By Grace Lee Boggs
Institute for Democratic Renewal/Project
Change
Union Theological Seminary
I want to thank the organizers for naming this Retreat
“Catching Up with Martin” and for inviting me to get the discussion under way.
When you’ve had the privilege of
participating in most of the great movements of the 20th century, as I have,
and are still around at the beginning of
the new millennium, somewhat hard of hearing and wobbly on your feet but with
most of your marbles, there are few
things more gratifying than to be part of something that is looking backward in
order to move forward.
In the 1960s I didn’t
pay much attention to King’s ideas because, along with my husband, auto worker
and writer Jimmy Boggs, I was deeply involved in the Black Power movement in
However, when crime
and violence became normal in
In retrospect, I now realize that one of the main weaknesses
of the Black Power movement, which has not been sufficiently
acknowledged, was that we were still stuck in the scientific
socialist ways of thinking that in one form or another empowered most activists
in the first half of the 20th century. It was in that period, under the influence of the MOW movement led
by A. Philip Randolph, that I decided to join the struggle against capitalism
and racism. In those days it didn’t enter our minds that victims of oppression needed to embody or
exemplify new standards of behavior. Their suffering was too stark. Our role, as we saw it, was to help them understand that capitalism and racism were
responsible for their plight and that
the only solution was to get rid of these “isms.” That is why we struggled for political
power. This is still the revolutionary
scenario for most Leftists.
What they have failed to recognize
is the new challenge created by the
dropping of the atom bomb that ended World War II. The splitting of the atom
brought us face to face with the reality that human beings had expanded our material powers to the point
where we could destroy our planet.
Therefore we could no longer act as
if everything that happened to us was determined by external or economic
circumstances. Freedom now included the responsibility for making choices. In the words of Einstein: “The release of
atomic power has changed everything but our way of thinking. The solution to this problem lies in the
heart of mankind.”
Henceforth radical social change
had to be viewed as a two-sided transformational process,
not only of our institutions but
of ourselves, a process requiring protracted struggle and not just a
D-day replacement of one set of rulers with another. We could no longer separate ethics from
politics or view revolutionary struggle simply in terms of us vs. them , victims vs. villains, good vs.
evil or transferring power from
the top to the bottom. Consciousness and
self-consciousness, ideas and values, mere “superstructure” in the Marxist
paradigm, had to become integral to the
struggle for radical social change, both as ends and as means.
The civil rights movement, launched
by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955, was the first struggle by an
oppressed people in Western society from this new perspective. Because American
blacks had developed a new confidence in their humanity as a result of the
Double V struggles during World War II and also because, realistically, violent struggle in the South
would have been suicidal, tens of thousands of blacks in
The absence of this
philosophical/spiritual dimension in the
Black Power struggles of the 1960s helps to explain why these struggles ended
up in the opportunism, drug abuse, and
interpersonal violence which continue to plague our neighborhoods. Last year
there were over 350 homicides in
The Detroit Rebellion, which
exploded spontaneously, played a
critical role in our achieving Black Political
Power in
It was because tens of thousands of ordinary
On August 6. 1965
King was among the black and white leaders who joined President Johnson in celebrating the signing of the Voting Rights Act , the
result of the March from
Less than a
week later, on August 11, black youth in Watts, California, protesting
the police killing of a speeding driver,
exploded in an uprising in which 35
people died and thousands were arrested.
When King flew to Watts on August 15 , he discovered to his surprise that few black youth in
The
Soon thereafter,
on the March through
Meanwhile, King was also being criticized by both blacks and
whites because of the opposition to the Vietnam War which he had voiced in the
summer of 1965. NAACP leaders and supporters of the civil rights movement like Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche,
concerned that opposition to the war would antagonize President Johnson, were saying, “Peace and civil rights don’t
mix. Negroes have no business getting
involved in foreign policy issues. They
should stick to the struggle against racism.”
At the same
time a
backlash was developing in the South against the rights blacks had
gained as a result of their struggles,
J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had
embarked on a vicious campaign to
destroy King, and his life was in danger every time he walked out the door.
Searching for theoretical and strategic solutions to
these challenges, King was often
depressed and close to the edge during this period. For example, after missing a flight for a
speaking engagement, he told Coretta, “I
know why I missed my flight. I really don’t want to go. I get tired of going and
not having any answers to give people.”
But King did not give up.
Working 24 hour days, traveling hundreds of thousands of miles a year to
make hundreds of speeches, he began developing the new ideas that can help us
deal with the profound questions that
were surfacing in the late 1960s and have
become more demanding in the decades since King’s assassination.
1. How do we redefine the concept of Work so
that those without and unlikely to find Jobs in our increasingly Jobless
society will not be viewed and will not view themselves as expendable?
2. How do we rebuild
our dying cities?
3. How do we redefine Education so that 30-50%
of inner city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that large
numbers of them will end up in prison?
4. How do we get out
of the quagmire in
5. How do we begin to
reduce the widening gap between rich and poor in this country and between the
global North and the global South?
6. And, especially since 9/11, how are we to
achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic,
military and cultural domination? Can we
accept their anger as a challenge rather than a threat? Out of our new vulnerability can we
recognize that our safety now depends on our
loving and caring for the peoples of the world as we love and care for
our own families, i.e., developing “a
new concept of global citizenship” or a “loyalty to mankind as a whole in
order to preserve the best “ in our
society.
Three works by Martin, written in the year and a half before
his assassination, read almost as if
they had been written today.
Where Do We Go From Here: Community or
Chaos? - published in early 1967 - begins with King’s recognition that
with Selma and the Voting Rights Act we had come to the end of the protest phase of the civil rights revolution and entered into a new phase which requires
structural changes in the system in order to eliminate poverty and unemployment
and close the gap between rich and poor
in this country and around the world..
To bring about these changes. King explains, will require more than demands for Black Power which, although emotionally
gratifying, are often more an expression
of disappointment and despair than of
the hope and vision necessary to
mobilize people in struggle. Our
challenge, King said, is to organize
the strength and compelling power of
poor people, white as well as black, as
workers, consumers and voters , to make
demands on the government for sweeping measures, e.g. a guaranteed annual
income for everyone. We need to turn
the ghetto into a vast school, to make every street corner into a forum, every houseworker and laborer into a
demonstrator, a voter, a canvasser and a student.
However, to be successful in this organizing
effort, we have to go beyond usual politics and undergo the kind
of mental and spiritual re-evaluation
that will enable us to recognize that the richer we have become materially,
the poorer we have become morally and spiritually, so
that we can begin working systematically
to bridge the huge gulf between our scientific and our moral progress.
That means we must undergo a revolution of values. We
must begin the shift from a
"thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society.
“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered
more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
This revolution of
values must take us beyond traditional capitalism and communism.
Capitalism, he said, encourages
cutthroat competition and selfish ambitions that inspire men to be more
I-centered than thou-centered. Communism
reduces men to a cog in the wheel of the
state. Each represents a partial truth. Communism fails to see the truth in
individualism; capitalism fails to realize that life is social.
A few months later, in Time To Break Silence, his soul-stirring anti-war speech at Riverside
Church on April 4, King expanded on what
he meant by a revolution in values.
“The war in
‘We have come to value things more than people. Our technological development has outrun our
spiritual development. We have lost our
sense of community, of interconnection and participation.”
In order to get on the right side of that revolution, he
said, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
“A true revolution of
values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.
With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual
capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South
America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment
of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling
that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not
just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of
war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ A nation that continues year after year to
spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is
approaching spiritual death.”
Then comes a
paragraph in which by simply replacing the word “communism” with ”terrorism,”
King could be talking to us today.
“This kind of positive revolution of
values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use
of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. We must not engage in a negative
anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that
our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of
justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of
poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed
of communism grows and develops,”
If over the
last 40 years we had heeded these words, if, instead of pursuing the cold war
against communism, we had created a movement to reorder our priorities, if we
had started to live more simply so that others could simply live, terrorism would not have had such a fertile
soil in which to grow.
The final
work by King in this period that deserves equally careful consideration is The
Trumpet Of Conscience, his November-December 1967 sermons in which King
proposed ways to address the
alienation which young people experience in today’s world.
“This
generation,” he said, “is engaged in a cold war
with the earlier generation. It
is not the familiar and normal hostility of the young groping for independence.
It has a new quality of bitter antagonism and confused anger which suggests
basic values are being contested.”
“The source of this
alienation is that our society has made material growth and technological advance an end in
itself, robbing people of participation,
so that human beings become smaller
while their works become bigger.”
The way to overcome this alienation, he said, is by changing our priorities. Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our Soul Power or our capacity for
Agape which is the Love that is ready to
go to any length to restore community.
This Love, King explains, is not some sentimental weakness. We can
learn its practical meaning from the
young people who joined the civil rights movement, putting middle class values of
wealth and careers in second place, taking off their Brooks Brother attire and
putting on overalls to work in the isolated rural South because they felt the
need for more direct ways of learning that would strengthen both society and
themselves.
What we need
now” in our dying cities,” King
said, are ways to provide young people with similar opportunities to
engage in self-transforming and structure-transforming direct action.
That is why fourteen
years ago we founded Detroit Summer to involve young people in rebuilding,
redefining and respiriting the city from the ground up.
Just imagine
how much safer and livelier our neighborhoods would be almost overnight if we
reorganized education along the lines of Detroit Summer; if instead of trying
to keep our children isolated in classrooms for 12 years and more, we engaged
them in community-building activities
with the same audacity with which the civil rights movement engaged them in
desegregation activities 40 years ago: planting community gardens, recycling
waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, rehabbing houses,
painting public murals. By giving our
children and young people a better
reason to learn than just the
individualistic one of getting a job or making more money, by encouraging
them to exercise their Soul Power we
would get their cognitive juices flowing. Learning would come from practice which has always been the
best way to learn.
Instead of trying to bully young people to remain
in classrooms structured to prepare them
to become cogs in the existing economic system, we need to recognize that the reason why so
many young people drop out from inner
city schools is because they are voting with their feet
against a system which sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like
products of a factory. They are crying
out for another kind of education that values them as human beings and gives
them opportunities to exercise their Soul Power.
This is the kind of new thinking we urgently need now
to address the 50% dropout rate in our
inner cities and the ugly reality that
in the last 25 years millions of inner city youth have ended up in prison.
Two years ago at an Activists and Spirituality Retreat in
Kalamazoo, following an impromptu panel
discussion between John Maguire, Vincent Harding (Martin’s comrade and neighbor
in Atlanta from 1961-68) and myself, we
decided to issue this These Are The
Times To Grow Our Souls/ Call For The Beloved Community.
Since then we have created
the Beloved Communities initiative which over the past year has taken us
on visits to five sites that we have identified as “Beloved
Communities.”
None of these
groups was directly inspired by King’s concept of Love as a Political Act.
But their existence is evidence that the tremendous changes that have taken
place in the last forty years since his
assassination have made it urgent that we catch up with him.
1. With the onset of computer
technologies the industrial mode of production which still prevailed in the
1960s has been replaced by knowledge-based production which produces not
only physical or material entities but
mainly immaterial ones: services,
relationships, information, emotions,
ideas, which can be summed up in the word “culture.” Only about 20% of American workers are now
engaged in manufacturing material goods.
2. As
capitalism has gone global, the power of nation-states has been replaced
by the power of transnational
corporations who use global
bodies like WTO, IMF and global treaties like NAFTA, to subject
communities and peoples the world over to the domination of the world
market, replacing local cultures and creativity with a homogeneous consumer
culture that serves the needs of global capital, providing conveniences but
robbing human beings and communities of any control over our daily lives and reducing all our human relationships and
relationships to Nature to commodity relationships.
The first sign of grassroots resistance to
this new form of capitalist domination emerged on January 1, 1994, the day that
NAFTA went into effect, when the Zapatistas took over Mexican cities, making
clear that their goal was not to take power but to create space for
indigenous peoples and all sections of Mexican society to enter into
democratic discussions on how to go
beyond Opposition (or Confrontation) to Resistance by creating new horizontal
alliances and infrastructures from below.
A few years later in November
1999, we
witnessed “the Battle of Seattle”
in which nearly 1400 groups
representing very diverse sections of society, including
environmentalists, feminists, steel
workers, longshoremen, anti-war
activists, religious groups, native peoples, peasants, prison abolitionists,
artists, elders, mostly rooted in local communities, closed down the WTO.
Since the “Battle of
Seattle,” similar convergences of diverse
groups have taken place in
In the process of convening these massive demonstrations and gatherings,
a new form of Democracy is being created
which is much more participatory, deliberative,
cooperative, consensual and (like
the cosmos) more rooted in community and more horizontal than the representative democracies that were
struggled for and achieved within 19th and 20th century
nation-states.
At the same time below the radar, individuals and groups are coming together at the local level to
imagine and begin to create new ways of living
that will give us back control over
our own lives and redefine what it means to be human in the 21st century. One estimate (by Paul Hawken) is that there may be as many as half a million
of these self-healing civic groups, most
of them small and barely visible, in
every country around the world.
In two
widely-read books, Empire and Multitude,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
emphasize the singularity or diversity of these groups and how they do
not fuse into some unity like “the people” or the “workers of the world” and
are not connected in centralized
organizations like the 2nd`or 3rd Internationals,
as in the Marxist-Leninist era, but
connect through networks. What they have
in common, they say, is that they are each imagining and creating the
new social identities, the new political subjects that will take the place of
the cogs and consumers to which global capitalism is seeking to reduce us.
As Margaret Wheatley points out in
the “Restoring Hope“article that is in your package, these groups are pushing
back against the destructive practices of globalism, In order to join this push what we need to do
is find each other and develop practices
at the local level that can restore hope to the future. That is how change takes place in living
systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring
simultaneously.
For example, during the last two
weeks I have been part of two groups which emerged spontaneously in
The other is a group of 18
activists, mostly young people in their 20s, who have come together at the Boggs Center to
explore how they can listen to and support each other in this period of great
crisis and great transformation, and especially to help them keep in mind that
as they struggle to change the world, they must also be struggling to become
the change they want to see in the world.
The exciting thing about these
groups is that in order to get started they do not need big leaders or huge
funds. All that is needed are a few people who are motivated by a desire to
humanize some important aspect of their
daily lives.
This is the kind of initiative that
I believe each of us can imagine ourselves and others undertaking in the coming
period to keep our own hopes alive and to restore hope to our communities. That is how, in our own ways, we can catch up with Martin.
____________________________________________________________
James
Washington, ed. Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and
Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.
Harper Collins Paperback 1991.
Michael
Hardt & Antonio Negri: Empire,
and Multitude, Penguin Press, 2004.
David Korten: The Great Turning: From Empire to
Earth Community,
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006.
Karen
Armstrong: The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of our
Religious Traditions, Random House,
2006.
Immanuel
Wallerstein: The End of the World As We Know It,
Alvin
and Heidi Toffler: Revolutionary Wealth, Knopf, 2006.
Donatella
dellla Porto, Massimiliano Andretti, Lorenzo Mosca, Herbert Reiter
Globalization
from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks, University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
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