Claudette Colvin died last week.
She was Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks. And if you’re an American, there’s a good chance you never learned who she was.
On March 2, 1955, she refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white woman. She was 15 years old and rebellious AF. Civil rights leaders at the time consider her too much of a liability.
Nine months later, Rosa Parks, a quite, respectable older woman, did the same thing. And she became the face of the movement.
Today is MLK Day in the United States. It’s important to keep in mind how much of what Americans are taught about the Civil Rights Era is centered around the feelings of white moderates and conservatives.
Even MLK Day itself.
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. was radical AF. White moderates and conservatives obsess over his “I Have a Dream” speech (the only one they seem to know) and his non-violent protect movement.
But he was a socialist and a working-class organization who also understood that violence, white not something he personally promoted, has a reason and a purpose as a tool for liberation. He was becoming more radical in the years preceding his death.
I contend that the cry of “black power” is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.
White folks love to point to MLK’s non-violent protect movement as “the right way” to protest.
But remember: he was the single most hated person in the US at the time. He and his supporters were stalked, harassed, arrested, and beaten for protesting “the right way.”
As the punk band Bob Vylan sings…
White folks love quoting Martin Luther
‘Cause he held hands and prayed while they bombed his building
Good for him but the times have changed
And don’t forget, white folks still killed him
MLK Day was used to defang MLK.
Something I didn’t learn until recently was that MLK Day, while being asked for by Civil Rights groups, was passed by Reagan.
He did it specifically to rebrand MLK from the radical he was into something more palatable for white folks.
By 1983 Reagan faced an onslaught of criticism from groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League for his aggressive assaults on affirmative action and court-ordered busing. With a reelection bid on the horizon, he began to make more concerted efforts to pacify his critics and soften public opinion over his open hostility to civil rights. The King holiday was the primary component of this effort.
Reagan’s pivot on the King holiday provided a two-pronged benefit. On the one hand it would pacify critics of his positions on civil rights, but on the other it enabled Reagan to position himself as the inheritor of King’s colorblind “dream”—a society in which “all men are created equal” and should be judged “not … by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”—in order to advance the anti-black crusade he had waged since the 1960s, now under the alluring mantle of colorblindness.
So when…
- You see some chucklefuck on Fox News talking about MLK today, quoting that one speech and ignoring what the man himself fought for.
- You realize you were never taught the real MLK in school.
- You learn about America’s rich history of radical black figures.
Remember that this is 50+ years of deliberate disinformation by both conservatives and “moderate liberals” to maintain power and suppress black liberation.
As F.D. Signifier says, these are not unprecendented times. This is who America is.
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