…after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. — Martin Luther King. Jr. (May 1967)
The victory of Selma 50 years ago, and the blood and lives it took to win it, require profound commemoration but also much more. Selma was a critical turning point in a long and urgent fight that has never ended. Taylor Branch in his history of the King years calls it “the last revolution” but it also laid the groundwork for the next one. That revolution, as expressed in the goals of the 1968 Poor Peoples Campaign, aimed at nothing less than the achievement of economic security and well being for all, and especially the most dispossessed, which alone makes real equality, freedom and dignity possible.
This revolution was barely begun and never completed. The consequences of leaving this work unfinished have been, in terms of suffering and injustice, terrible and longstanding. Five decades after winning a monumental battle for voting rights, poverty and economic hardship in the U.S. are widespread and increasingly severe. Inequality has reached record levels, with a tiny and power saturated minority accumulating nearly all the wealth we produce. In order to defend these indefensible privileges, voting rights once again have come under attack. As the Black Lives Matter movement has dramatically highlighted, deep racial injustice continues to run through every aspect of U.S. society – from poverty to education to the police criminal justice systems.
Nowhere are these consequences clearer than in Selma itself. As Mark Davis points out in a U.S. News and World Report article, in Selma and surrounding Dallas County today, the poverty rate is almost 37%. 60% of children live below the poverty line. One in eight adults cannot find a job. The drop out rate in some schools is nearly 40%. Hunger and homelessness is common and hits not only blacks but also many poor whites.
The challenge this Selma poses is not simply how best to celebrate the heroic battle fought and won 50 years ago. It is how to begin at last to realize fully the promise for which so many have sacrificed. To meet that challenge requires learning from the best of those who came before us.
[aesop_quote background=”#507b96″ text=”#ffffff” align=”left” size=”2″ quote=”You cannot get genuine equality until “there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” This is why around the world and in the United States the era of human rights is also an “era of revolution.”” parallax=”off” direction=”left”]
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. always looked back only to understand better how to keep moving forward. He did this in a little studied but extremely prescient speech at a SCLC staff retreat in Frogmore, South Carolina in May 1967. His starting point was a simple but powerful one. “We have moved”, he said, “from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.” He was not alone in making this observation. Malcolm X, among others, had often made the same point. But in these brief remarks King spelled out the meaning of this move to human rights, its revolutionary implications and power.
“Civil rights,” he explained, are “those rights that are clearly defined by the constitution.” Human rights include civil rights but also, equally and inseparably, economic and social rights that go beyond what is explicitly in the U.S. constitution. They “are clearly defined by the mandates of a humanitarian concern”, as well as international declarations and treaties. They cover, but go beyond, the ugly and violent acts of repression perpetrated by Bull Connor in Birmingham or Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma, violations that many white people, especially in the North, found easy to condemn. What has proved much harder than opposing the Bull Connors and the Jim Clarks, then and now, is to push toward what human rights requires. This is what King calls “genuine equality.” In words as relevant today as they were in 1967, King points out that “the absence of brutality and legal segregation is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not to ordain brotherhood.” Genuine equality demands what, as King points out, many of his early allies never really supported – fair housing, quality education, and an end to poverty. This would require far deeper and more costly change than simply ending Jim Crow. Genuine equality requires the universal realization of all human rights.
The human rights goal of genuine equality also redefines what is meant by “integration”. It is, King laments, a term too often defined as something that “merely adds color to a still predominantly white power structure”. What integration must mean as we move to the human rights era, he argues, is “shared power”.
That power is essential because “if we are to gain our God-given rights now, principalities and powers must be confronted and they must be changed.” You cannot get genuine equality until “there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” This is why around the world and in the United States the era of human rights is also an “era of revolution.”
Revolution is a word which has been deliberately debased by defining it to mean the violent overthrow of a government. King makes it clear that, tied to human rights, revolution has a much different and deeper meaning. He talks first about a “revolution of values” which requires us to “raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” Elaborating further, he says: “We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life’s highway. But one day we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished. That is where we are now”.
By daring to talk about “restructuring” society King makes clear, once again, that he is not interested in reform that “merely adds color,” like increasing the number of black business owners or black politicians, without fundamentally altering the system that “produces beggars”. A human rights revolution can never mean just helping spread out the violation of those rights more equitably. It means stopping them. Not improving the look of poverty, but ending it.
This does not mean in any way minimizing the role of or reducing the fight against racism. King sees clearly, as so many do not, how crucial racism is to the maintenance of such an unjust system. He explained this in the very speech that celebrated the completion of the voting rights march to Montgomery. Again his words have lost none of their relevance:
If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for food that his empty pockets could not provide he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was at least he was a white man, better than the black man…..That’s what happened when the Negro and the white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society, a society of justice where none would pray upon the weakness of others, a society…where greed and poverty would be done away.
Shortly after that historic speech in Montgomery King began to take on, more fully than ever before, the call for an end to the war in Vietnam and the work of building a multiracial movement to end poverty. He did this, as he explained in his Frogmore remarks, not because he wanted to add more “issues” to the fight but because he understood their deep connection, that “the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together,” so tied together that you can’t address or get rid of one without taking on the others.
Human rights are recognized in numerous documents as inter-related and indivisible but King makes his point by drawing on an older tradition. He recalls the story of Nicodemous who, when he asked Jesus how he could be saved, was not told to work on one individual failing or another but rather to be “born again” Jesus told him”the whole structure of your life must be changed.” In a similar way, King asserts, America must be born again: “the whole structure of American life must be changed.”
[aesop_quote background=”#507b96″ text=”#ffffff” align=”left” size=”2″ quote=”How do we communicate that often the only way to conserve what is needed and valued is to radically change what is not? How can we build a sustained and broad social force, led by those with the most at stake, that will make radical change possible?” parallax=”off” direction=”left”]
The challenge of seeing this necessity is nothing compared to the challenge of making in happen. By 1967, the battered King had no illusions about his country. America he knew “is a conservative nation.” The task for all those who are serious about changing it is to understand why.
America is a conservative nation, King argues, “precisely because she has something to conserve.” Others, millions and billions, around the country and the world, are radical because they are living with conditions – poverty, disease, illiteracy – that nobody wants to conserve. The problem for America is “how to keep the tension alive between a legitimate conservatism because you have something to conserve and a pressing radicalism because there are millions of God’s children who are living with conditions they don’t want to conserve.”
“America’s problem is how to learn to be conservative and radical.” This is also a problem for those seeking to change America. How do we fight, and make clear that we are fighting, both to conserve the valuable and hard-won gains that are now under attack, while going even further to fight for the radical changes needed to not just modify but end racism, poverty, militarism and other related evils like climate change? How do we communicate that often the only way to conserve what is needed and valued is to radically change what is not? How can we build a sustained and broad social force, led by those with the most at stake, that will make radical change possible?
Recognizing that we have entered an era of human rights points the way but does not guarantee moving in that direction. The United States government has long understood the power and also the danger of the idea of human rights. As Carol Anderson documents in detail in her pioneering work Eyes Off the Prize, even as U.N human rights standards were being formulated in Paris in 1948, the U.S was preparing to (succesfully) fight off efforts by the NAACP and leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois to use those standards to protest the widespread and brutal mistreatment of people of color. For years the U.S. took steps to ensure that human rights would be applied primarily, if not exclusively, to other countries. It denied even the existence of the economic and social rights that the U.N proclaimed.
Today, as more people are rising up to protest the injustice of their lives, it is becoming harder to deny the existence of these rights, but those in control of this system will do their best. As much as any government, the U.S. is skilled at the art of using human rights rhetorically while never allowing them to be applied substantively at home. It is predictable and consistent that in response to the police killings of black men measures are already being taken to introduce some reforms of police practices without touching the dire conditions facing the communities where those killings take place.
What the U.S. has never been able to deny with any lasting success is the spirit of those with little or nothing to conserve and a strong desire for dignity, real freedom, and genuine equality. To strengthen that spirit it is crucial to learn from past fighters like Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Malcolm X and Dr. King. It is also critical to learn from their lives. Dr. King, who at the time was under vicious assault from all sides, including former allies, because of his opposition to the Vietnam War and the U.S. economic system, ended his remarks at Frogmore with these words: “I will not be intimidated. I will not be harassed. I will not be silent and I will be heard.” Perhaps the best way to commemorate Selma is by renewing a commitment to do the same.