Remembering MLK Jr. + Poem: June Jordan

This is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), one of the most tragic events in a year and era of horrors. His murder was a terrible blow to the African-American Civil Rights movement and to the push for equality for all Americans, of all races and ethnicities, genders, sexualities, religions, classes, but it also challenged those whom he had led, with whom he had walked, for whom he had fought, to keep going, and our society was irrevocably changed for the better because of him.  Rev. Dr. King was shot in cold blood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone earlier in the spring of 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers, who were pushing for equal pay and conditions. I AM A MAN. In his final months, Dr. King stood and marched with the working people, with his brothers, who were only asking for fairness, decency, equal treatment. That struggle, like so many others, continues as I type this entry. It was during his return visit in April 1968, the day after he had spoken to the Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, that he was killed. But I'm not saying anything most readers here do not already know.

The great poet June Jordan (1936-2002), whom I first encountered in my college years, awed and later got to meet and hear read several times, including towards the very end of her life when she also participated in a remarkable conversation at NYU with Toni Morrison, wrote the following poem in tribute and memory to Dr. King.  I am not alone in considering him to be one of the greatest figures ever to have emerged from this society, and one of the most extraordinary people in history, for his vision, his bravery, and his courage, and I think that June Jordan captures this in the most boiled-down form, almost a distillate of thought and feeling, that pours and then rills, like tears, down the page. June Jordan, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, was a native of New York and attended Barnard and the University of Chicago. She published her first book in 1968, and went on to publish nearly 30 more books. She taught at a number of colleges and universities, and when I first encountered her work, she was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, but she went on to teach at the University of California-Berkeley. She was beloved as a teacher, but also deeply admired for her political outspokenness and her bravery in coming out. I can recall more than a few poems of hers that did not stint in telling it like it was, whether the issue was the dreadful governments of the time, or the contours of her private life.

In 1991 she founded the highly acclaimed Poetry for the People program, which, as its website says, "continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a beloved community for all."  One visionary, writing in tribute to another.

POEM
In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.

I

honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip rape
exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime
terrorizing

death by men by more
than you or I can

STOP


II

They sleep who know a regulated place
or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious
like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more

June Jordan, “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com.

Source: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997)

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Last week Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson claimed that were the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (at left, Riverfront Times) still alive, Rev. Dr. King would have supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without hesitation a wide array of people across the internet decried this evidently nonsensical assertion, and cited many examples, from throughout his life and career, of his anti-war and anti-violence stances.

But why not go directly to Rev. Dr. King's words themselves? Here is one of his most important speeches, delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, a year before his assassination, on the Vietnam War.  Rev. Dr. King had spoken many times at Riverside, often memorably, but this speech was a landmark for many reasons.  I sincerely hope the President and others who honor Rev. Dr. King's memory take note of this profound speech, among the bravest and most important he ever delivered.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Speech at Riverside Church (with audio)

A snippet from the speech's end:

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when "justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

Happy MLK Jr. Day

Happy Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day,
or, Happy Pre-Obama-Inauguration Day,
or Happy Last Day of the George Walker Bush Presidency Day!


Really, take your pick, though all three possibilities are conjoined in ironic ways. How fitting that the last day of George W. Bush's brutal, corrupt, destructive disaster of a presidency falls on the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s federally-recognized holiday, a day that the departing Vice President, Dick Cheney, and the most recent Republican Presidential hopeful, John McCain, like many in their party, both vigorously opposed up to the point that it became official. How telling also that they are now the contemporary face of the Republican Party, a party now centered in the Deep South, even though its chief founder and first presidential exemplar--before whose Memorial the President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama, our soon-to-be First Lady, Michelle Robinson Obama, his two children, Sasha and Malia, assorted family members, political and artistic stars, and hundreds of thousands of everyday people, celebrated joyously yesterday--stood on behalf of defeating the South's rebellion, its ongoing system, and the nation's division, and embodied a model of leadership and vision that President Obama has shown he will follow.

How fitting also that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and example, his words, his dedication and persistence, his courage and fearlessness, his profound sense of hope, his great love for his people and all people, and above all, his sacrifice, honored today and a beacon for all the world, hover over this inauguration, lead us right into it, and provide another model our new president has avowed, and against which the departing debacle of a president represented the ultimate antithesis.

His, George W. Bush's, was a government, a nation, a society built on lies, on faithlessness and bad faith, on chicanery and con-artistry and complete indifference to and defiance of the rule of law, the Constitution, what this nation supposedly has stood for since its founding, on giving those who had everything more and depriving those who had little anything, on torture and war and renditions and poisoning the environment and funneling tax dollars into the hands of the privileged few, corporations, banks, insurance companies, landowners, on religious fanaticism and provoking religious fanaticism and the misuse and abuse of religion, on finding the least qualified, most dogmatic and well-connected, more doctrinaire people for jobs and giving them a free pass, on destroying institutions not for the sake of reforming them, but out of a repeatedly failed ideology, on division, on sexism and racism and homophobia and classism and ethnocentrism, on tokenism, on domination and hierarchy and luxury for the few and consumerism pressed to an insane degree and fake credit and phantom assets and valueless derivatives and a ghost economy, on so utterly shattering this society and societies across the world, shattering this economy and the global economy, shattering our politics and the global political economy and balance, that a titanic shock-and-awe assault on it might be possible if his party could extend its lease on power and control, except that the result was the election of a pragmatic, center-left, young, charismatic, visionary Black junior Senator from Illinois with an unusual background and a platinum tongue to replace him.

We are complicit in what is passing, and what will come to pass; Bush's failures are our failures, and, as tomorrow promises, our gain.

As I've read it said of Franklin Roosevelt in the comments section of Glenn Greenwald's blog more than once, when visited by a group of supporters early in his tenure, he told them: "I want to do the right thing. Now you have to make me." Let's support our new president, and in the spirit of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and all who came before him and after him, let's make sure our new president does the right thing. He wants to, and we have to make him.