The death of MLK Jr. set America ablaze
And the fire of racial division remains
America was on fire. My West-side Chicago neighborhood seemed to be the center of the conflagration. Blocks away, the Madison Street commercial strip was burning. And my adolescent brain struggled to make sense of it.
The night before, Thursday, Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder had ignited explosions across America. Cops and armed troops were now patrolling my neighborhood. Much of my memory remains a jumble. What I remember clearly is a deep sadness and a feeling that my country was in danger. But along with the feelings of anxiety, sorrow and rage was a whiff of hope — for some powerful people seemed committed to making America better.
The evening of King’s murder, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a grieving, shaken nation. He spoke of reaching out to a multi-racial array of leaders coming to the White House to help forge a way forward. “The dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has not died with him,” he said. “... America shall not be ruled by the bullet, but only by the ballot of free and of just men.”
America under assault
The turn of phrase is striking when the American ballot is under foreign assault, even as the country engages a great debate over the power and the pull of bullets. And it is noteworthy that this new movement against gun violence coincides with newly unleashed anger over young black men needlessly dying — most recently in Sacramento — at the hands of thugs and presumed protectors alike. This is not a new concern.
Chicago’s explosion was not just because of King’s death. It was also fueled, as were many riots in the 1960s, by allegations of police abuse. One thing we have learned in the past 50 years is that few of our race-related problems are new. We just keep experiencing them in slightly different ways.
As violence spread in the aftermath of King’s death, a writer for the Christian Science Monitor struggled to explain America’s racial dynamic: “An event like the murder of Dr. King … is generally regarded by whites as an incident, deplorable, but still an incident,” Saville Davis wrote; whereas for blacks “it is merely one more tragic example of the boiling emotions … they feel when they walk down their unsightly streets and pass a policeman.” Davis was hinting that even well-intentioned whites often see racial problems as isolated events, whereas many people of color see racism as an omnipresent force deeply implicated in every aspect of their lives.
Whereas whites typically minimize the impact of race, many blacks see racial bias as a constant potential threat. Because of that deep difference in perspective and experience, we disagree about solutions. And we never solve many of the problems that separate us.
That difference in perspective was evident in a Black History Month poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Only 18% of blacks believed they were treated the same as whites in their communities, but 64% of whites thought blacks were treated equally. Thirty percent of whites thought police were fairer to blacks than in the past, but only 3% of blacks agreed. And while 46% of blacks thought things had gotten worse for blacks over the past five decades, only 24% of whites agreed.
Trump’s racial baggage
It takes great leaders — in the mold of King and President Johnson — to help us see past differences, to help us see that we are stronger when we work together than when we pull apart. So it is worth noting that a huge number of blacks and whites both agreed that President Trump is a racist — some 47% of whites and 84% of blacks deemed that a fair description.
That is not surprising given that Trump cut his teeth on a family business that discriminated against prospective black renters, that he slurs Mexican immigrants, slanders African nations, slams Muslims, sees good among neo-Nazis and demands reimprisonment for young black men proven innocent by DNA. But it’s worth remembering that attitudes among minorities were not so pessimistic even a few years back. My book, The End of Anger, published in 2011, documented a new optimism in communities of color. A 2013 poll picked up the same thing, leading AP-NORC to describe the public mood as: “White malaise but optimism among blacks, Hispanics.”
That, it seems, was an eon ago. America’s then-president saw value in appealing to people’s common humanity. Now the presidential leadership style thrives on stoking paranoia and personal grievance and on dividing supposed winners from losers, as a way, it seems, of turning us away both from compassion and reality.
In the end, King’s fight was never just about race, or even just about ending certain hateful practices and racial entitlements. It was also about teaching us that racialism blinds us to much of reality, including the reality of our own potential as a nation — and as individuals.
It is sad that 50 years after King’s death, we still need leaders to remind us of that. It’s even sadder that no one among our current crop of leaders seems capable of filling that role.
Ellis Cose, a fellow of the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California and a member of USA TODAY’s
Board of Contributors, is the author of The Rage of a Privileged Class.
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