On this, the commemoration of the 82nd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birth, we can take some solace from what Dr. King did in the face of forces far more annihilating than the ones that progressives face this cold January.
Impossibly enough, he built a movement.
He did so in an era when the consequences for challenging the racial order in the American South were swift and brutal. You lost your economic livelihood, or your life.
In 1955, when Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott, the chances of such a movement seizing the nation's conscience, and within less than a decade including the full moral authority of an American president, were just about inconceivable. He was a minor 26-year-old radical, hardly known outside his own circle.
In 1955, except for a recent Supreme Court decision on school segregation widely held to be unenforceable, there was no support from the government to end the racial order in the South. The Democratic Party was fatally dependent on the votes of Southern racists. The Republican Party of Lincoln was failing to lead even on something as rudimentary as a federal anti-lynching law.
Yet within a decade, the legal foundations of what Pulitzer Prize winning author Douglas Blackmon called "slavery by another name" had crumbled. Half a century later, public attitudes were continuing to evolve, glacially to be sure, but in the direction of Dr. King's arc of justice. Far sooner than he might have expected, our country elected an African American president.
I mention all this not just because this is the day to remember Dr. King, but because we progressives have been depressing the hell out of each other lately and wringing our hands about President Obama's missed opportunities.
It is all too easy to make a list of why all political possible avenues to a more progressive society are blocked. If you want to wallow in it, here is the list:
Okay -- depressed?
Well, the prospects that African Americans faced in 1955 were far worse. And, against all odds, unimaginably brave men and women, some honored and some still unknown, went out and built a movement.
And you could say the same of every other cause that has resulted in real social progress over the last century. A bottom-up social movement came first, presidential leadership came afterwards.
Organizing in the mines and mills proceeded long before Senator Robert Wagner imagined sponsoring a bill to legalize collective bargaining, or President Roosevelt embraced the labor movement.
Women's right to vote did not come from presidential leadership but from bottom-up struggle. Women's economic rights were added to the Civil Rights bill of 1964 by cynical reactionaries in the hope that it would kill the bill. Today, our daughters take for granted rights that their grandmothers doubted would ever come.
Homosexuals, as recently as half a generation ago, were the last group that an American could openly ridicule without being called a bigot. So gays and lesbians built a movement whose moral power could not be denied.
The disability rights movement was built from the bottom up, to the point where George H.W. Bush felt compelled to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which seemed to come out of nowhere. It didn't; it came from the bravery of unsung people.
I could go on.
As readers of The Huffington Post may recall, it drives me and many other progressives nuts that in a moment when heedless capitalism has disgraced itself, President Obama has not been more like the two presidents of the past century who helped lead radical, transformative change -- Franklin Roosevelt and the Lyndon Johnson of the civil rights era. But in both the 1930s and the 1960s, the movement came first, the likelihood of success was even slimmer, and mainstream political embrace followed.
At a time when the economic dreams of tens of millions of Americans are being crushed, I have no doubt that we shall see another progressive social movement, beginning with a tiny brave minority, and coming to have real transforming influence. Dr. King put it well: "Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see."
Those who say it can't be done in an age of trivializing media, or the paradoxically fragmenting and disempowering role of the Internet, or the undertow of private amusement, or the hegemony of big money, are too cynical. The great social movements of the past were even more impossible.
Dr. King declared, "History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." He also said, "Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle."
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect, and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.
Robert Greenwald: No Room for the Pentagon's Wars in Dr. King's Dream
So KING was not a Progressive Liberal he was as Conservative as our Founding Fathers that equality is a birth right of not just of American Citizens, but ALL MANKIND. And the Constitution was the rock of the world for righteousness or "right action".
The 21st Century has been symbolized to me as IRONY. Where WORDS are being redefined to change policy, law and meaning to confuse, manipulate and control the honest, sincere and hard working for the GREED of the few.
To me we have a two party one is the GREEDY party, desiring to take others Happiness away enslaving their 100% Labor for 7% return for all the Labors SWEAT and GENIUS. Twisting the words and hence the LAW for their GREED. That is as much progressive away form our roots of America as you can get
Call me what you will, but you will never take away my right to life, liberty or Happiness
This is the spirit of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mendella, Jesus Christ
Empire is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Actually, democracy ------- govt of, by and (most importantly) for the people -------- exists NOWHERE. The best which exists is mirage democracy, given the over emphasis on the political component and the under emphasis on the economic component with respect to "the people". Govt of, by and for the banksters and their various cohorts (including the elites of govt) appears to be a more accurate description of what exists.
BE that leader!
During this national holiday there is the usual stillness about King’s public opposition to our violence in Vietnam. Every year it gets pushed further into the background. Kuttner ignores it. This kind of parallels the silence during the recent midterm elections about the two shooting wars in which our troops and drones are presently engaged
GUNS are not the problem. Create fairness and there will be less sick people, less violent activity.
Change can come from the most unlikeliest of places.
One hopes that those who are in charge of keeping the histories of our American Experiment, will not dilute nor misrepresent the full measure of his work and his message over time. He was a moral leader, not only for the civil rights of black folk, he was also a moral leader for the poor, the downtrodden, the left out, the working class no matter what their color or their gender, and for a nation that had lost its way in war, as we so often do.
His words not only reached "the negro" but well beyond that into the core of all human beings sense of conscience, and if not all of us then, then more of us now.
Exactly. You said it better than I did. However, that is why I put quotation marks around "invented".
Sometimes I despair. We slowly, painfully make progress in some areas as I certainly know that we have in the areas of race and racial discrimination, and yet we walk backwards in other areas like economic justice and war.
Thanks for your comment.
But on this MLK Day, knowing what I KNOW about this Martyr, I'm simply in Awe!!
Sometimes I wonder, what the Man who Fought for Equal Rights, and Spoke Out against the WAR (Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos), would have to say about US in Afghanistan & Iraq!!!
Then again, I think I Know the answer....
Happy Birthday Martin..........................
Peace, Love & Respect.
The election of President Barack Obama directly addressed the deep psychological scars that our history has layered over with the remnants of America’s tragic past. King went on to say, “each accomplishment was the culmination of long years of ache and agony….quietly, without the blare of trumpets, without marching legions to excite the spirit..."
When President Obama took office in 2009, he urged those who applauded his ascension to Presidential leadership to keep the pressure on him. King noted, “The fluidity and instability of American public opinion on questions of social change is very marked.” The ebb and flow of the multitude of the critical issues facing our country today and that must be decided are momentous.
I believe President Obama is a fighter. Dr. King understood that..."No major program gets going unless someone is willing to wage an active and often fierce struggle in its behalf." I think Obama is poised to do this.
Mr. Kittner it's time you faced the reality that in the 60's/70's MOST OF AMERICA WAS RACIST. To be fair there were more racists and racial hate in the South but we didn't own it. It was everywhere.
I am sick and tired of the South being characterized the way you do, Mr. Kittner.
But you're right, racism is not confined to the South. Heaven knows it's not unique to Southerners, or even Americans. Racism is a human problem the world over. In fact King believed that Southerners would overcome their racism before northerners would simply because of the shared history and culture, however brutal and exploitative it had been for blacks. The South has certainly gone a long way toward rectifying inequities and blocked opportunities. About 15 years ago, the NYTimes reported that three of the four most integrated communities in the country were in the South. We can as Southerners take some hope in the continuing opening up of southern society to full equality, but we mustn't ever pretend that history was not what it was.