Today is Martin Luther King Day in America.
In 2013, Washington, D.C. became the home of the magnificent Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. This year it may become the burial site of his legacy.
When it comes to racism in our country, the progress we have made has not come primarily from a collective commitment to Martin Luther King’s vision of justice and equality. It’s come from our reaction to violence and murder.
Part of the national reaction to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Enforcement Act of 1870. The relentless lynchings of black people spawned the NAACP and led to the Supreme Court’s striking down segregated schools in its Brown v. Board of Education decision. The grisly murder of Emmitt Till gave momentum to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The public reaction to the bombing deatths of four black children in Birmingham, and the unearthing of the buried bodies of the James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, helped pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a national popular figure until after he was assassinated, but the gradual change in public opinion toward him led to his birthday being made a national holiday in 1983. The brutal torture and death of George Floyd in 2019 inspired demonstrations by millions of people around the world and resulted in the murder conviction of a white officer and a new focus on police brutality against minorities. The vigilante execution of Ahmad Arbery led to convictions and life sentences for his murderers.
All of these reactions to violence and murder led to positive results that undeniably represented real legal progress for African-Americans and put the country on the path to electing Barack Obama as President—twice. Some white Americans saw Obama’s election victories as proof that institutionalized racism in America was dead and buried. Right-wing radio host Lou Dobbs proclaimed that "We are now in a 21st-century post-partisan, post-racial society,” and liberal pundit Chris Matthews said of Obama, "He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour."
African Americans knew better. In a 2014 poll, half of white respondents said that they believed that the justice system treats Americans of all races equally, but only ten percent of blacks said the same. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 13% of black Americans surveyed identified race relations as the country’s most important problem. Only four percent of whites who took the survey agreed.
African Americans know our country’s racial history and how white Americans have worked strenuously since the founding of the first British colonies in North America to wipe out all trace of it. African Americans understand that every important stage of racial progress in American history has been followed by a political backlash that has reinforced white supremacy.
African Americans know all about the tenuous commitment of both national parties to racial progress. Just six years after Republican President Ulysses S. Grant declared that “the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life,” the Party of Lincoln saw Rutherford B. Hayes, its candidate in the 1876 election, lose the popular vote and fall just short of the required number of Electoral College vote. The Republicans decided that retaining national power was more important than supporting racial progress, and the Democratic Party decided that re-establishing white supremacy in the South was more important for the White House. The Democrats thereby allowed twenty Electoral College votes to be switched to Hayes in return for a commitment from Hayes to remove federal troops—and Reconstruction—from the South.
African Americans know all about how the Voting Rights Act was supported by both parties for forty years (Nixon, Ford, and Reagan both signed extensions of the Act), but they also understand how that legislation began the dramatically swift transition of white supremacist voters and politicians from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and how hard the Republican Party worked to make the South a Republican stronghold.
African Americans understand that the election of Barack Obama not only fulfilled a cherished dream but also unleashed a furious reaction from white American voters that led to the election of an avowed racist as President in 2015 and the complete and utter transition of the Republican Party into the White Supremacist QAnon Party.
African Americans understand that before Obama’s election an extension to the Voting Rights Act, an act that had passed the Senate 98-0 and the House 390-33, and was signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush. They don’t need to be reminded how the reconstituted conservative Supreme Court rescinded the enforcement mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act in 2003, or that not a single Republican senator supports voting-rights legislation.
Black voters responded to Trump by saving the Democratic Party’s from extinction in the 2020 election and buy awarding them with a surprise Senate majority in 2022. They expect Biden and the party to put action behind its stated support of voting rights.
They haven’t gotten that action. What they’ve gotten instead is a year squandered in dead-end negotiations within the Democratic caucus and a party that can’t pass voting rights despite controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress.
When Joe Biden came to Georgia last week to deliver a major speech (but no legislation) on voting rights, black Georgians prominent in the long fight over voting, including Stacey Abrams, did not show up. "We don't need even more photo ops," Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told reporters. "We need action.” Returning to Washington, D.C. after the speech, Biden paid a visit to Mitch McConnell’s office to apologize for telling the truth when he linked the White Supremacist QAnon Party to the segregationists of the past.
African Americans know where the bodies of their historical supporters are buried. They can also see that one political party is busy digging a grave for voting rights and democracy in this country and that the other party is powerless to stop it.