On MLK and the MYTH of Black Leadership Past and Present

On this, the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I reflect back on a conversation I had with a good friend of mine a couple of weeks ago.

He made the statement:

"Black people need a leader. You know, like Dr. King was."

That statement then prompted me to get into an hour long disucssion with him about "The Movement", Dr. King's legacy, and Black leadership in the black community in general.

What has always infuriated me around this time of year (MLK Day/Black History Month) is how the Civil Rights Movement is characterized by the mainstram media as a single minded movement LEAD by King that ultimately culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

How many times will we hear the "I Have A Dream" speech in the next 30 days?

The historical revisionists would like us to believe that it was simply Dr. King who put Black America on his back and carried us to the promised land. They would want you to believe that he WAS the singular figure that, in essence, MOVED the movement. I disagree. I will concede to the fact that King was the charismatic face of the movement...and his comrades knew that a man of such conscience and integrity would be key in marketing this non-violent movement to a government and an American public that were still in large scale resistence to the push for Civil Rights. King was the right face, the right voice, and had the right message at the right time which helped further legitimize the civil rights agenda. What I wholeheartedly object to is the way the contributions of many others (most of them nameless and faceless) are diminished in favor of perpetually dramatizing and glamourizing the achievements of KING alone.

What about Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Madger Evers, A. Philip Randolph, Joseph Lowery, Stokley Carmichael (Later known as Kwame Ture), Malcolm X, and numerous others who did not have the benefit of high profile recognition but were out on the picket lines resisting. Their stories go largely untold in favor of, every year, re-dramatizing King's story in a way that does his life, the lives of Black Americans at the time, and the life of the movement no suitable justice.

Do they tell us about the original proposed March on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin some 20 years before the ACTUAL March occured? NO!

Do they tell us that this proposed march was in reaction to the continued discrimination in jobs in the defense industries and that there were 100,000 people committed to go and march on Washington in July of 1941 and that in reaction to this President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 which barred discrimination defense industries and federal bureaus. NO! (note: when the order was issued the march was called off).

Do they tell us that Randolph and Rustin were major organizers of the March on Washington in 1963? NO!

Do they tell us that Bayard Rustin was a gay man and one of King's closest advisors yet was forced to remain in the shadows of the movement once the rumors of his sexuality went public? NO!

Do they tell us about some of the ideological differences between various organizations during the movement and the tension that those differences caused? (i.e. NAACP's focus on desegregating through the courts vs. SNCC's direct action campiagns...ex. sit-ins)? NO!

Do they tell us how Stokely Carmichael and SNCC's militancy began to influence and inform King's thinking towards the end of his life. NO! (In fact, it is with Stokely that we hear King refer to African-Americans for the first time as BLACK)

I say all this to say that it continues to bother me when people reduce the movement to being a collection of colored folks who simply and uncritically followed ONE individual (King). Dr King was one of many amazing human beings who collectively challenged a white supremacist system; and not always from the same perspective/point of view.

The Black community is not and never has been a monolith. We are a collection of persons with multiple personalities, perspectives, and YES, contradicitions.

I expressed all of this to my friend in our argument/debate and all he could get out of it was that I was apparently DISRESPECTING the legacy of Dr. King.

I just shook my head on the other end of the phone and removed myself from the debate...frustrated I thought to myself; Is this what our problem is? Have we been fooled into believing that there is some Black savior that is coming to take us all out of the fucked up conditions that many of us are still living in?

I left that conversation feeling really sad about the state of affairs amongst our people. The powers-that-be really want us to believe it was JUST King that brought us over...that he was our "Haley's comet"...and that we won't ever see times as revolutionary as those for generations to come unless we anoint someone as our Chocolate Messiah.

They don't want us to believe that the seeds of a revolution could be in each of our own hands.

The sad part is that I don't think a critical mass of us believe it anymore.

So if you do ONE thing on MLK Day...Please...DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. Search for the truth. Continue to pay homage to this great man but seek to place his life and what he achieved in its PROPER context.

PeaceLoveandEternity

Q