Recapture MLK's Radical Revolutionary Spirit
Create Cities And Communities Of Hope
By Grace Lee Boggs
Eastern Michigan University
January 15, 2007
Thank you for inviting me to keynote Eastern Michigan University's celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 78th birthday.
At 91, soon to be 92, I value every opportunity to speak with folks younger than myself - which, I expect, includes everyone in this auditorium - in the hope that my experiences and reflections will help you make the hard choices that each and every American, in all walks of life and of all ethnic, class and sexual identities, will increasingly face as the 21st century unfolds.
I have been a Movement activist for more than 65 years ever since 1941 when, fresh out of university and very wet behind the ears, I joined the March on Washington movement led by A.Philip Randolph which forced Franklin D.Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in hiring by defense plants.
For the last 53 years I have lived in Detroit, most of that time in the same house on the east side of Detroit where I still live. For 40 years, until his death in 1993, I was married to James Boggs, an African American auto worker, activist and writer. During the 1960s I was so active in the Black Power movement in Detroit that FBI agents wondered whether I was Afro-Asian.
In the 1960s I didn't pay much attention to Martin Luther King, Jr. My movement activities were concentrated in the inner city of Detroit,. So I identified more with Malcolm X than with MLK, and like most Black Power activists, I viewed King's ideas of nonviolence and beloved community as somewhat naïve and sentimental.
However, as my movement activities have become increasingly centered around struggles to free our communities of the crime and violence that escalated in the wake of the urban rebellions of the late 1960s. I have been increasingly drawn to King's ideas, especially those that he was developing in the last three years of his life when his major concerns were the Vietnam War and the despair of black youth in our dying cities. And I have often wondered whether our relationships with one another, with the rest of the world, and with the biosphere, would be more harmonious today if in the 60s and 70s we had found ways and means to combine Malcolm's militancy with Martin's vision of the beloved community.
As we enter the seventh year of the Third Millennium, the violence at home and abroad and against our biosphere has reached a level that we could not even imagine in the 1960s.
Last year there were over 350 homicides in Detroit, often a half dozen over a single weekend. Recently the Detroit Summer Collective, a group of young people that works closely with the Boggs Center, asked Detroiters at schools, libraries and local businesses "What are your hopes and aspirations for the young people of our city?" Almost everyone talked about the need to stop the violence.
For example, "I hope people can live their dreams without getting killed. I hope nobody dies over stupid things. I want no more drive-bys. Stop the fighting in the streets, No More War."
At the same time we are quagmired in a illegal war in which over 600,000 Iraqis and 3000 Americans have been slaughtered and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered - while our schools and cities deteriorate and millions are unemployed or underemployed because giant corporations have outsourced our jobs to countries where they can make more profit with cheaper labor.
Growing inequality in the U.S. is making a mockery of our founding ideals. The average salary for American workers is now 525 times smaller than the income of the average CEO. Millions of children in the Global South die each year of starvation while diabetes as a result of obesity is approaching epidemic levels in the U.S.
Meanwhile, our never-ending pursuit of material and technological growth has created a planetary emergency. As Time Magazine put it in its special Tipping Point issue last spring: "From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. "
Forty years ago, as he struggled with the crisis of the urban rebellions and the Vietnam War, King began to project the radical changes in ourselves and in all our institutions that would empower us to address these increasingly urgent issues.
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, which the March on Selma had forced Congress to pass.
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 Watts had even heard of him or his strategy of non-violence and that, despite the loss of lives, they were claiming victory because their violence had forced the authorities to acknowledge their existence.
The Watts rebellion forced King to recognize how little attention he himself had paid to black youth in the cities. So in early 1966 he rented an apartment in a Chicago black neighborhood and began to get a sense of how the anger which exploded in Watts was rooted in the powerlessness and despair which is the daily experience of youth in our dying cities. He also discovered the futility of trying to involve these dispossessed young people in the kinds of non-violent mass marches that had worked in the South. And they gave him a lot to think about when they demanded to know why they should be non-violent in Chicago when the U.S. government was employing such massive violence against poor peasants in Vietnam.
Soon thereafter, on the March through Mississippi in June 1966, King again found himself on the defensive when SNCC activists like Stokely Carmichael insisted that demanding Black Power by all means necessary was the only way to meet the needs of angry black youth.
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, 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." Even his closest associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were too preoccupied with the opportunities for upward mobility opened up by the civil rights movement to worry about the despair which was exploding in violence in northern ghettoes.
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 new 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 his wife 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 radical ideas needed to address the new questions that were emerging in the late 1960s and have now become overwhelming.
Three works by Dr. King, 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 said, 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 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. Restoring our communities and providing hope to our young people must take precedence over our pursuit of economic and technological development. "When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, "he warned, "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 Vietnam, he said," is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a world revolution because we refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
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 an oil economy which has encouraged a foreign policy in the Middle East that that has angered millions of grassroots Muslims, we had resolved 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 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 but somehow the .key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. 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 we founded Detroit Summer fifteen years ago to engage young people in rebuilding, redefining and respiriting the city from the ground up.
Just imagine how much safer and livelier and more peaceful 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 isolated from the community and 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 an educational system which sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like products of a factory because it was created for the age of industrialization. They are crying out for another kind of education that gives them opportunities to exercise their creative energies because it values them as whole human beings.
This is the new approach now needed in all our educational institutions. Instead of viewing the purpose of education as giving students the means for upward mobility and success and/or to become the technological elites that will enable the U.S. to compete on the world market, we need to recognize that the aptitudes and attitudes of people with BAs, BSs, MBAs, Ph.Ds bear a lot of the responsibility for our planetary crisis. At a time when we urgently need to heal the earth and build durable economies and healthy communities, our schools and universities are still stuck in the processes and practices used to industrialize the Earth in the 19th and 20th centuries
In fact, formal education as it is now structured bears a large part of the responsibility for our present crisis because it produces morally sterile technicians who have more know-how than know-why.
What we urgently need are school boards, school superintendents and college presidents with the imagination and courage to introduce innovative curriculums and structures that create a much more intimate connection between intellectual development and practical activity, root students and faculty in their communities and natural habitats, and engage them in the kind of real problem-solving in their localities that nurtures a love of place and provides practice in creating the sustainable economies, equality and community that are the responsibilities of citizenship.
Schools and colleges dedicated to this new kind of education would look and act very differently from today's educational institutions. For example, much more learning would take place OUTSIDE school walls. INSIDE an integral part of the educational process would be the design and operation of the building. Classes would audit resource flows of food, energy, water, materials, waste and investments.
From my contacts with university students who come to the Boggs Center, and who volunteer for community service-learning and Alternative Spring Break programs in Detroit, my sense is that this kind of place-and -community-rooted education is what they hunger for.
In the present period when huge global corporations are robbing us any control over the ways we make our living, people everywhere are also searching for ways to go beyond traditional capitalism and communism, for example, by building local enterprises like employee-owned businesses (ESOPs), coops, community development corporations.
Entrepreneurs are creating businesses in which the health of the environment, the well-being of communities, the empowerment of employees are all part of the bottom line.
Community and school gardens and farmers markets are springing up everywhere as growing numbers of Americans recognize the nutritional, ecological and economic benefits of local food initiatives.
State governments, Mayors and City Councils are assuming the responsibility, abdicated by the federal government, to reduce global warming pollutants through innovative conservation measures and utilization of clean, renewable sources of energy.
Communities are asserting their right to self-government by repudiating the concept of corporate personhood which has enabled giant corporations to override local decisions protecting health, safety, family farms and the environment.
In the 1999 "Battle of Seattle" tens of thousands of individuals and groups, representing very diverse sections of society, closed down the WTO because it empowers global corporations to overrule national and local environmental and social legislation. Since then hundreds of thousands of individuals and groups from around the world have gathered at World Social Forums to make clear that "Another World is possible."
In the process of convening these global demonstrations and gatherings and in these local initiatives a new form of Democracy is being created which is much more participatory, more rooted in community and more horizontal than the representative democracies that were struggled for and achieved within 19th and 20th century nation-states.
In these and other imaginative ways Americans are beginning to build the movement to go beyond traditional capitalism and communism and bring about the radical revolution in values which Dr. King projected forty years ago in the crisis created by the Vietnam War and the urban rebellions.
Everyone who cares about Democracy, Sustainability, Peace, and living a life of purpose and meaning can play a role in building this new movement to replace our dying cities with cities of hope.
If you're looking for a way to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 2007, the 40th anniversary of his Time to Break the Silence" Speech, you might start thinking of how you can help build this movement. That is what we are doing in Detroit.