Today marks 40 years since Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In commemoration of this solemn anniversary, The American Prospect's Kai Wright penned a thoughtful essay about the civil rights leader's forgotten, radical legacy:
His "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is in fact a blunt rejection of letting the establishment set the terms of social change. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he wrote, later adding, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
Shame that quotation rarely makes it into the sort of King remembrances that will mark today's 40th anniversary of his assassination. Generations after the man's murder, our efforts to look back on his life too often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about his much-discussed dream. And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that remains urgently important to Americans' lives. Today, I don't mourn King's death so much as I do his abandoned ideas.
We're as guilty of this tendency here in Chicago as anywhere else; we name colleges and streets after the civil rights legend, but forget his denunciations of racism, materialism, and militarism.
Our inability to break down patterns of residential segregation is perhaps the most obvious and frustrating example of this tendency.
(More after the jump ...)
Of course, it was King who moved into a cheap tenement in Lawndale and led two courageous marches protesting discriminatory housing policies in Chicago's all-white neighborhoods and suburbs. It was during his march in Marquette Park when he encountered the most vitriolic racism of his life, calling the city's makeup “a system of internal colonialism not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium.”
The violence he endured was invaluable; the furor over these demonstrations led city leaders to support the creation of an organization dedicated to promoting open housing in the Chicago area and paved the way for Congress to pass a national fair housing law in 1968.
Sadly, 40 years later, some argue the city is no less segregated now than when King first visited. The Chicago Reporter covered this topic in 2006:
Still, Chicago remains among the nation’s cities with the highest rates of segregation between blacks and whites. In fact, black Chicagoans are more concentrated in heavily populated black areas now than they were in the years leading up to King’s Chicago campaign. The number of communities that were at least 90 percent black tripled between 1960 and 2000. And the percentage of the city’s black residents living in those communities grew from 41 percent to 55 percent ...
“I see it more like a slow drip than progress,” said John Logan, professor of sociology at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “It’s sort of like a water torture. You might be expecting and hoping for substantial change, but you’re being tortured by how slow it is.”
To build healthy, multi-ethnic, economically diverse communities, it's going to take smart government policy, citizen pressure, and honest soul-searching from all of us about the issues we tend to ignore the most: race and class. It's what King would have wanted.
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