get it, or at least wouldn't get to keep it.

So it seems a long way to go to something practical.  But as a basic idea, it has a certain elegance as a solution to real and growing problems.

First, there's current need.  The stupidities of the Consumer Price Index apparently says that the cost of living is not increasing (at least, that's how Social Security interprets it--no cost of living increase this year.)  But a new study says what people outside the wealth bubble already know--the costs of everyday purchases are rising, and taking more of small and fixed incomes.  Fixed costs, like higher and higher rent, that don't make a dent in big budgets, soak up a perilously greater percentage of the small.

Second, the reason the guaranteed minimum income was first proposed is already a reality, and is likely to get worse.  While certain politicians want to blame the economic troubles of a former working class growing into an underclass on immigration and bad trade deals, the reality is more complex--and apart from things like corporate greed taking jobs to countries where near- or actual slave labor is available, a big cause is robots.  And the trend is "engineering the labor out of the product"--i.e. more robots, and automation of tasks performed not only by factory workers and clerks but skilled office, medical and even professional occupations.  So the future those 60s folks envisioned is getting here fast, and for a growing number of people, already here.

There is the somewhat different problem of the virtual economy--the online centers of wealth--employing relatively few people, and putting a lot of other people out of work (like freelance print journalists I could name.)  In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford notes that General Motors peak earnings were $11 billion in 1979, when it employed 840,000 (union) workers.  In 2012 Google cleared $14 billion, with fewer than 38,000 (mostly nonunion) workers--some of them very well paid, and a lot not so much.  That's a lot of purchasing power gone from the economy, as well as a lot of waste.

In terms of the economy, there's the worry that in the event of a new recession, the usual fiscal tools aren't available (you can't reduce 0% interest rates) and the current support programs aren't going to be sufficient to prevent a steep rise in poverty and further wounds to the economy from less consumer spending.  So something that doesn't exist now will be needed.

Even without steep recession, some economists argue that we can't depend on technology to continue to fuel economic growth, for society at large and certainly not for a great many people.

The guaranteed income idea was always meant to fulfill a social as well as economic need, and indeed, an opportunity for an affluent society to free humans from the increasingly unnecessary and coercive burdens of working for the money to live.  The benefits in human freedom and creativity to make the choice to pursue work and ideas without being forced to serve the self-interests of people in power  might also mean great benefits to human society, and even the economy.

There's also the idea of a revived WPA, supported by the likes of economist Robert Reich, as government employment for public works, which often goes by the name of infrastructure.  There might even be some combination of guaranteed minimum income with public service.

Taking it from a different direction, the time may come fairly soon, under the pressure of the climate crisis and its effects, that the idea of a guaranteed minimum income will seem  like a sensible transition to a radically different economic order in the future.

Update:James Surowiecki's column in the New Yorker summarizes in better depth the history and current status of Guaranteed Income (which he calls the Universal Basic Income or UBI) proposals and concludes: "If the U.B.I. comes to be seen as a kind of insurance against a radically changing job market, rather than simply as a handout, the politics around it will change. When this happens, it’s easy to imagine a basic income going overnight from completely improbable to totally necessary." He starts the column with a real world successful experiment in Canada in the 1970s I wasn't aware of.

Honoring MLK with Action

He is revered for his moral campaign against racial segregation, but the Rev. Martin Luther King also led protests for economic justice and living wages, especially in what turned out to be the last part of his life.  It was at the time one of those protests that he was assassinated.

On Martin Luther King Day 2016, Black Lives Matter protested in San Francisco, and several prominent black film artists announced they would boycott the Oscars, protesting the zero nominations for the second year in a row.  But below the radar, so to speak, there were protests at several US airports that were also in the spirit of Martin Luther King.

They were by airport workers protesting low wages, and advocating the $15 an hour federal minimum wage that President Obama has proposed.  The protests were held at 10 or more airports, including Miami, Chicago, Boston (where there were arrests), Newark, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle.

The wealth of a larger number of wealthy is extreme, especially in comparison to MLK's lifetime.  There is perhaps less dire poverty in America than in the 1960s.  But the relentless struggles of a large number of working poor form a scandal of our time.  Masked by economic indicators that usually only indicate how well the rich are doing, this is our prime area of invisible plight.

These protests shine a light. As time goes on without action, they should grow.  Is there any doubt that Martin Luther King would be saying so?  

The Dreaming Up Martin Luther King Day Quote

"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty."

Martin Luther King, Jr.
1967
excerpted Seattle Times

The irony is obvious. We're going backwards.  For more on the guaranteed income, an idea widely discussed in the 1960s and 70s, see the posts on this blog accessible through the "guaranteed income" label, and this post at Soul of Star Trek.

The Radical King

"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age …. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

By the standards of the time, Martin Luther King was a radical, not only on civil rights but on the war in Vietnam.  Now that aspects of his agenda have been enshrined in law, and he has been enshrined in a holiday, it is well to note that in some other areas he would be considered radical today, especially on the issue of poverty and what today is somewhat confusingly called income inequality.

He was scheduled to march on Washington again in 1968, on the issue of poverty.  He was assassinated before he could.

His passion on the issues of alleviating poverty came from the same source as his passion for ending racial injustice: real human suffering.  An example he noted:

"And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions-no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, “The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair.” She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children."

Does anyone believe this doesn't go on right now in America, almost a half century later?

More to come here on the topic of poverty and the income divide.

The Enduring Dream

I was sitting on the ground in the very hot sun when I watched and listened to the speeches and the songs at the March on Washington in 1963.  I listened to at least parts of the speeches and songs at the 50th anniversary commemoration in front of the Lincoln Memorial literally in my rocking chair, as I accessed the C-Span replay on my laptop.  Nothing after the comma in the preceding sentence would have made any sense at all in 1963.

Some of the words were stirring, some provocative.  But the only real speech that came close to measuring up to that day was President Obama's.  I was proud to hear him single out "those white students who put themselves in harm’s way, even though they didn't have to."  But mostly he praised those who deserved it the most--the African Americans who daily faced personal and institutionalized bigotry, who had lately faced mobs, police dogs, beatings, fire-bombs, white faces contorted with violent hate.   "They were seamstresses and steelworkers, students and teachers, maids and Pullman porters."

It was an important day and a unique experience for me, and I worked hard to write well about it in retrospect.  For the record, my remembrance was published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and the Arcata Eye--though of course my favorite version is right here, a couple of posts ago. The PG played it at the top of the editorial page I'm told, and led to a radio interview with a public radio station.  The interview didn't really add anything, because I'd said what I had to say the best way I could in what I wrote.  And I was beginning to feel strange about drawing attention to myself, when my participation was so insignificant.  But it is one of the most important historical events I was part off--probably the most important. In an interview later in the day, President Obama would say of the original March "I think that day is as important a day as any in our history."

He made the case then and earlier in his speech for why that is so.  It's because ordinary people came together and changed things.  Not just in providing impetus for civil rights legislation that ended segregation enforced by law, or even only on behalf of African Americans.  Martin Luther King's speech made the point that until all were free in America, no one was free.  President Obama noted in his speech:

"   And because they kept marching, America changed. Because they marched, a Civil Rights law was passed. Because they marched, a Voting Rights law was signed. Because they marched, doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else’s laundry or shining somebody else’s shoes. (Applause.) Because they marched, city councils changed and state legislatures changed, and Congress changed, and, yes, eventually, the White House changed. (Applause.)

Because they marched, America became more free and more fair -- not just for African Americans, but for women and Latinos, Asians and Native Americans; for Catholics, Jews, and Muslims; for gays, for Americans with a disability. America changed for you and for me. and the entire world drew strength from that example, whether the young people who watched from the other side of an Iron Curtain and would eventually tear down that wall, or the young people inside South Africa who would eventually end the scourge of apartheid."

Much of President Obama's speech related his ongoing theme of changing the downward plunge of incomes for the non-wealthy few to the goals of the March--which after all was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

He captured the feeling of that day when he talked about the spirit there of determination, compassion, empathy and courage, and how the March was all about imagining a better future.

"But it also teaches us that the promise of this nation will only be kept when we work together. We’ll have to reignite the embers of empathy and fellow feeling, the coalition of conscience that found expression in this place 50 years ago." 

"That’s where courage comes from -- when we turn not from each other, or on each other, but towards one another, and we find that we do not walk alone. That’s where courage comes from. 

And with that courage, we can stand together for good jobs and just wages. With that courage, we can stand together for the right to health care in the richest nation on Earth for every person.  With that courage, we can stand together for the right of every child, from the corners of Anacostia to the hills of Appalachia, to get an education that stirs the mind and captures the spirit, and prepares them for the world that awaits them. 

With that courage, we can feed the hungry, and house the homeless, and transform bleak wastelands of poverty into fields of commerce and promise.

America, I know the road will be long, but I know we can get there. Yes, we will stumble, but I know we’ll get back up. That’s how a movement happens. That’s how history bends. That's how when somebody is faint of heart, somebody else brings them along and says, come on, we’re marching. 

There’s a reason why so many who marched that day, and in the days to come, were young -- for the young are unconstrained by habits of fear, unconstrained by the conventions of what is. They dared to dream differently, to imagine something better."

Update: A few links I forgot: former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau on the March,             expostfactoid's grudging approval of President Obama's speech, and what's still the best piece on the March in the context of the Civil Rights movement I've seen on the web, by the great Louis Menand at the New Yorker.

Before leaving thoughts of the March behind for now, I must mention the great American novel The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers which revolves around the March, and certainly the questions of race in American life.  The March scenes are haunting and magical, and though certain events are fabulous in the original sense, some are based on little known aspects of the day. If I were teaching a course on the Great American Novel I would add to the justly selected standards Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby two contemporary novels: Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Powers' The Time Of Our Singing.

An Altered State: My March on Washington 1963

I was 17 when I participated in what was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. I was a student at a Catholic high school, and heard my own beliefs expressed by President Kennedy in his television address that June: “We are confronted primarily by a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

In the weekly newspaper for the Greensburg, Pennsylvania diocese, the Catholic Accent, I read about an organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that was inviting people to go to the March. I contacted the priest who was named and he talked to my parents. He must have been convincing because I got permission to go.

But I got my first indication of just how small this group was going to be when I attended a meeting, and it was two priests and me. A photographer from the Accent snapped our picture as I pretended to paint the already completed banner we would carry.

As it turned out we were the only three people from the diocese to march under that banner. We would meet many other people from the Pittsburgh area, organized by religious groups of various denominations as well as by labor unions and civil rights groups.

Many traveled to the March from all over the country by bus, and a few by plane, including celebrities from Hollywood and legendary entertainer and activist Josephine Baker from Paris. I boarded a special train from Pittsburgh, one of the twenty or so originating from various places that were added to take people to the March. Recently reviewing video from that day posted on YouTube, I was amazed to see a few frames of my 17 year-old self arriving at Washington’s Union Station (at about the 11:32, 11:33 marks), walking towards the camera and trying to look appropriately serious, in my dark suit, white shirt and tie.

I also looked alert. Vigilance to the possibility of violence was universal that day. From police commissioner Bull Connor unleashing police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, to the murder of Medgar Evers outside his home in Mississippi, it had been a brutal summer in the South. It’s been estimated that over 14,000 demonstrators across the South (including high school students) were arrested during those months, with at least one death.

When I got home I wrote (in the Catholic Accent) of the “dedicated and dignified fervor” around me at the march. But high spirits were also part of that day’s rhythm. From Union Station to the Lincoln Memorial there was always singing. For me it started even earlier, when I restlessly explored the train, wandering through one quiet car after another until I suddenly pushed open a heavy door to a car literally packed to the rafters with young people. Some were perched in the luggage racks. Several at the far end of the car were playing guitars, and everyone was singing.

The march itself was like one long song. It is more powerful in my memory than the hours of speeches at the reflecting pool. Looking into the faces of the people nearest me, and all of us looking around, my feelings became a reflection of what we felt in common.

We were astonished by our numbers, by the fact of us all there, of the reality that was completely new. The overwhelming mood was wonder. It was a sustained altered state, a living dream.

We had a sense of unanticipated numbers on the march, but the dimensions of the day weren’t clear until we got to the reflecting pool. So many people (since settled at 250,000, the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that date) and yet the transfixing feeling of peace—I don’t think anyone had foreseen this.

I saw the joy and wonder and the tears as black people of different ages and from different parts of the country saw each other there. I was also aware that in this context they could see a young white face undistorted by hate or contempt.

We’d marched and sung together, but even as an audience for the program at the Lincoln Memorial, the interactions didn’t stop-- interactions that in the mid-1960s were still rare.

Now we stood in line together at portable water fountains and toilets. We bunched and sprawled on the grass together, sweating under the same steamy sun, both drowsy and responsive to the inspiring words and music coming through the not always comprehensible fuzz of the sound system. We felt careful courtesy becoming a release into a common regard. We looked at each other.


We listened to Dr. Martin Luther King together, quoting an American hymn—“From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” We heard his American litany reach its crescendo: “Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!...Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!”

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring... from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’"

He spoke of a dream that he saw reflected in the water in front of him.

The official intent of the March was to support passage of the Civil Rights bill that President Kennedy sent to Congress a few days after his June speech. Immediately afterwards I recall commentary in the press calling it a failure because that bill was stalled in Congress (it would pass in early 1964.) Today the march is better remembered than the political reason for it.

Race has still not been erased as deep separation, nor has full racial justice been achieved. But fifty years after that day, my memories aren’t of politics or even history. They are physical. They are of a future glimpsed by being lived.

copyright 2013 William Kowinski

The Speech (Continued)

I should have known that if I wanted something useful on the Inaugural Address I'd best go to the New Yorker.  Editor David Remnick found a historical parallel with FDR: In 1933, F.D.R. came into office with an Inaugural Speech calling for fearlessness in the face of horrific adversity; four years later, with greater confidence, he outlined the framework of a liberal state—“the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization.” That seemed to be what Barack Obama was after Monday, an echo of F.D.R. in 1937—a reassertion of government, of commonality.

I see Remnick's point in how Obama's two speeches contrast.  But in this speech President Obama did what he has been doing since the weeks before the 2012 campaign began, and all the way through it: redefining the center, the common sense space where most Americans agree.  Most Americans support Medicare, equal pay, immigration reform, addressing the climate crisis--even gay rights and gay marriage, and everything he has proposed on guns.  Most Americans even want the government to regulate commerce, safeguard public health and fix the damn bridges.  What is so controversial, except with a shrinking minority of loudmouths?  

Also at the New Yorker, Amy Davidson noted a transfigured echo of Lincoln's second Inaugural in this section from Obama's: "Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together."  It's the lash and sword sentence.  She didn't need to point out that "half-slave and half-free" are also Lincoln, as in the echo of "anew."  JFK echoed the "anew" in his Inaugural, and quoted the "half slave and half free" line on another occasion.  The "by lash" is of course a reference to slavery, and it is a reference of particular power from the nation's first black President, as well as his recognition of a past unforgotten in the black community.

Early in the speech, he linked the Constitution ("We, the people") and Declaration of Independence ("most evident of truths" etc.) to Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial which in essence was simply that: a link from the Founding assertions to the future:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

Well, that has special meaning for me because he was talking about my footprints--I was in that crowd on the Mall .  We were 400,000 strong that hot August day.  This year they were a million (including Mike and Alice) from all over the country and the world.

Amy Davidson moves smoothly from the Inaugural Address to the only piece I've read all the way through on the First Lady's Inaugural Ball dress, and her sense of style.  Cool.
 

The Dream and the Reality of 2012

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post today on the Romney ads accusing President Obama of ending the work requirement for welfare in some states--a charge that Romney is making on the stump, and that reportedly will be the substance of Rick Santorum's speech to the GOPer convention today:

Beyond being flatly false, Romney’s ads are puzzlingly anachronistic. Welfare is a shrunken program...Meanwhile, few think the problem in this country is that the poor don’t want to work...

In modern politics, however, when a campaign begins doubling and tripling down on an unusual line of attack, it’s because it has reams of data showing the attack is working. What’s worrying is why this ad might be working.

 

Political scientist Michael Tesler partnered with the YouGov online polling service to test the question on 1,000 respondents... reports Tesler, “racial resentment affected whether people thought Romney will help the poor, the middle class and African Americans. Moreover, seeing the ad did not activate other attitudes, such as party or ideological self-identification. It only primed racial resentment.”

This is where things get tricky. Romney’s welfare ads are not racist. But the evidence suggests that they work particularly well if the viewer is racist, or at least racially resentful. And these are the ads that are working so unexpectedly well that welfare is now the spine of Romney’s 2012 on-air message in the battleground states."

Andrew Sullivan on his Daily Beast blog:

I try not to jump to conclusions about racial appeals - but the two-pronged campaign assault by Romney, on Medicare and welfare, does not rise to the level, in my view, of plausible deniability.
The key to both is the classic notion that unworthy blacks are taking from worthy whites. And so the Medicare ad uses white old faces expressing shock at the notion that Obama would transfer money from their retirement healthcare for health insurance for those without, i.e. the poor, who tend to be more minority than the rich. It's basically a lie - Ryan would cut the same from Medicare as Obama would, and there is no direct quid pro quo between the two policies. It's also dishonest: Ryan and Romney are promising to cut Medicare spending and yet are running against Obama for doing exactly that.

Then there's the simple bald lie that Obama is allowing welfare recipients to escape work requirements. I don't remember a campaign in my lifetime which based an entire line of attack on a total fabrication, in fact a reverse of the truth. The welfare waivers are designed exclusively to experiment with how to increase the effectiveness of the work requirement for welfare, and waivers have been granted to Republican governors as well. And yet we get this from the Romney campaign:

"Our most effective ad is our welfare ad," a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O'Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. "It's new information."

It's not. It's new disinformation. It's Orwellian propaganda.

 The simple assumption of racial politics as the driver of campaigns is what's striking. Karl Rove became what he is - a persistent whitehead on the face of American politics - because he learned the art of race-baiting politics in the South. Romney - having given up on Latinos and blacks and gays - is now betting the bank on the white resentment that has been fast losing potency since the 1990s. "

Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memoral in Washington, 49 years ago today:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Reporter David Schuster reported that a GOP convention attendee was ejected for throwing nuts at an African American camerawoman for CNN and shouting, "This is how we feed animals." CNN confirmed to TPM.

Update: The chief difference between this year's race baiting by the GOP and past examples, cf. 1988 is that some of the media reporters are calling them on it, to their faces.  Josh Marshall at TMP quotes another example.

MLK Day in Retrospect

Martin Luther King is in that middle area of figures considered "great" enough to have a holiday: he was too long ago to be real to most people, and he's not yet a figure so remote that he's going to be used to sell used cars or shill for a sale on his Day, as are the figures of Washington and Lincoln.  But when GOPers who stoked the suspicion and hate that enveloped him in a penumbra of violence for what was left of his young life are blithely praising his idealism and "hope for the future," then the attempted co option has reached beyond reality.

It's pretty clear that while culturally and in certain legal areas, African Americans are better off than in the 1960s, in other ways they are in worse circumstances that are worsening.  The indefensibly high rates of incarceration of black men generally, and specifically for crimes that whites much more often escape such penalties, is clearly racist in effect and to a great extent in cause.  This is one of the more obvious remnants of racism.

The promises of the 1950s and 1960s have not been fulfilled in other ways.  De facto segregation of schools, separate and unequal, are still the law of the land, however formally illegal.  De facto retrenchments of voting rights are rising, with the poll tax substitute of ID laws.  And an entire state of Michigan is denying entire cities with majority black populations of the right to vote for any local official, by installing GOPer governor appointed dictators.  This is as clear a tyranny as any this continent has ever seen.

But of course the most telling fact is the economic injustice that has swollen the wealth of the inconceivably wealthy 1% and is sending more and more people off the cliff of ordinary life, among the 99%.  People without homes, without enough food, without medical care, without the means to have a decent life--those numbers are growing, and growing fastest among the most vulnerable populations, which certainly includes minorities, and certainly includes African Americans.

In that context, the South Carolina GOPers who assembled for their debate on Martin Luther King Day--as other GOPer audiences in other primary debates--are showing  faces of America carefully hidden behind suburban doors and suburban secret codes, small town murmurs and city euphemisms, for decades.  But these days the mobs are whipping into a frenzy again, and the white sheets are there for all to see.  Their hate extends to all other colors, to any other religion or culture (they even booed the idea of applying the Golden Rule), and even to any foreign language (French, say, or science.)  These are shock troops of the Dark Ages, and if they succeed, those times will hasten. 

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live...Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul."

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Address

A Faith in Hope

President Obama spoke at the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.  These are some of his words:

"We forget now, but during his life, Dr. King wasn’t always considered a unifying figure. Even after rising to prominence, even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King was vilified by many, denounced as a rabble rouser and an agitator, a communist and a radical. He was even attacked by his own people, by those who felt he was going too fast or those who felt he was going too slow; by those who felt he shouldn’t meddle in issues like the Vietnam War or the rights of union workers. We know from his own testimony the doubts and the pain this caused him, and that the controversy that would swirl around his actions would last until the fateful day he died.

I raise all this because nearly 50 years after the March on Washington, our work, Dr. King’s work, is not yet complete. We gather here at a moment of great challenge and great change. In the first decade of this new century, we have been tested by war and by tragedy; by an economic crisis and its aftermath that has left millions out of work, and poverty on the rise, and millions more just struggling to get by. Indeed, even before this crisis struck, we had endured a decade of rising inequality and stagnant wages. In too many troubled neighborhoods across the country, the conditions of our poorest citizens appear little changed from what existed 50 years ago -– neighborhoods with underfunded schools and broken-down slums, inadequate health care, constant violence, neighborhoods in which too many young people grow up with little hope and few prospects for the future.

Our work is not done. And so on this day, in which we celebrate a man and a movement that did so much for this country, let us draw strength from those earlier struggles. First and foremost, let us remember that change has never been quick. Change has never been simple, or without controversy. Change depends on persistence. Change requires determination." 

" Dr. King refused to accept what he called the “isness” of today. He kept pushing towards the “oughtness” of tomorrow."

And so, as we think about all the work that we must do –- rebuilding an economy that can compete on a global stage, and fixing our schools so that every child -- not just some, but every child -- gets a world-class education, and making sure that our health care system is affordable and accessible to all, and that our economic system is one in which everybody gets a fair shake and everybody does their fair share, let us not be trapped by what is. (Applause.) We can’t be discouraged by what is. We’ve got to keep pushing for what ought to be, the America we ought to leave to our children, mindful that the hardships we face are nothing compared to those Dr. King and his fellow marchers faced 50 years ago, and that if we maintain our faith, in ourselves and in the possibilities of this nation, there is no challenge we cannot surmount.

And just as we draw strength from Dr. King’s struggles, so must we draw inspiration from his constant insistence on the oneness of man; the belief in his words that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” It was that insistence, rooted in his Christian faith, that led him to tell a group of angry young protesters, “I love you as I love my own children,” even as one threw a rock that glanced off his neck."

"And so at this moment, when our politics appear so sharply polarized, and faith in our institutions so greatly diminished, we need more than ever to take heed of Dr. King’s teachings. He calls on us to stand in the other person’s shoes; to see through their eyes; to understand their pain. He tells us that we have a duty to fight against poverty, even if we are well off; to care about the child in the decrepit school even if our own children are doing fine; to show compassion toward the immigrant family, with the knowledge that most of us are only a few generations removed from similar hardships.

To say that we are bound together as one people, and must constantly strive to see ourselves in one another, is not to argue for a false unity that papers over our differences and ratifies an unjust status quo. As was true 50 years ago, as has been true throughout human history, those with power and privilege will often decry any call for change as “divisive.” They’ll say any challenge to the existing arrangements are unwise and destabilizing. Dr. King understood that peace without justice was no peace at all; that aligning our reality with our ideals often requires the speaking of uncomfortable truths and the creative tension of non-violent protest.

But he also understood that to bring about true and lasting change, there must be the possibility of reconciliation; that any social movement has to channel this tension through the spirit of love and mutuality.

If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there; that the businessman can enter tough negotiations with his company’s union without vilifying the right to collectively bargain. He would want us to know we can argue fiercely about the proper size and role of government without questioning each other’s love for this country -- (applause) -- with the knowledge that in this democracy, government is no distant object but is rather an expression of our common commitments to one another. He would call on us to assume the best in each other rather than the worst, and challenge one another in ways that ultimately heal rather than wound."

"It is precisely because Dr. King was a man of flesh and blood and not a figure of stone that he inspires us so. His life, his story, tells us that change can come if you don’t give up. He would not give up, no matter how long it took, because in the smallest hamlets and the darkest slums, he had witnessed the highest reaches of the human spirit; because in those moments when the struggle seemed most hopeless, he had seen men and women and children conquer their fear; because he had seen hills and mountains made low and rough places made plain, and the crooked places made straight and God make a way out of no way.

And that is why we honor this man –- because he had faith in us. And that is why he belongs on this Mall -– because he saw what we might become. That is why Dr. King was so quintessentially American -- because for all the hardships we’ve endured, for all our sometimes tragic history, ours is a story of optimism and achievement and constant striving that is unique upon this Earth. And that is why the rest of the world still looks to us to lead. This is a country where ordinary people find in their hearts the courage to do extraordinary things; the courage to stand up in the face of the fiercest resistance and despair and say this is wrong, and this is right; we will not settle for what the cynics tell us we have to accept and we will reach again and again, no matter the odds, for what we know is possible."

After MLK

Little more than a week after gun violence killed a federal judge and five citizens and severely wounded a member of Congress, we have a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., shot and killed at the age of 39. Weeks later, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed at the age of 43, while running for President. It only takes a glance at, for example, this collection of quotes from MLK to see how far--and how much farther away--we are from becoming the country and the society MLK envisioned. His words may as well come from Mars, they are so far from today's public dialogue. The prevailing attitudes about guns is one depressing indication, but the militarization of spirit is evident throughout. MLK's words--beacons of hope in their time, inspiring action--are today considered heavenly idealism, with genuflection and bows of the head as the response, rather than consideration or determination.

Just about the only positive that can be noted is expressed in the photo above, one of my favorites of the past several years which I've been looking for an excuse to publish. You can read all American history, and particularly the decades from the 1960s to 2008, in Sidney Poiter's face as he embraces President Barack Obama. It was a political outcome only someone with the vision of MLK could have imagined in the 1960s.

But while racial justice was the cause of his life, it was not the limit of his concerns or his vision. Both he and Robert Kennedy had visions of a better America--not just better in some absolute idealistic moral and political sense, but better because the times demanded it. To meet the challenges of their present and their future--which is our present and onrushing future--they knew what was required. It's easy to miss the progress we've made in certain areas. But in others we not only haven't moved forward, we're sliding back dangerously. If we measure 2010 against MLK's words, that sobering conclusion becomes hard to avoid.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.