I went to a talk today which marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of MLK. Angela Davis gave a lecture entitled, “We Are Not Now Living the Dream: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Human Rights in the 21st Century.”
She opened the talk with a quote from surprisingly apropos “Beyond Vietnam” (audio) speech given at Riverside Church in New York City.
A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube.
[…]
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent.
She took an interesting position on King’s life saying that in the modern view he is seen as having died as a figurehead for the civil rights movement, but at the time they didn’t call it the civil rights movement — it was the “Freedom Movement.” She claimed, and King’s speech seems to support, that his philosophy took rather obvious direction of: the issues of poverty and racial discrimination in the United States are inexorably linked.
Davis at one time ran for President on the Communist ticket and the reasoning behind her position came through in her solutions to the issues of “pathological hyperindividualism.” Her basic points weren’t tied to that philosophy however.
In particular she referenced the Pew Report “One in 100: Behind Bars in 2008“. She asked the very valid question about why 1 in 106 white men is in jail while 1 in 15 black men is (1 in 9 black men from 20-34). Why is this not being called racism? If it is racism, what can be done about it?
The issue that she focused on in the most depth was loss of the right to vote. She called it “civil death” which is a neat idea since so far as the civil society is concerned, you really do cease to matter. The deciding Florida 2004 Presidential election was decided by less than 600 votes. In the state at that time over 600,000 past felons were denied the right to vote, the bulk of them minorities. With 2.3 million people in prison we have the largest per capita and largest overall prison populations in the world. (China’s second with 1.5 million.) The civil death of criminals is no longer simply an issue affecting a negligible portion of society. When 35% of black men will have spent time in prison at some point in their lives, it’s a veritable civic genocide.
