This year's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the last that
will be commemorated during the Obama presidency, offers the opportunity for
sober clarity about the present leavened by defiant hope for the future. The
King holiday, a hard-won victory by veterans of the civil rights era alongside
of black elected officials, became a crucial part of a new national consensus
on racial equality.
Dr. King's complex iconography can be understood with a
simple lesson: He brought racial justice into the mainstream as a fundamental
element of American democracy.
On this score, King served as the civil rights movement's
most important political mobilizer, a global Nobel Peace Prize-winning figure
capable of bridging racial and economic divides by participating in bus boycotts
in Montgomery, Alabama, writing a passionate letter from a Birmingham jail
cell, leading a March on Washington, and traversing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in
a demonstration that galvanized world opinion in support of the struggle for
black dignity.
In the shadow of continued moments of racial strife, the
Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday represents America's political and rhetorical
acceptance of civil rights as a moral and political good. President-elect
Donald Trump's recent assaults on civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman
John L. Lewis, however, signal the potential end of this consensus, diminishing
our nation's moral stature on race matters at the precise moment we need it
most.
Lewis is a genuine American hero, a humble and courageous
foot soldier and civil rights leader, who suffered severe beatings in 1961 as a
Freedom Rider and four years later during the "Bloody Sunday" march
in Selma, Alabama. He is the last major speaker from the 1963 March on
Washington living in America.
But this legacy was not enough to insulate him from the
President-elect's political wrath. After Lewis explained on "Meet the
Press" that he did not consider Trump to be a legitimate president elect
because of Russian interference in American elections, the soon-to-be occupant
of the Oval Office pounced.
Trump launched into a racially charged smearing of the
congressman's Atlanta district as being in "horrible shape" and
"crime infested." That he engaged in this latest Twitter war a few
days before the King holiday is no accident.
Throughout perhaps the most racially divisive presidential
election campaign in history Trump used terms like "Chicago" to
signal his open disdain for black America. His comments on "inner
cities" revealed a man stuck in a time warp, a place where African
Americans all reside in seething urban ghettoes whose potential for violence
threatens to wreak havoc on law-abiding white citizens.
Almost as in response to Trump's racially charged fantasies
of black lawlessness, poverty, and violence, Attorney General Loretta Lynch
reiterated the federal government's need to "defend the constitutional
rights of the citizens in this great country" by holding law enforcement
accountable when they violate their sworn duties to serve and protect.
Just as it is no coincidence that Trump is targeting Lewis
as we prepare to mark a day remembering Martin Luther King, it is not
accidental that Lynch will deliver her final speech as attorney general in
Birmingham, a major site not only in King's life but also in the civil rights
movement writ large -- and located in a state that is home to her successor.
Trump and his nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions,
represent the post-consensus face of American politics on racial justice. By
normalizing the demonization of predominantly black neighborhoods across the
nation as unworthy of federal protection and resources, Trump signals to both
ordinary citizens and political institutions the value that should be placed on
the black folk who live there.
Sessions, meanwhile, has adopted less combative rhetoric but
has called the Voting Rights Act "intrusive," prosecuted civil rights
activists for voter fraud and expressed support for voter ID laws.
2017 promises to offer a racial landscape at the federal
level that echoes aspects of King's era more than our recent past, where
President Obama's rise gave way to grand expectations that the nation had
finally turned the corner on race.
Yet one of King's most important legacies, though less
talked about, is the embrace of defiant struggle against long odds. During the
last three years of his life, King fought hard for economic justice in Chicago,
spoke out against the Vietnam War, organized alongside welfare rights activists
and attempted to lead a poor people's movement whose multi-racial makeup formed
one strand of a global community that King characterized as the "world
house."
King's willingness to speak truth to power helped to
transform American democracy, expanding the vision of the Founding Fathers into
one that included a larger cast of characters than they could have ever
conceived. What he characterized as "great wells of democracy" became
a metaphor for a panoramic movement for social justice that reshaped every
corner of American society and inspired Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to make
the cause their own.
Indeed, every president since then, despite disagreements over
how best to achieve racial equality, has accepted this goal as an article of
faith.
Until now.
Yet the genius of King and the larger civil rights movement
is in unleashing the power of ideas that transcend political leaders,
democratic institutions, even nation-states. King faced obstacles larger and
more enduring than presidents or election cycles, yet he never lost faith in
the capacity for citizens to recognize their own humanity in the lives of
others and to use this knowledge and empathy to transform the world.
"The arc of the moral universe is long," King
reminded the nation, "but it bends toward justice."
Courtesy CNN.
