Just a reminder that our current civic saints were not universally beloved … in fact, they are saints precisely because they were prepared to not be universally loved.
August 9, 1966 – WHY MUST WE PUT UP WITH DAILY BRAWLS? | Chicago Tribune Archive.
Part of making change is making trouble for someone; leaving your own comfort — meager as it may be — to put your self in a position to make someone uncomfortable; agitating. And those bold enough to confront the public conscience will always be accused of vanity. After all, drawing attention is the goal. People would prefer to look away, and they will if you let them.
There was no MLK Day in 1966. MLK wasn’t “MLK” until we co-opted his most uplifting and comforting words as part of our contemporary civic religion. “Civil Rights” was not an anodyne cliche, something to be taken for granted even in its plain absence. Our civic saints are never saints in their own time; they are troublesome, controversial figures, who might well have made their friends nearly uncomfortable as their foes. We should only ask ourselves if we are controversial enough to live up to their good example.
fredrichlariccia says
as a child of the 60’s. I can still hear his passionate voice of righteous outrage against American apartheid and the immorality of the Vietnam War.
I hung a picture in my room of JFK, MLK and RFK together
and I can still hear Moms Mabley singing ” Abraham, Martin and John’. It still chokes me up.
How can a country that claims to believe in equal justice for all murder its four most principled, progressive apostles ? It’s just too sad for words.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
joeltpatterson says
From historian Rick Perlstein:
jconway says
This 2008 article is a little dated with the hopeful optimism for Obama, but otherwise offers a decisive look at how the MLK marches in the solidly unionized and Democratic ‘bungalow belts’ of Chicago giving birth to the proto-Reagan Democrat. Taking the advice of Gerald Ford, the liberal Republican Charles Percy flip flopped on his support of the Open Housing Law that MLK was marching for, which won him surprising majorities in white ethnic precincts that had voted almost 6-1 for Kennedy just six years earlier.
Trickle up says
to block the doorways.
SomervilleTom says
The irony of reading so many “they weren’t nice” complaints on the various I-93 protest threads on Martin Luther King day was stunning.
Growing up in a MD suburb of Washington DC, I grew up with protests and demonstrations that weren’t “nice”. They were accompanied by the same chorus of complaints from otherwise well-intentioned people, including a great many self-professed liberals.
Martin Luther King, in particular, was savaged by mainstream politicians across the spectrum. He was derided by the mainstream media. The brainwashing of the mainstream media against the civil rights movement was nearly as pervasive as the similar brainwashing against Russia (then known as “the Soviet Union”).
News outlets nearly always made sure to lift the most incendiary fragments possible out of the speeches of MLK, and nearly always accompanied them by clips and accounts of violent demonstrators. It only takes a dozen or so people to turn over a car. In a demonstration with 100,000 participants, you can be sure that the news reports would show the overturned car and skip the demonstration.
Lest anyone think we’ve “moved beyond” this treatment of “uppity ni**ers”, I encourage you re-examine the “Jeremiah Wright” controversy of the 2008 presidential campaign.
Osama Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda showed us, in 2001, how a small collection of radicals can fight well beyond their class by turning the passions of their opposition against itself. OBL and AQ wanted to demonstrate several things to their Muslim peers:
– American government was obsessed with money and power
– Americans were hypocrites who cared only about themselves
– America was more vulnerable to financial attack than any other vector
– Americans hated Muslims and wanted to do unspeakable things to them given the chance
None of these points were particularly innovative or new. Each had been repeated many times by many people (changing “Muslim” to other targets as needed, of course).
Had OBL and AQ organized a protest and issued press releases stating the above, they would have been simply ignored. Any media coverage would have described them as “radical Muslim extremists” (which they were) whose aims were anathema to civilized society.
The strategy they chose, instead, was to use terror (the 9/11 attacks) to provoke an “immune response” from the US, and let the actions of the US carry their message to the world.
That strategy worked. The US spent a decade showing the world through our own actions that each of the alleged points against us was valid and accurate. Our own actions during the decade that followed 9/11 recruited more “Jihad soldiers” than OBL or AQ could ever have accomplished on their own. The result is today’s ISIS.
I am, of course, not advocating AQ-like terror as a demonstration tactic (in spite of what right-wingers will claim). I am instead asserting that straight-ahead demonstrate-and-issue-press-releases tactics are utterly useless in today’s society if demonstrators want to actually CHANGE society.
Marshall McLuhan attempted to teach us nearly fifty years ago that “The medium is the massage (sic)“.
OBL and AQ learned that lesson. How many of us can say the same?
Charley on the MTA says
I think you went off on a pretty bizarre tangent there with Osama and ISIS.
King and the demonstrators were making a statement and shaking things up, but the whole point was that they were *not* a physical threat, only a threat to business-as-usual.
AQ and ISIS appeal to their constituencies based on a pornography of violence. That’s the opposite of Gandhi and King, and of civilization generally.
I just don’t know what your point is w/r/t effective advocacy. I don’t get it.
SomervilleTom says
My point is that when a radical advocacy group faces overwhelming power against it — either physical power (as in AQ) or media power (as in the Occupy and Black Lives Matter groups), effective protests require finding a way to turn the overwhelming power against itself. The paradigm is a virus that provokes an anti-immune response from its host.
Regarding MLK, we can comfortably say today that they “were making a statement and shaking things up” and “were *not* a physical threat, only a threat to business-as-usual”. While these events were unfolding, that was not the case. The very piece you quote in your thread-starter includes “Chicago is retrogressing to the condition of a fronteir town in early days, where shots are fired in the air and challenges to combat are hurled. The town marshals are busier than in a TV western”. “Challenges to combat” and busy town marshalls are metaphors of physical threats, are they not?
I’m not sure I get how you can write the text of your thread-starter and also this comment that I’m responding to. The news media and government responses of the day portrayed MLK as radical, threatening, dangerous, anti-American, and all that. He was NOT favorably compared with Gandhi during MLK’s lifetime, at least by these sources. The FBI persecution and pursuit of MLK is infamous.
At the time, the mainstream news media and most of the political establishment saw precious little difference between MLK, the NAACP, and the far more violent individuals and groups like MalcomX, Louis Farrakhan, and their followers. I encourage you to explore the Johnson Hinton incident.
As I said, I’m not defending the strategy or tactics of AQ and/or ISIS. I’m instead attempting to describe an underlying paradigm that makes them effective. “Pornographic violence” is not new. Paralyzing the world’s greatest military superpower and driving the world’s wealthiest nation into near bankruptcy IS new. Provoking a decade of US kidnapping, torture, abuse, and murder is new.
While the power arrayed against “Black Lives Matter” may not be physical power (at least right now), it is nevertheless overwhelming. Conventional demonstration and protest approaches are unlikely to be effective. The Occupy movement has apparently failed to achieve ANY long-term change.
I suggest that groups like “Black Lives Matter” must therefore understand how to leverage that overwhelming power against itself. It appears to me that I-93 protests are a step in that direction.
David says
is always worth reading. This passage struck me this year:
merrimackguy says
I just read “Team of Rivals” which reinforced what I knew about the period prior to the Civil War. Abolitionists were considered extremists and most people just wanted everything to stay the way it was. It was the spreading to the West, as well as what happened when slaves went to the North that caused the trouble. Even some of those opposed to slavery wanted blacks to go somewhere else.
jconway says
He would’ve stopped the expansion of slavery westward but kept it where it was. The fact that it was his election that caused the South to secede should negate any asinine argument about state’s rights, stopping federal power, or the South preserving any kind of republican virtue. That lost cause bullshit is just that.
Us northerners elected a guy who wasn’t even going to ban slavery in the South and they still bolted, and by 1863 the political will and military necessity of complete abolition overruled Lincoln’s former principles (which to wit, may have been political posturing rather than sincerely held). Sad to see students at U Chicago fail to realize this basic history, so thick is the libertarian disdain of Lincoln.
merrimackguy says
economic value of slavery. It really was what created wealth in the South. Also the agrarian economy retarded industrialization.
Hard to believe that only 150 years ago people in the US were okay with people owning people. Romans owning Gauls maybe, but even medieval peasants and Russian serfs weren’t slaves. Just head shaking really.
jconway says
It’s even more twisted that the many thousands of young white men, many of them subsistence or tenant farmers themselves, gave their lives fighting for the ownership class right to own slaves they could never hope to acquire for themselves. It says a lot about racial resentment politics that this urge to “at least be better than a n****r” still inspires similar militancy today.
And at least two states still insist on commemorating Lee alongside Dr. King, the same day in Arkansas and the same month in Virginia (where it was decoupled from King Day but paired with Stonewall Jackson Day).
Mark L. Bail says
do.
paulsimmons says
…and he was politically isolated.
This excerpt from Channel 5 in Chicago gives an overview of the municipal politics:
In addition King was sabotaged by the Left in Chicago. In his attempts to fight racism in housing his biggest enemy was Saul Alinsky. The final insult was the 1967 New Politics Convention, where King was heckled by the delegates.
petr says
Harvard’s late Professor of Christian Morals , Peter Gomes, preaching on “All Saints Day” at Duke (he was also a visiting professor at Duke) about, appropriately enough, what it means to be a ‘saint’ and upon the notion of ‘militancy’. The video is the entire service but the homily begins at about minute 40. I recommend it to anybody who found the above paragraph from Charley resonant…