After MLK50, the question is what’s not next
I recently wrote a column about riding a MATA bus with Sammie Hunter on his way home from his job as head dishwasher at Methodist Hospital South. It was a five-mile trip that became a twohour journey – 15 minutes of which involved walking a mile.
Some readers contacted me, offering to help him.
One asked if Hunter could get his boss to agree to change his work hours to make his commute easier. Another asked whether he could ride a bike to work, while another wanted me to ask him if his church could buy him a bicycle.
Their intentions are good. But their questions are misguided.
What they should have asked is what they – or their church or their community – could do to help fix a woefully underfunded transit system that makes it difficult not just for Hunter, but for thousands like him, to do something as essential as getting to work. But they didn’t. And while there’s nothing wrong with them offering help or suggestions, the real answer isn’t to focus on fixing the people struggling with broken systems, but on fixing the systems.
Such fixes require more people to use
their votes and their voices to demand money for better transit. Or things such as wages that are high enough so that people don’t have to work multiple jobs or depend on food stamps to get through the month.
All of which brings me to the question that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed in Memphis 50 years ago, posed in his last book: “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”
We can start with where we don’t go – or rather, where we must stop going.
One of those places where we must stop going is one where more effort is expended on how to help people survive an unfair system rather than change it. Think about it. If King and his compatriots thought that way, they would have simply bought Rosa Parks a supply of insole pads for her shoes to make it more comfortable for her to stand on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus if she had to give her seat to a white man.
King, in fact, even warned about this mindset. In a 1962 draft of a sermon titled, “On Being A Good Neighbor,” he wrote, “Philanthropy is marvelous, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the need for working to remove many conditions of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” In Memphis, those conditions persist. Although a Community Foundation study last year found that Memphis leads U.S. cities when it comes to charitable giving, that’s probably because Memphis’ status as the nation’s poorest large city is driving many people to do what they can to help. That’s great. But it’s not enough. Childhood poverty for children in Shelby County has worsened since 1980, while the childhood poverty rate for African-American children quadruples that of white children, according to “The Poverty Report: Memphis Since MLK.”
The poverty rate for African-Americans is more than twice that of whites in Shelby County, and black people earn half of what whites earn. Part of the reason for that is that the manufacturing jobs that once paid decent wages have been replaced by warehouse jobs that don’t.
And many of those low-paying warehouse jobs have moved 10 to 35 miles away from where many African Americans live.
That’s a problem with the system, not the people grappling with it. That’s what needs fixing. And that’s where we need to go from here. Many who visited Memphis this past week to honor King and the cause that he represented before he was killed – to reshuffle a national deck stacked against poor and marginalized people – talked about how to make such fixes.
Said his daughter, Berniece King: “I’m going to reiterate what he [King] told us. He told us we needed a revolution of values. That’s still hard for us to hear. We’ve got to find a way to embrace the dignity, worth and value of human life, and break these cycles of poverty, racism, militarism and violence in our world. Until there’s some kind of shift there, we will continue to put Band-Aids on the problems.”
Said the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach, a new movement to combat systemic poverty and racism: “The first thing we need to do is convince America that we need to go somewhere from here, that we need to change the narrative … one of the first things that Dr. King said you need to do is dramatize a shameful condition, and show people how these interlocking injustices are damaging us all … people have to be willing to put their bodies on the line, to put their hopes on the line to change these systems…”
Said Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME: “We’ve got to go back to basics, talking to people, knocking on doors, and asking people to become involved in this struggle …I’m optimistic. Look at what the students are doing, look at how they’re changing things. They’re saying, ‘We’re going to make our voice heard, and there will be repercussions if this nation continues to go down a path that we don’t want it to go down.’”
Said Michael Eric Dyson, Georgetown University sociology professor, author and radio host: I think where we go from here is to take hold of the analysis that Dr. King gave us. Criticism of poverty, criticism of militarism and criticism of racism. Then we add to that criticism of homophobia and gender oppression … then we keep Dr. King’s vision alive by embodying the best forms of resistance to social injustice that we can conjure.”
Said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader who was on the balcony with King when he was killed: “In Memphis, the population is 63 percent black, but the [county] contracts are only 6 percent black. We must deal with the issue of poverty now, and use politics as a lever to change our economic condition.”
Two years ago, a study found that only 5.8 percent of all Shelby County contracting dollars went to blackowned firms. African-Americans make up 54 percent of the county’s population.
Notice that no one mentioned anything about, say, setting up funds to give a few poor people more money to help them because their employers won’t pay them a living wage, or any other effort that would wind up helping only a few people as the majority struggles to survive a system that shortchanges them.
It’s great that some readers want to help Hunter, the head dishwasher. But if they’re going to give money or advice, they’d do more if they gave to causes that are working to change the circumstances that make their giving necessary in the first place.
Rather than use mental energy to offer advice or charity to help someone like Hunter navigate an unfair system, they should use righteous energy to work toward changing that system for everyone.
Because if nothing else, King didn’t believe in adapting to injustice. He believed in ending it.