The nation must escape a moral quagmire
“There are problems here tonight,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a Houston crowd in 1967. “The forces of evil are all around.”
The dark events I witnessed on a momentous Texas night 50 years ago underscored the accuracy of the civil rights leader’s assertion.
A crowd of four thousand had assembled in a Houston arena to support King’s efforts for the city’s municipal workers, who were on strike in 1967. Outside stood a phalanx of Texas Rangers with white shirts, brown ties, distinctive stars and fancy gun belts girding ample bellies. Other Rangers with rifles were stationed on the building’s roof “to prevent violence.” Inside, peaceful melodies of Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez lifted the spirits of the strikers and those of us who had gathered to support them. A strong sense of solidarity prompted generosity, and the crowd filled buckets with dollars to meet workers’ needs.
Then, just as expectations were mounting that King would soon appear, we heard a muted series of pops, and tear gas spewed from the ventilation system. The rancid gas caused spasms of coughing and retching that handkerchiefs and scarfs could not prevent. The crowd neared the edge of panic.
Amid this chaos, Dr. King emerged from the wings, strode to the podium and branded the act with a name. It was evil, he boldly asserted, the evil of racism. By crystalizing the act in a name, King made sense of the dangerous moment. Audience members who had been rushing to leave paused and returned to their seats. With a few more sentences, King brought the mass to its feet with a roaring declaration that we would not be bullied by the Rangers’ cowardly actions. Many of us departed with renewed fervor for the civil rights movement, but a few months later, our leader was murdered in Memphis.
Most of us who honor King’s memory may be forgiven for assuming that the hatred of that Houston evening had dissipated along with the tear gas, an assessment reinforced by the election of our first black president and South Carolina’s decision to strike the rebel flag. Yet, it took only a few months of a rancorous presidential campaign to bring racism into the open.
President-elect Donald Trump would have us believe that his inflammatory statements were just campaign rhetoric, to be forgiven and forgotten in a ceremony of commitment when he is sworn in as our nation’s new chief executive. The damage he has done stands in stark contrast against his calls now for civility and unity. His campaign helped to stoke social acceptance for racism and encouraged his supporters to give bigotry a voice. Witness the more than 1,000 biasrelated incidents documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center since the November election.
Does Trump regret his statements? Hear the praise he lavished recently on a crowd of Alabamans: “You people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ ... You were nasty and mean and vicious and you wanted to win, right?”
In the face of such declarations from our nation’s duly elected leader, one question looms: Who now will walk from the wings, take the podium and define the issue of racism for Americans? Who will condemn Muslim registries? Who will speak out for immigrants facing unjust deportation? Who will speak up for African Americans and poor Americans deprived of health insurance? Who will oppose efforts to eliminate school lunches for poor children and reduce welfare support? Who will inform Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts that voter ID laws still abridge civil rights?
The stage is empty, and the odds are long against the emergence of another Martin Luther King Jr. Those of us who hope for an America that gives every individual his due, provides access to at least a minimal level of health and welfare for all citizens, protects the weak against violence — we must now point out the moral quagmire into which our nation has been plunged.
A half century after King’s courageous pronouncement, evil still exists in America. It is now our duty to brand it racism.
A retired associate vice president of the College of William & Mary, Walker has been active in the civil rights movement since his undergraduate days at the University of Virginia, where he first heard King speak. Now a Virginia resident, Walker was an instructor of English at Lamar State College of Technolog y — now Lamar University — when he attended the Houston rally.