Similar cry of hurt heard in massive women’s marches

It is a meaningful coincidence that the anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March lands on the same weekend as the national Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday. Both the civil rights and women’s rights movements are divided by questions of how they wish to be perceived — and how much they should even care what others think.

“Nasty woman,” a phrase used by then-candidate Donald Trump to describe opponent Hillary Clinton in the third 2016 presidential debate, was embraced by many of her female fans as quickly on T-shirts and protest signs as “deplorables” — her description of proTrump extremists — went viral throughout his support base.

That same defiant spirit has emerged in the recent objections by women’s rights advocates to a questionable L-word in the coverage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and her exploratory presidential campaign: “likability.”

“Because what is likability if not a deference to men — with a self-deprecating smile,” writes Katha Pollitt, The Nation’s brilliant legal affairs columnist. “A likable woman doesn’t challenge women, either,” she continued, “by reminding them of the compromises they’ve made and the edges they’ve trimmed off their personalities.”

A similar internal debate between moderates and an impatient extreme roiled the ranks of Dr. King’s racially integrated and nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the emergence in 1966 of Stokely Carmichael’s (later Kwame Toure) “black power” movement. Carmichael believed that black people had to first “close ranks” in solidarity with each other before they could join a multiracial society.

Like those of who believe, as I do, that “Black Lives Matter” is a title that unfortunately can be — and by conservatives often is — misinterpreted as antiwhite, Dr. King thought the black power slogan was “an unwise choice.” Nevertheless, he responded by redefining the slogan to fit within his own nonviolent agenda.

Black Power “was born from the wombs of despair and disappointment,” King told his staff in 1966. The cry of Black Power is really a cry of hurt.”

It is not a big stretch to hear the same cry of hurt in the massive women’s marches that took to the streets in Washington and other cities around the planet on the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

It is also easy to see growing pains in the Women’s March movement, after its first day of protests exceeded expectations worldwide. For example, Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, three of the four original co-chairs of the national organization Women’s March Inc., were found to have expressed support in the past for Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan.

They have since distanced themselves from his notoriously anti-Semitic statements, but the controversy resulted in two competing marches in New York: Women’s March Inc. and Women’s March Alliance.

History repeats itself in this instance or, as Mark Twain might say, it rhymes. After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, the coalition that he helped to build fragmented in a world that he helped to change. But the old arguments about moderation versus extremism still divide movements that otherwise are united in pursuit of shared goals.

Dr. King found ways to embrace the goals of both moderates and extremes but organize to achieve those goals through nonviolent coalition building.