“Catching Up With Martin”By Grace Lee Boggs
Institute for Democratic Renewal/Project Change Union Theological Seminary - New York, September 29, 2006
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. To get things started, I am going to tell the story of my own efforts to catch up with Martin, mainly in Detroit where I have lived for the last 53 years, most of that time in the same house. I hope that my story will jar and challenge each of you to examine your own theory and practice of social change over the years and ask yourself whether you have caught up with Martin or whether you are still stuck in obsolete paradigms.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 Detroit. For example, I was the coordinator of the Michigan all-black Freedom Now Party and one of the main organizers of the Grassroots Leadership Conference at which Malcolm made his famous speech distinguishing between “Field Negroes” and “House Negroes” and linking the black revolution with the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Not only did I identify with Malcolm but, like most black power activists, I tended to view King’s concepts of non-violence and beloved community as somewhat naďve and sentimental.
However, when crime and violence became normal in Detroit in the wake of the 1967 “Rebellion” (which the press called a “riot”), Jimmy and I felt called upon to make a statement about the new contradictions facing Black Power. So we wrote (and sold for 10c each) this little pamphlet entitled ‘Crime Among Our People,” proposing programs of action to rid ourselves of the “corrupt values and practices which are the result of the present system and which make us accomplices in our own self-destruction,” for example, pledging with one another not to buy the “hot goods” stolen from our neighbors.
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 Montgomery, Alabama, were able to carry out a year-long successful non-violent struggle against racism. Led by the 26 year old Martin, a people who had been treated as less than human struggled against their dehumanization not as angry victims but as new men and women, representative of a more human society. Using methods, including creating their own system of transportation, that transformed themselves and increased the good rather than the evil in the world, exercising their spiritual power and always bearing in mind that their goal was not only desegregating buses but building the beloved community, they inspired the human identity, anti-war and ecological movements that during the last decade of the 20th century have been creating a new civil society in the United States.
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 Detroit. By July 2006 the number had reached 220, more than one a day.
The Detroit Rebellion, which exploded spontaneously, played a critical role in our achieving Black Political Power in Detroit because it warned the power structure that white political power could no longer maintain law and order. But the ensuing contradictions and chaos challenged us and still challenge us to recognize the limitations of Rebellion and to distinguish between Rebellion and Revolution. As we wrote in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century, published in 1974, “Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future.” On the other hand, “A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, A revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future…It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have – creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.”
It was because tens of thousands of ordinary Montgomery blacks saw themselves in this way, not just as victims but as pioneers in becoming more human human beings that the civil rights movement culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
THINKING DIALECTICALLYIn order to catch up with Martin, we need to recognize that his favorite philosopher was Hegel, the German philosopher of the French Revolution. From Hegel Martin learned the importance of thinking dialectically, i.e., to recognize that reality is always changing and facing us with new challenges and new contradictions. Therefore we must resist the tendency to get locked into old solutions, what Hegel called “fixed concepts of the understanding” and what I call “isms.”
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 Selma to Montgomery.
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 uprising 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 Chicago 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 black youth made expendable by Hi-Tech. 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 and Willie Ricks 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 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 Iraq?
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 house worker 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 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 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 re-spiriting Detroit 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.
BELOVED COMMUNITIES IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
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 and comrade 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”: Detroit Summer, Tewa Women in New Mexico, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, N.C., Weaving of Faiths in Los Angeles, and Growing Power in Milwaukee
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.
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 Toronto, Miami, Davos, Genoa, Cancun. Also, beginning in 2001, tens and hundreds of thousands of individuals and groups from all over the world have gathered every January at World Social Forums in Porte Allegre, Brazil, and Mumbai, India, to announce that “Another World is possible.”
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 Detroit. The first was initiated by the parents of small children who recognized that unless we begin taking imaginative and immediate steps together to create a child-friendly Detroit, those of us who have been struggling to redefine and respirit Detroit will find ourselves compelled to move out of the city as tens of thousands have been doing in response to escalating violence, failing schools, rising property taxes, and the increasingly manifest inability of city leaders to provide solutions.
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.
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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, Harvard University Press 2000; 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, University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 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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