President Obama, Doctor West, Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Tradition

Political Traditions are crucially important. They are in some respects a non-renewable resource. We are thus well advised to protect them from manipulation. So, while I am not nearly as eloquent as Doctor West, and while I do not agree with everything he says here - mostly because my own religious commitments are roughly non-existent - I nonetheless find it ironic that Obama is seeking to lay claim to the tradition of the struggle for civil rights via a symbolic appropriation of Martin Luther King, Jr.. The irony is two-fold. First, as Doctor West points out the President's party and policies are rife with that Doctor King would find deeply objectionable. There is no need to recount the items. But even the sanitized version of King that I have repeatedly complained about here over the years would surely resist being recruited into the mainstream of the contemporary Democratic political establishment. And, second, it is important to remember that, notwithstanding his accomplishments and stature, Dr. King's relationship to 'the movement' in fact was fraught with conflict and contestation. I have mentioned that here before as well.  The inauguration today is yet another attempt to sanitize the American political tradition and it's debt to African Americans.
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P.S.: And if you think that centrists like Obama are the only ones seeking to appropriate the King legacy, have a look at this post and the various links it contains.

Recommended Reading: Pragmatic Utopianism as "The Future of Black Politics"

You can find a smart and provocative essay by Michael Dawson (along with a set of pointed responses) here at The Boston Review. I agree with a much of what Dawson has to say about the crucial importance of African-Americans to any viable progressive political mobilization in the U.S.. Yet I am persuaded too by Tommie Shelby's insistence (in his comment on Dawson) on the importance of multi-racial political organizations. (More generally, I wonder if Dawson might craft a reply by building upon the distinction, articulated by Bob Moses and Charles Payne as they channel Ella Baker, between mobilization and organization and on the crucial importance of both for progressive politics.) Finally, and perhaps gratuitously, I wish Dawson had felt less need to rely on the pronouncements of obscurantist leftist "theorists" like Badiou and Žižek. I simply have no patience for them. He should stick with the tradition of African-American political thought from DuBois through King and Malcolm X to Walter Mosley. Reconnect that to the American political theory of pragmatism from Dewey to Unger and Cornel West, and you have more than sufficient resources to spell out the sort of pragmatic utopianism Dawson advocates.

Passings ~ Dorothy Height (1912-2010)

Dorothy Height on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial
at the March on Washington in 1963 (Photo: AP).

Dorothy Height, a key, if unheralded leader in the American movement for Civil Rights has died. You can find an obituary here in The New York Times.

The key observation from The Times report reads: "If Ms. Height was less well known than her contemporaries in either the civil rights or women’s movement, it was perhaps because she was doubly marginalized, pushed offstage by women’s groups because of her race and by black groups because of her sex. Throughout her career, she responded quietly but firmly, working with a characteristic mix of limitless energy and steely gentility to ally the two movements in the fight for social justice."

Height was hardly the only female civil rights activist to resist this dual exclusion - think of Ella Baker, for instance - and while the movement for civil rights was a crucial one, it is useful to recall its flaws even as we celebrate its accomplishments and keep an eye on its still unattained goals. The same, of course, is true of the women's movement.

Heroines ~ Ella Baker (13 December 1903 – 13 December 1986)

Ella Baker, official of the Southern Conference
Educational Fund, 3 January 1968 ~ Photograph: AP.

Ella Baker was born and died on this day. Baker was an amazing woman ~ a radical and a democrat. Here is how Robert Moses recollects her views, which had an immense impact on he and many students in the early 1960s:

"As executive director of SCLC, a position she took reluctantly, Miss Baker had hoped to steer the ministers who formed its membership into grassroots community organizing for civil rights. She was doubtful and doubts and dissatisfaction with the organization deepened with her involvement. Southern ministers, she felt, weren't inclined toward grassroots organizing because of the hierarchical structures of their churches. And, more broadly she felt, as she put it, that it "[handicaps] oppressed people to depend largely on a [single] leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means that the media made him and the media may undo him. . . . My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice.
. . . People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves."

Her style strained an already uncomfortable political relationship and finally made it impossible for Miss Baker to continue with SCLC. "She wasn't church," one SCLC minister said. She wasn't deferential. She wasn't a man in an organization that was patriarchal as well as hierarchical. And what I think was probably the most critical tension: her concept of leadership, that it should emerge from the community and be helped in its growth by grassroots organizers, clashed with the SCLC's idea of projecting and protecting a single charismatic national leader."

Looking Back?

This is a now iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at Men's 200 meter Medal Ceremony the 1968 Olympics. Smith won the Gold Medal and Carlos the Bronze. Australian Peter Norman won the Silver Medal and wore a human rights badge in solidarity with the two Americans. Smith and Carlos have been in the news several times recently here and here. Forty years later the pervasive racism these athletes were protesting persists in the United States.
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P.S.: A comment from Stan Banos prompts me to add this afterthought. I mostly grew up in a small, quiet, insulated, mostly white working class city in Western Massachusetts that was dominated by a single employer. I was barely a teenager when this picture was taken. I recall seeing it and thinking that Smith and Carlos were acting outrageously, not in the sense that their protest was despicable or inappropriate, but rather in the sense that it was extra-ordinary. I no more knew what to make of this than I knew what to make of Rosa Parks or Muhammad Ali or Ella Baker or Malcolm X or Martin Luther King. It is a shame that Smith and Carlos have not been recognized as American heroes in the way these other men and women have been.

I look back on this photograph now and think Smith and Carlos were incredibly courageous and, indeed, patriotic. Their protest called attention to the outrage of racism in the U.S. and, by doing so in a venue suffused with nationalism, they called attention to the massive discrepancy between American ideals and American reality, a discrepancy that rendered the former mere platitudes. That discrepancy remains and our ideals remain platitudes. We needn't look back, we only need to look around.