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16th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration
Stride Toward Freedom!
2003 Celebration keynote address
Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. (external link)
16th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration keynote address, delivered
by Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2003 at the 5th Avenue Theatre:
"It’s wonderful to see so many people gathered here to commemorate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Of course, yesterday was my birthday too, but y’all didn’t show up for that. That’s all right. I love you anyway.
Besides we’re not just celebrating the contributions of one man. We are here because of the ideals, the commitment, the actions, of a whole bunch of people over a whole lot of years.
Dr. King is symbolic of the labor it takes to help America be the best that it can be, the grunt work and nobility of spirit that is required to point this great nation toward it’s highest ideals.
“Remember. Celebrate. Act. A Day on, Not a Day Off.”
Well, I’m not going to argue with having a day off, but there is something to the sense of purpose that phrase conveys. The people who participated in the civil rights struggle accomplished a miraculous amount of good, but they left some work for us to do.
A black woman can kiss James Bond, and I suppose that’s a kind of progress, but there are still too many Americans stuck in poverty and too many children who can’t get a decent education, and too many young people sitting in prisons when they should be taking notes in college classrooms.
We are still willing to give tax breaks to millionaires, but wary of providing health care to working families.
We are still rattling sabers….
So, what’s any of this got to do with little children holding hands and skipping across the hills of Georgia? Little white children, little black children, little brown children, little yellow children, little red children, little striped children….
Remember records? A few of you do. Music used to come embedded in grooves on a vinyl platter.
We’ve let Dr. King’s message get stuck in one of the grooves on the civil rights platter. The sweet groove. Peace, nonviolence, love. There’s no room in that groove for justice, no room for struggle, no room for putting right what we can see with our eyes is wrong.
Peace, nonviolence and love have to be in the service of something to have meaning.
Your jobs, those of you who work for the county, your jobs put you in a position to be caretakers of society, so you may understand this message more than most.
Dr. King lived his life in the service of something. He believed that there was something wrong in the world and that good people working together could set things right.
He gave voice to a philosophy that works better than bullets for bringing about social change.
Clayborne Carson knows a lot about Dr. King. Carson is director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project and a professor of history at Stanford University.
He grew up in New Mexico, as I did, so we have a bit of a bond. When we left New Mexico the black population dropped by half.
Professor Carson has a goal. He told me, “My goal at this time is to convey to a younger generation that it is not about what King did 40 years ago, but rather about a set of ideas that grew out of those struggles that they have to adapt to their own struggles.
It’s his ideas and his social analysis that keep his work relevant to our times, that and the fact that the struggle for a more just society doesn’t have an end.
Human beings aren’t perfect and can’t be made perfect, but we can be made better.
Many of the issues Dr. King faced in the country and in the world are still with us. Greed, war, abuse of power, discrimination.
Dr. King asked, how can it be that there are millions of poor people in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known?
He began by trying to improve the lives of black Americans whose oppression was obvious, but he quickly saw that there was something about the way the economic system works that creates poverty in all groups.
When you set your eyes on justice, you can’t stop at civil rights for black people, you have to move on up to human rights for all people, and you have to do it in a systematic way.
Dr. King said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
So he talked about reforming the whole society, healing the whole nation not just putting bandages on individuals.
Dr. King was pleased with the passage of civil rights legislation in the United States, but he had to ask, what good is the right to eat in a restaurant when you have no money? What good is the right to live in any neighborhood when you can’t afford a house?
What good is the right to be hired when you don’t have skills?
A few years ago, I paid a visit to Taylor Rogers down in Memphis. I was working on some stories about the 30th anniversary of Dr. King’s death.
Taylor was 72 at the time. He and his wife, Bessie, who had been together 52 years, live in a small, white clapboard house full of the things they've accumulated over the years. The neighborhood is not in one of Memphis' preferred areas. It is not a far walk to streets where deep poverty is evident.
Taylor Rogers went to work for the Memphis sanitation department in 1958 making 96 cents an hour. He was making a little over one dollar an hour in 1968 when he and the other sanitation workers decided to walk off the job.
"We had gotten tired of being mistreated and used," he says.
It was their call for help that drew Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he would be assassinated April 4, 1968. For King this was one in a long series of battles for basic rights, but in each of the cities King led marches, from Montgomery to Memphis, ordinary people put themselves on the line for a better life.
Rogers is the kind of person who drove the civil-rights movement - a regular guy, not overly concerned about ideology, but just wanting a decent life.
And yet, Rogers is someone special. There are photos of one of the sanitation workers' marches on his walls and plaques and certificates from organizations that invite him to dinners this time of the year and thank him for his role in the strike.
He's tall and thin, his gray hair receding. He's wearing jeans, but their creases are ironed crisp.
He shows me a shoebox with miniature marchers and sanitation trucks inside. One of his grandchildren made it for a class project last year. Then Rogers tells me about the strike.
He'd just bought a house in October 1967, and he had eight children to support.
It would not have been worth the risk to strike for a few more pennies, and he wasn't thinking about universal civil rights. The strike happened for a fairly simple reason, he says. "We decided to stand up and be men."
Rogers eventually became president of the union, a position he held for 20 years until he retired in 1992.
In 1968, before the union, the men had to carry 50-gallon barrels on their heads or shoulders into back yards to collect refuse. Often the barrels had holes in them and garbage leaked over the workers.
If a man injured his back, there was no provision for medical care. He'd have to either work despite the pain or leave his job.
There was no vacation time, no sick leave, no benefits at all. "Roll call was at 7 a.m., and you worked until they said stop. There was no overtime pay."
Workers had talked about a union before. A few walked out in 1963, but that didn't last long. T.O. Jones, the leader of the walkout, was fired as an example to other workers. But he kept organizing.
In the 1968 walk out, workers were beaten, gassed and jailed, but Rogers says the strike brought the black community together. People donated food and money to the strikers. White churches helped out, too.
The strike, which would last 65 days, was getting nowhere when King agreed to come and lead a march.
"We were overjoyed when he came. We felt he had the power and strength to get things done." Rogers says he was impressed that a man of the stature of King would interrupt what he was doing and come stand with a group of sanitation workers.
"When he died I thought we would never have a leader like Dr. King.
"I think it was his religious background. He was always concerned about the poor people. He was always telling people to be concerned. You might not be on strike, but either we go up together, or we go down together. He brought poor people and middle-class people together."
"We thought we were helping ourselves, but we helped the whole race," Rogers says.
When he was killed, King was in the midst of organizing a poor people’s campaign that would cross racial boundaries to attack the economic structures that institutionalize poverty.
Keeping anybody down, hurts everybody.
You know that during slavery, white workers in the North tended to oppose slavery not because of concern for the enslaved, but because they knew the existence of slavery hurt them directly.
Employers faced with demands for better conditions or better pay, could always say, well, at least you’re not a slave. More than that, the existence of slavery devalued labor in the minds of employers and workers alike.
After slavery ended, black Americans continued to be paid less for the same work. Poor white sharecroppers would be paid a little more than black ones, but not enough to get them out of poverty.
They could have tried to challenge the system, but the few times when black and white sharecroppers tried to join and make change, landowners used race to drive a wedge between them.
Are you a white man, or are you…well, the question alone kept the system in place.
Dr. King said once, “In a real sense all life is interrelated. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”
Today the black poverty rate is about three times the white poverty rate. But the white poverty rate is rising, and the disparity between rich Americans and the rest of the society has soared since 1980.
Today, on average, black people are still paid less for the same work, but the pain of inequality spills over to other Americans as well, and indeed it affects the way we Americans view people in other lands.
Martin Luther King’s ministry didn’t stop at these shores. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam and was vilified by newspapers and magazines. People who supported his work against racism urged him to keep silent lest he damage the cause of civil rights. But it’s all tied together.
King saw the war in Vietnam draw money and energy away from the nation’s infant anti-poverty programs.
In a speech at New York in 1967, Dr. King said, “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. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor….”
War wasn’t only gutting poverty programs, Dr. King realized that it was consuming the sons of the poor.
A couple of weeks ago, Congressman Charles Rangel suggested we bring back the draft so that the sons and daughters of the rich and the powerful would have to take their place on the front lines.
He said that might make the leadership think a little deeper before sending troops off to battle.
Of course, he mostly wanted to make a point, since there is no chance of the draft being brought back, and even if it were reinstated there would be loopholes. I understand Texas has a particularly fine Air National Guard.
Dr. King’s concern moved outward and grew broader, from concern about the effect of the war on economic programs, to a concern about American soldiers, to a concern about the Vietnamese people to a concern about our relationships with poor countries around the globe. And finally back to a concern about our very soul.
What do our actions say about our values? The question is still relevant.
We have a balancing act to perform on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We have to rededicate ourselves to the work that still needs to be done, while we celebrate the wonders that have been achieved.
Kenneth Chenault runs American Express and Richard Parsons is in charge at AOL Time Warner. Tiger Woods owns golf. Serena and Venus Williams make tennis sing, especially when Serena wears a cat suit.
Colin Powel and Condolezza Rice, serve in a president’s inner circle. Some things have changed.
There is a larger black middle class than ever, but in some ways that has meant a few people have the same right to ignore social injustice that well-off white people have always had.
I’m fat and happy, except when I think about the people who aren’t fat and happy. Kids not getting an education. Lives wasted in prisons. People beyond our borders who suffer needlessly because sometimes we can’t see that what is in their best interests can also be in our best interests.
Sometimes I ask myself why do I have to think about this stuff. I’d be happier if I didn’t. I enjoy writing about things that have nothing to do with race or economic injustice.
I read somewhere that once you become a parent you can never be as happy as you were before. Your mind is not entirely free because part of it is always wondering how your children are.
Parents can kick up their heals on a Caribbean cruise, but every once in a while a thought intrudes. Where is my child? How is my child?
There is a bond that turns a person’s attention outward. You are no longer the center of your universe.
Darn, I thought, and here I’ve gone and had a kid. Somebody want a 10-year-old boy? Nooo.
Good parents know you give up some things to have a child, but what you get back is better than gold.
I think you get more than you give anytime you expand your world beyond yourself. Sometimes you may feel outrage or sadness, but you reap a bigger you. Your life has more meaning.
There is nothing like being needed to boost a person’s self esteem. And when you are needed, you must respond.
Dr. King said, “Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.”
He also said that all that’s needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Have fun this weekend and remember that someone needs me and someone needs you."
Copyright 2003 Jerry Large. Reprinted here with permission.
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