Martin Luther King, Jr and Civil Society: Positive Change in the US
Martin Luther King, Jr and Civil Society: Positive Change in the US
David Bruce Wharton
Ambassador Wharton addressing members of the public
Remarks by Ambassador Bruce Wharton at a Food for Thought Session organised by the Embassy's Public Affairs Section; January 22, 2013
Thank you Sharon and PAS staff
I am delighted to be back at the Public Affairs Section, and so proud of the great work my Zimbabwean and American colleagues do here to open and sustain productive relations between the people of Zimbabwe and the people of the United States. In this era of global challenges such as health, climate change, migration, food security, poverty, intertwined economic systems, and international crime and terrorism, among others, we need to listen and learn from each other. Global problems require both local and global actions, as no one country or people have all of the answers. Thanks to programs like “Food for Thought,” Zimbabweans, Americans and others living in Zimbabwe have an opportunity to share ideas and discuss common concerns and work together to build the sort understanding and commitment needed to address those challenges.
It is also a great honor to be with you today to celebrate one of my personal heroes and one of the greatest leaders my country ever produced, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just one week ago, on January 15, we marked the 84th anniversary of Dr. King’s birth. He was born into an influential religious family as his father Martin Luther King, Sr. was the pastor of one of the most prominent churches in Atlanta, Georgia for more than 40 years. Dr. King was a precocious child, skipped two grades in school, entered university at the age of 15, and graduated from Morehouse College at 18. By the time Dr. King was 26, he had earned his Ph.D. from Boston University and was the pastor of an important Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.
Deeply influenced by the example of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. King became a champion of non-violent resistance as a means of challenging the repressive social order and racist laws that prevailed throughout the United States in the 1950s. Very soon after becoming the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Dr. King became the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a non-violent social action that lasted over one year and resulted in the end of racial segregation on public transportation in Montgomery.
That campaign launched Dr. King’s career as a leader of the civil rights movement in the U.S. He went on to lead successful campaigns of non-violent resistance to racial segregation across the U.S. His leadership in places like Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, Chicago, Illinois, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Albany, Georgia, and Washington, DC resulted in slow, but continual improvement in the rights of African Americans to vote, work, study, live and travel as any other American could. Dr. King was incredibly resolute and courageous for the 13 years of his leadership of the civil rights movement in the U.S. During that period, he was arrested at least 30 times, his home was bombed, his phones were tapped, and he was often threatened.
Dr. King’s leadership was recognized through many awards in the U.S., including a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal, and by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. On April 4, 1968, at the age of 39, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee by James Earl Ray, a white-supremacist and small-time criminal. Ray was convicted of the crime after pleading guilty. You may know that Mr. Ray was captured at Heathrow Airport in the UK about two months after the assassination as he was trying to make his way to Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia.
My own connections to Dr. King’s legacy, his life and his death, are strong. From 1960, one of my earliest memories is of my parent’s explaining to me that they no longer wanted me to attend a private school in Austin, Texas because that school refused to admit black children. Dr. King influenced my parents’ sense of justice, and they decided not to support a school that had racist admission policies. In 1968, I was the only American student at a boarding school in Germany, and my classmates and teachers looked to me to explain why Dr. King had been murdered and what it meant for my country. That moment had a profound effect on my political awakening and marked the beginning of my own commitment to justice for all people. In high school and university in the U.S., I volunteered with several groups that worked to promote justice and opportunities to end poverty. More recently, I have been a contributor to the campaign to build a monument to Dr. King on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and took my family there for a moment of reflection on the night before I was sworn in to become the United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe. The biggest object on the wall of my office here in Zimbabwe is a photograph that Reverend Jesse Jackson gave me of Dr. King and Reverend Jackson speaking together on the night before Dr. King was assassinated. Many Americans – people of all races and backgrounds – share my view that Dr. King was one of our most important leaders. Dr. King is consistently ranked as one of the top two or three most-admired Americans in public opinion polls conducted in the U.S. It is fitting that each year on the third Monday in January, Americans pause to remember and celebrate the life and lessons of one of our greatest citizens.
Today, though, I would like to do something that I believe Dr. King would applaud: spend a bit of time talking about the remarkable range of people and organizations that supported and followed his leadership. Dr. King did not – could not – succeed alone. He was supported by thousands of people, most working through organizations that he and others founded.
In 1957, Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SCLC. This group harnessed the moral authority and the organizing power of African American churches to conduct non-violent protests in support of civil rights reform. Dr. King led the SCLC until his death.
There were a number of other organizations, voluntary groups of citizens, some with paid staff, others without, that worked across the United States to promote racial justice through non-violent means. The so-called “Big Six" civil rights organizations and their leaders were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Roy Wilkins; the National Urban League, led by Whitney Young; the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by Philip Randolph; the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, led by John Lewis; and the Congress of Racial Equality, led by James L. Farmer, Jr. These national-level groups and leaders were joined by hundreds of other state and local groups. While Dr. King and other leaders such as Malcolm X provided the vision and strategic leadership for the cause of racial justice in America, the work of organizing, educating, advocating, and grassroots mobilization fell to these groups.
In the early days – in much of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s – these groups were viewed with suspicion by state and local governments, and by some elements of our national government. The cause they supported challenged long-established social order and legal structures. The so-called “Jim Crow” laws in the southern United States protected the then-perceived interests of the white Americans who monopolized political and economic power. In the southern United States, organizers of campaigns for equality were often regarded as outside agitators, people who were coming in to force liberal, northern attitudes on local communities. They were accused of stirring up trouble, upsetting traditional values, and interfering with the South’s own way of doing things.
Politicians such as Alabama governor George Wallace famously promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” and in 1963 personally blocked the entrance to the University of Alabama to prevent the first two black students from entering. Law enforcement officials such as Bull Connor, the now-notorious director of public safety for Birmingham, Alabama, used brutal force to prevent the groups mentioned above and their supporters from holding meetings and protest marches. Images of protestors being beaten with truncheons, sprayed with fire hoses, and set upon by police dogs are now iconic emblems of that ugly period in American history.
Young Americans of all races and ethnicities joined together as “Freedom Riders” to travel on public buses into places such as Birmingham, Alabama and Meridian, Mississippi. Political leaders in those and other southern communities, lacking a legal justification to prevent these peaceful, multi-racial protests, organized groups of thugs to harass the Freedom Riders. In some incidences, these organized mobs attacked and savagely beat the Freedom Riders on the buses as police officers stood by and did nothing.
Other organizers and activists, including representatives of labor unions, voter education programs, and community organizers – both black and white – paid the ultimate price for their beliefs. In 1964, three young organizers were murdered in Mississippi by members of a white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, which had links to local police officials. That event had a galvanizing effect on U.S. federal authorities, and resulted in a massive investigation and the eventual conviction of those responsible for the murders. I should note that the last conviction in this case finally happened in 2005. So, while justice was delayed by 41 years, it was ultimately not denied.
Giving Dr. King his full due as leader and a catalyst for change, I think it is vital that we remember the many others who worked for the same cause and without whom the advances made could not have occurred.
Many, perhaps most of these people worked through churches and civic organizations as platforms and organizing bodies. Today, we would call these groups civil society organizations or CSOs. CSOs provided the organization and structure for the participation of individuals in the long and difficult struggle for civil rights in my country. CSOs helped citizens to organize, to make their voices heard, and to bring pressure on authorities to advance the causes of freedom and justice.
Although we now agree on the value of their accomplishments, 50 or 60 years ago the work of these CSOs was seen as threatening to entrenched powers, and the organizations were seen as enemies by some state and local governments. Even elements of our federal government, fixated as we were then on fighting communism, were concerned that civil rights organizations might be infiltrated by communists bent on attacking the U.S. Now, of course, we know that was not a danger. Dr. King and the other leaders of the struggle for racial justice were deeply patriotic; in fact, they were simply calling upon America to be true to the ideals on which our country was founded.
Of course, it is also important to recognize that not all CSOs were effective, and not all CSOs were progressive. The Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens' Council, and the Citizens' Councils of America were also CSOs, and each of these sought to block equal rights for African Americans. Overall, however, I have no doubt that the existence and work of CSOs greatly accelerated the process toward racial justice and civil rights in my country – a process that continues today.
As a government official myself, I can tell you that it is not always easy to work with CSOs. Before coming to Zimbabwe, I met with CSOs interested in issues such as human rights, conservation, education, health care, democracy, and business. I did not agree with all of their analyses or goals. Some wanted one thing, while others wanted almost the opposite. But it was important for me to make the time to meet with these groups, to hear their points of view, and to explain my own.
One of the functions of CSOs is to represent the interests of a given group of citizens to government. I know that a single e-mail from an American urging our government to take action on an issue is far less powerful than the one-million e-mails to government that a CSOs can organize. CSOs may be seen as a form of collective bargaining for citizens who share a concern about an issue.
So, while CSOs can be difficult for a government to deal with, the U.S. experience with CSOs during our own struggle for civil rights and justice makes their value absolutely clear. As a government official, I have a responsibility to be respectful of CSOs that operate within the law to advance their membership’s interests -- even when I do not agree with their goals. Furthermore, I have a responsibility to pay attention to their position and give them an opportunity to share their views with me. I see it as an important duty of government to protect the space in which CSOs operate, just as it is our duty to protect freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly.
Finally, I believe that partnerships between government and CSOs are positive and important. In fact, both the White House and the State Department now have offices dedicated to outreach to CSOs and to looking for ways in which we can work together. This outreach does not infringe upon the independence of CSOs, but seeks to identify areas in which we may work together. These efforts include improving health, business, governance and justice, among other issues, across the United States and abroad. Each year, for example, the State Department works with CSOs to compile the annual Human Rights Report, which looks at human rights situations throughout the world. Without civil society organizations, this work would only present a partial view of the state of global human rights. This important role played by CSOs also extends to other sectors such as the trafficking in persons, corruption, environmental protection, and many other sectors. As independent entities with different abilities and missions, CSOs and governments offer both complementarity and a means of checks and balances.
Sixty years ago much of the United States was in the grip of a serious conflict between CSOs and their leaders, such as SCLC and Dr. King, and state and local governments and their leaders. The conventional wisdom across much of America in the 1950s and ‘60s was that Dr. King and the CSOs represented danger, and officials such as Bull Connor and George Wallace represented safety. Today, we can see how wrong that conventional wisdom was. Now, people who sought to limit the ability of CSOs to work for civil rights are not well regarded by history, while those who endured the harassment, the abuse, and the violence are remembered as heroes. And, some of the officials who sought to stop the work of CSOs even came to change their views and express regret for their earlier actions. George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, was one of those. In 1979, recalling his effort to prevent black students from studying at the University of Alabama, he said, “I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over."
So, in celebration of Dr. King and many people and civil society organizations that supported him and made his famous dream a reality, I will close with one of my favorite Martin Luther King quotes: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”