The NCRM honored Biden in 2018. Their reasons now resonate
In 2018, the National Civil Rights Museum was on to something.
Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s quest to build a beloved community ended with him bleeding on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968, the museum honored a person who will likely have to stanch the proverbial bleeding of national unity needed to revive King’s quest.
It recognized former Vice President Joe Biden with one of its annual Freedom Awards.
The award highlights people who have worked to bolster civil and human rights; people who, like MLK, understand that when barriers to progress are removed for Black people and other marginalized communities, barriers to peace and prosperity will fall for everyone.
But the museum also did something else.
Besides honoring a man who was vice president to Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, the museum also outlined a question that King posed 50 years ago, and one that Presidentelect Biden must confront.
The question? “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
That question was the title of King’s final book, and it was also the theme for the museum’s 50th anniversary MLK Jr. commemoration..
King biographer Taylor Branch, who was the museum’s keynote speaker, talked of how King’s legacy was “about a future, if we are lucky enough to make it so, and not about a past.”
Yet right now, President Trump and his enablers are trying to keep Americans mired in the past by making that future about chaos.
And, sadly, Biden will first have to work to steer the nation away from that.
Trump continues to poison the national discourse with baseless allegations of voter fraud. He’s deployed lawyers and surrogates to undermine efforts to count ballots and persists in spewing lies designed to enrage an already unhinged base.
On Thursday, Philadelphia police arrested two armed men after they received a tip of a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where ballots are being counted,
A photographer captured a picture of their Hummer – which bore a Qanon sticker, a far-right conspiracy group.
Armed Trump supporters have also descended on election centers in Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, egged on by far-right conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.
Tamping down that chaos will be difficult, especially since most of it is being fomented by the very person whose job it is to boost stability and unity in the country..
But seeing that Trump has always only worked to aggrandize the people who thrive on division, it’s not especially surprising that we’re stuck in this moment, said Tajaun Stout Mitchell, who attended the 2018 ceremony in which Biden was honored.
“The way you go from chaos to community is to have everyone at the table, and this man didn’t want everyone at the table,” said Mitchell, an activist who once represented Whitehaven on the Memphis City Council.
“He wanted to break bread only with the folks who would beat his drum…and to say you’re not going to send federal dollars to blue states, or to Democratic cities, when we’re all Americans, well, he was just so divisive.”
And as Trump faces the reality of being a one-term president, he’s amped up the divisiveness to the point where it could trigger destructiveness.
It’s sad that America’s path to community is being sabotaged by people who believe the democratic process is illegitimate if it doesn’t bolster their privilege.
It’s even sadder that the chaos that King spoke of is being stirred by the one person who ought to be building community; that the adult in charge is behaving like a child that another adult should be in charge of.
Yet here we are.
Biden may show that the museum, in honoring him with a Freedom Award two years ago, made a proper, and prophetic, call.
It’s a shame, though, that one of his first tasks will be to steer the nation away from a path obstructed with Trump’s lies and his enablers’ propaganda, past the three evils of racism, poverty and war that King spoke of, and past all the things that feed the chaos.
And help put America back on a path toward unity and stability, and, at the very least, sanity.