Jackson won’t let violence kill MLK’S vision
The Rev. Jesse Jackson is 80. And he’s still trying to keep hope alive.
During the week which marked 54 years since he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where his mentor, Martin Luther King Jr. was silenced by a sniper’s bullet, Jackson made his yearly pilgrimage to The Commercial Appeal.
He fought Parkinson’s Disease to push out his thoughts on how violence is overtaking King’s message of peace as a tool to resolve conflict. Those who choose it, he said, tend to wind up defeated.
As was the case when racists like Jim Clark who, as sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, brutalized Black people with guns and cattle prods to stop them from marching for voting rights in Selma in 1965.
In the end, Clark lost his election in 1966 – a year after the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed and Black voters ended his reign. He died at age 84 after being reduced to much of his life resorting to dubious pursuits, such as selling drugs, to survive.
“In the end, the winners lose,” Jackson said.
Still, in listening to Jackson, all I could think of was how difficult it must have been in that moment when he saw King bloodied on that motel balcony, to resist falling into despair; to resist giving up on a country where being Black and demanding rights that eluded us when we were property, and then second-class citizens, was enough to get us killed.
But Jackson kept fighting, and 40 years after the violence and despair of that moment subsided, the nation elected its first Black president, Barack Obama.
It re-elected him in 2012 and, on the power of Black voters, elected Obama’s vice-president, Joe Biden, as president in 2020.
Sadly, that progress unleashed violence from supporters of former president Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; from those who see the racial unity that King championed as a threat, not as a strength, if people who look like them don’t have the ultimate say in who gets to govern the nation.
They’d rather destroy things like the Capitol and Congress – the place where democratic ideals are supposed to be carried out– than to embrace a government that gives everyone a voice in shaping those ideals.
And they call themselves patriots.
Weaponizing racism
But Jackson is an example of what a real patriot is; someone who isn’t dissuaded by intimidation and violence. He still believes in the fight.
The difference is that now, outside of the violence at the Capitol last year, racism has been weaponized in ways that cast white people as victims, or as potential victims, of racial progress.
It’s weaponized by people like U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who characterized three speeding tickets that Memphis attorney Andre Mathis accumulated more than a decade ago as a “rap sheet,” that made him unfit for a federal judgeship.
I mean, what other way to invoke a racist trope about a Black man than to use a term reserved for a felony record to describe traffic violations?
Blackburn’s racism roll didn’t stop there.
In questioning Judge Katanji Brownjackson, who is on track to become the first Black woman to serve on the U. S. Supreme Court, Blackburn frequently took quotes out of context to paint Brown-jackson as a judge who supports Critical Race Theory, which isn’t being taught in schools, and who would be soft on crime, and who, because she didn’t respond to her ridiculousness about defining what a woman is, might rule on a case that mandates sex changes for infants.
That idea is about as ludicrous as Blackburn’s question.
The racism is also thick in the Tennessee legislature, where laws are now being devised that allow people to sue public school teachers and university professors if teachings about racism makes students uncomfortable or feel guilty.
Meaning that, if an instructor teaches about the despair many people felt when King was gunned down in Memphis in 1968, hypothetically, someone could sue if that lesson caused them anguish.
Meaning that most civil rights history may not be taught – or propagandized to the point where it might as well not be taught.
And it exists here in Memphis, where Neo-confederate George Johnson repeatedly threatened Shelby County Commissioner and social justice activist Tami Sawyer with violence because she fought to get Confederate monuments removed from the city’s parks.
But as Jackson believes, and as Sawyer still believes, all the violence and all the racism that is being revived now means there is more work to be done.
That work mostly still lies in voting.
Anyone who is motivated by fairness should vote
Shelby County, with more than 550,000 registered voters, still has more potential voters than 50 Tennessee counties combined, said Katie Cahill, the associate director of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, in 2018.
While more than 292,000 Shelby County voters cast ballots in those midterms, with most supporting Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, and Gov. Bill Lee’s Democrat opponent, Karl Dean, if that record turnout was higher, it could possibly neutralize the votes of those who are more inclined to take Tennessee back to the days of the Dixiecrats.
Possibly.
While Blackburn isn’t up for re-election until 2027, Lee is up for re-election this fall. Still, now is the time to remind voters of the backwardness that Blackburn and Lee represent when it comes to racial progress, and how Tennessee will be saddled with it if they sit out the 2022 midterms.
Anyone who is motivated by fairness should vote, if for no other reason than to avoid giving too much power to those motivated by racial fears.
That’s the hope that keeps Jackson coming back to Memphis each April 4; on the day that the man who epitomized that hope was killed by the violence he believed could be overwhelmed by reason.
Violence and racism ultimately didn’t win then. And we can’t let it win now.
Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com and you can follow her on Twitter: @tonyaajw