In a previous post I wrote about Coxey’s Army, an 1894 protest march, and its connection to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement. That got me to thinking about where Occupy Wall Street would fit into Dr. King’s worldview. One of the last sermons he delivered offers more than a clue.

On March  31, 1968, a few days before his death on April 4, 1968, Dr. King spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington about the plans for the Poor People’s Campaign, an ambitious program to end poverty with jobs, improve housing and raise incomes for poor Americans of all races. Another march on Washington was  scheduled to begin in May 1968.

In this speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” King addressed the two evils he was working to overcome besides racial injustice: poverty, which knows no color in America, and war, then specifically the war in Vietnam. The text of the entire speech can be found online at Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.

Most people associate Dr. King exclusively with the civil rights struggle. But he understood that social justice could not happen without economic justice. And that war was not the answer.

Would Dr. King be on the streets with OWS?  I’ll leave that to others to say for certain. But on Monday, read one of his last sermons and you may get the answer.

Of course, it has already happened in America, more than once. Most famously, perhaps, it happened nearly half a century ago on a hot summer night in the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Watts.

While the times and many circumstances are very different between England now and America then, the American experience with urban rioting –now seemingly forgotten– is worth remembering because many of the root causes seem to be the same.

It started with a “DWB”– “driving while black.” On August 11, 1965, an all-too-frequent stop of a young black man exploded into one of the worst urban riots in American history.

Where: Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.

When: On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered. Within a few hours the crowd had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. It exploded.

What By nightfall of the next day, small, roving bands of young people throwing rocks and bottles had grown to a mob of thousands. Rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion with widespread looting. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. When Dick Gregory, the well-known African American comedian and civil rights activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg.

The battle raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.

Why: The aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count and insurance estimates. Watts signaled a sea change in the civil-rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded,

“We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

Here is the original New York Times report on the “Negro Riots”

The Watts summer of 1965 was the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering. The worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in rioting. In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, “I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I’ve got to do something to help them get the money to buy them.”

One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was known as the Kerner Commission. In 1968, it warned that America was

“moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

Here is a link to excerpts from the Kerner Commission Report:
How much has really changed?

On the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report in 2008, Bill Moyers of PBS produced a show on the Commission and what has –or hasn’t — changed in four decades.

You can read more about Watts and the civil rights era in Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

He is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races.

Today we pay tribute to Martin Luther King, the man who has never abandoned his faith in the unarmed struggle he is waging, who has suffered for his faith, who has been imprisoned on many occasions, whose home has been subject to bomb attacks, whose life and the lives of his family have been threatened, and who nevertheless has never faltered.

On Monday January 17, 2011, Dr. King’s life will be marked by a federal holiday (3d Monday in January) celebrating his life and achievements. It is now a day that many try and set aside as a Day of Service in honor of Dr. King’s memory. The “Dream Speech” will be televised and talked about.

But Martin Luther King’s Dream seems very far away after Tucson. (It is perhaps worth noting that Arizona was a state in which the newly-elected Governor Evan Mecham revoked the state’s King holiday in 1987 and it was only reinstated after a national outcry and the NFL pulled the Super Bowl from its Arizona site in 1993.)

According to a recent poll, as reported on National Public Radio, ”

Despite having their first black president, Americans are no more certain than before that the country is closer to the racial equality preached by Martin Luther King Jr.

The killings in Tucson and the ugly wash of words that have unfortunately followed in their wake seem to have left little room for thoughts of Martin Luther King –also gunned down by an assassin. But his fundamental ideas are always worth remembering, particularly in the face of this deadly violence.

These words come from his Nobel lecture:

Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.

At the top of my short list of alternative national holidays, I would propose December 1st as Rosa Parks Day.

History is taught as the record of presidents, kings and generals. But sometimes it is the extraordinary story of an “ordinary” person that history must tell. On December 1, 1955, one woman’s act of defiance changed history. But it wouldn’t be fair to call Rosa Parks, who was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama and died October 24, 2005 at age 92, an “ordinary person.” What do you know about this courageous woman who helped spark the civil rights movement that transformed America? (Answers below)

1. Where and why was Rosa Parks arrested?
2. Before her arrest, was Rosa Parks involved in the civil rights movement?
3. How much education did Rosa Parks, the descendant of slaves, receive?
4. What action did her arrest trigger?
5. Who was elected president of the organization that ran the boycott?

There is a wealth of resources about Rosa Parks from the Library of Congress.

Answers
1. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. A city law required that whites and blacks sit in separate rows. The law also required blacks to leave their seats to make room for white passengers.
2. Yes. Rosa Parks had become one of the first women to join the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, serving as its secretary until 1956. Employed as a seamstress, she lost her job as a result of the boycott and later moved to Detroit.
3. She attended Alabama State Teachers College.
4. Her arrest triggered a boycott of the city’s segregated bus system that had been planned by local civil rights leaders who were awaiting the right moment. The arrest of Rosa Parks was that moment. For 382 days, thousands of blacks refused to ride Montgomery’s buses and the boycott ended when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated seating on the city’s buses unconstitutional.
5. A young and unknown Martin Luther King, Jr. –then a Baptist minister in Montgomery– was chosen as president, providing his first national stage.

Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Anything

Read more about Rosa Parks in Don’t Know Much About History and my biography for young readers, Don’t Know Much About Rosa Parks

On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their bodies were discovered a few weeks later.
Here’s is the original New York Times story about the crime:

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0621.html#article

If Hollywood gets its way, the civil rights movement was saved when Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe rolled into town like two gunslinging Western marshals. In this revisionist cinematic version of history, two FBI men bring truth and vigilante justice to the nasty Ku Klux Klan while a bunch of bewildered Negroes meekly stand by, shuffling and avoiding trouble.
The 1989 film Mississippi Burning was an emotional roller coaster. It was difficult to watch without being moved, breaking into a sweat, and finally cheering when the forces of good terrorized the redneck Klansmen into telling where the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were buried. The movie gave audiences the feeling of seeing history unfold. But in the grand tradition of American filmmaking, this version of events had as much to do with reality as did D. W. Griffith’s racist “classic,” Birth of a Nation.
The movie opens with the backroads murder of three young civil rights activists in the summer of 1964. That much is true. Working to register black voters, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two whites from the North, and James Chaney, a black southerner, disappeared after leaving police custody in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the film, two FBI agents arrive to investigate, but get nowhere as local rednecks stonewall the FBI and blacks are too fearful to act. The murderers are not exposed until Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman), a former southern sheriff who has joined the FBI, begins a campaign of illegal tactics to terrorize the locals into revealing where the bodies are buried and who is responsible.
It is a brilliantly made, plainly manipulative film that hits all the right emotional notes: white liberal guilt over the treatment of blacks; disgust at the white-trash racism of the locals; excitement at Hackman’s Rambo-style tactics; and, finally, vindication in the murderers’ convictions.
The problem is that besides the murders, few of the events depicted happened that way. Pressed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a large contingent of agents to Mississippi, but they learned nothing. The case was broken only when Klan informers were offered a $30,000 bribe and the bodies of the three men were found in a nearby dam site. Twenty-one men were named in the indictment, including the local police chief and his deputy. But local courts later dismissed the confessions of the two Klansmen as hearsay. The Justice Department persisted by bringing conspiracy charges against eighteen of the men. Tried before a judge who had once compared blacks to chimpanzees, seven of the accused were nonetheless convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to ten years.
Although J. Edgar Hoover put on a good public show of anti-Klan FBI work, it masked his real obsession at the time. To the director, protecting civil rights workers was a waste of his bureau’s time. Although the film depicts a black agent, the only blacks employed by the bureau during Hoover’s tenure as head were his chauffeurs. The FBI was far more interested in trying to prove that Martin Luther King was a Communist and that the civil rights movement was an organized Communist front. Part of this effort was the high-level attempt to eavesdrop on King’s private life, an effort that did prove that the civil rights leader had his share of white female admirers willing to contribute more than just money to the cause. Hoover’s hatred of King boiled over at one point when he called King “the most notorious liar” in the country. Another part of this effort involved sending King a threatening note suggesting he commit suicide.

This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About History

Here is the original NYTimes story about that protest and what it started.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0201.html#article

Howell Raines, who covered the civil rights movement for the Times wrote an op-ed on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/opinion/01greensboro.html

The act of ordering coffee at a Woolworth’s lunch counter was not a “random act of kindness,” that clichéd panacea for the world’s ills. It was a deliberate act of defiance. and that got me thinking about deliberate defiance today.
What should we be defying?
The two wars?
The discrimination against Americans who want to marry or serve in the military?
Hope is a nice word. So is Change. But if we really hope to change anything, what should we be doing that would be as earth-shaking as ordering a cup of coffee?

In the mindlessness of its evil, the 16th Street bombing was also the most heinous act of the era.

When In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963.
Where The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama
What As children filed into the church for a worship service, 122 sticks of dynamite, with a time-delayed fuse, exploded outside the church basement
Who Four young girls –Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14) were killed by the blast. Other children were gravely injured. Later in the day two more young African-Americans were killed in shootings in the aftermath of the bombing. No arrests were made at the time of the bombing. The FBI later reopened the case.

In 1975, Robert Chambliss was convicted of four counts of murder in the case. In 2000, the case was again reopened and two other men were convicted: Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton. Two other suspects died before being charged.
This is the New York Times account of the last of the convictions in the case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/23/us/38-years-later-last-of-suspects-is-convicted-in-church-bombing.html?scp=4&sq=Birmingham+bombing+convictions&st=nyt

There are many excellent books about the civil rights era. Here are four of particular note:
Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Birmingham that focuses on the bombings.
Eyes on the Prize by Juan Williams and Julian Bond, companion to a PBS documentary series
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch is the first of a 3-part biography of Martin Luther King that goes up to 1963, the year of the bombings.
My Soul is Rested is an excellent history of the civil rights era by Howell Raines, a New York Times writer who also wrote a magazine piece about Birmingham on the 20th anniversary of the church bombings.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/24/magazine/the-birmingham-bombing.html?scp=5&sq=Birmingham+Bombing+Howell+Raines&st=nyt

Here is the New York Times account of the march and speech:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0828.html#article

King’s most memorable speech was the culmination of the mass march on Washington, D.C., that drew a huge crowd of blacks and whites to the nation’s capital. In his biography of King, Bearing the Cross, author David J. Garrow calls the speech,

“The clarion call that conveyed the moral power of the movement’s cause to the millions who had watched the live national network coverage. Now, more than ever before…white America was confronted with the undeniable justice of blacks’ demands.”

The march was followed nearly one year later by passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in June 1964, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King in October 1964.

Not everyone liked the march. Or the speech. Malcolm X responded to the historic occasion this way:

Not long ago, the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling, and deluding effects of so-called “integration.”
It was that “Farce on Washington,” I call it. . . . .
. . . Yes, I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome . . . Someday . . .” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and “I Have A Dream” speeches?

What many people have also forgotten about the March was that it was about more than civil rights. Billed as the March for Jobs and Freedom, the March was also dedicated to economic justice. Martin Luther King increasingly voiced his opposition to the war in Vietnam as well.

In the current landscape of high unemployment and two foreign wars, it is difficult to imagine that Dr. King would be satisfied that his work was done. So the Dream goes on.

This is a link to the King Center Photo and video archive:
http://www.thekingcenter.org/PhotoVideo/Default.aspx

You can read more about King, the march and the civil rights movement in Don’t Know Much About History