At the Riverside with King

Today after you've heard the "I Have a Dream" speech for the n-teenth time, not that it isn't worth hearing again, you might spend a little time with Dr. King's 1967 sermon at the Riverside Church (full text and audio), in which he dared to say,

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in [a] revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

As Taylor Branch reports in At Canaan's Edge, the final volume of his magisterial trilogy on King's life, while the Riverside congregation "embraced King's message as though relieved to hear biting reflection sustained with nuance so devoid of malice," rewarding him with two standing ovations, public reception of the speech ran from mixed to hostile. His longtime adviser Stanley Levison

considered the speech itself an obstacle to public understanding. "I do not think it was a good expression of you," he bluntly advised, "but apparently you think it was." With his trademark directness, Levison called it unwise to focus on Vietnamese peasants rather than average American voters. "The speech was not so balanced," he told King. It was too "advanced" to rally his constituency, and covered so many angles that reporters sidestepped his message by caricature and label. "What on earth can Dr. King be talking about?" wrote a Washington columnist on April 5, wondering how any civil rights leader could overlook the benefits of integrated combat. "If there hadn't been a war, it would have served the Negro cause well to start one."

It simply seemed a betrayal for King to shift from civil rights to the war. From Branch again,

While neither [the Washington Post or The New York Times] engaged the substance of his Riverside argument, both archly told him to leave Vietnam alone for his own sake. "Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence," declared the Post. "He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people." Editors at the Times pronounced race relations difficult enough without his "wasteful and self-defeating" diversions into foreign affairs. In "Dr. King's Error," they summarized the Riverside speech as "a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate," and predicted that his initiative "could very well be disastrous for both causes."

Upon which King "broke down more than once into tears."


Emancipated slaves, New Bern, N.C., 1863, accompanied by Union troops

Airport to MLK: one for the books

Back during the long deliberations over the change of the name of Airport Road to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, I found the work of cultural geographer Derek Alderman, who has made a scholarly specialty out of studying MLK road name changes, useful in putting the request into a larger context. Latest on his list of publications now is an essay (.pdf) in the collection Landscape and Race in the United States, edited by Richard Schein. In the essay, "Naming Streets for Martin Luther King Jr.: No Easy Road," he discusses the Chapel Hill process:

In representing the street-naming issue as divisive, some whites have suggested that King--because of his legacy as a peacemaker--would not have wanted his commemoration characterized by racial conflict. For example, street-naming opponents in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, argued this point when they called on black leaders to rename a park, library, or school for King rather than the controversial Airport Road. Black supporters such as Michele Laws countered with King's own words: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy." These attempts by some whites to represent the civil rights leader's image as nonconfrontational is, according to Michael Eric Dyson, part of a larger national amnesia about King's true legacy. According to Dyson, most of America chooses to remember King as the "moral guardian of racial harmony" rather than as a radical challenger of the racial and economic order. In this respect, the politics of street naming are not just about black Americans establishing the legitimacy and resonancy of King's achievements but also about wrestling away control of his historical legacy from conservative whites, who have appropriated his image to maintain the status quo rather than redefine it.

Later in discussing specifically why the King commemoration has come to focus on roads, and not, say, libraries or parks or schools, Alderman quotes yours truly:

Under Jim Crow laws, blacks had a hard time just making a road trip. They had to pack their own food, even their own toilet paper, for they didn't know if they would find a restaurant that would serve them or even a gas station where they could use the bathroom. . . . Mobility, the freedom to travel the public roads without fear and with assurance that you got what you needed--these were the basic goals for King. Thus I can't think of a better way to honor Dr. King than with a road naming.

It's been a year and a half since we dedicated our own Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It's going to be longer than that before we see his values thoroughly reflected in Chapel Hill. But it was a significant step with more than token meaning.

Speaking of King, the sixth volume of his collected papers will be out this spring. Writes Ralph Luker, "This volume is of special interest because it includes material – many sermons and speeches, some letters -- that Coretta Scott King long delayed making available to the King Project. It is a large part of what was recently purchased for $32 million by an Atlanta trust. . . . Until now, much of the material in this volume has never been closely read by King scholars."

MLK Day in Chapel Hill

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP's 28th annual rally, march, and church service in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. got off to a brisk start at 9:30 this morning. (It was a bad time to have lost my gloves.) I was honored to be one of the speakers at the Old Post Office. This is what I said:

About a year ago, you set out on a journey, and I joined you. It was a rough road, a bumpy road, with a couple of switchbacks along the way. The road was called Martin Luther King Boulevard. May 8 will be a great day in Chapel Hill.

But here we are in January, celebrating the birthday of Dr. King. Janus was the god of beginnings, of fresh starts. He was also the god of passageways, of comings and goings. When you see pictures of him, he has two heads, one looking forward and one looking backward.

In this past year, you have asked us to look backward and forward.

You've asked us to take a hard look backward at our own history. You've reminded us that Dr. King visited Chapel Hill in May 1960, and that's something that we needed to remember. It was a very important time for the movement in Chapel Hill, and we can't let it be forgotten.

You've also asked us to look forward. Later when we get to the church, Rev. Barber is going to remind us that "the work has just begun." When we look to the future to end homelessness in Orange County, we are doing the work of Dr. King. When we work to get bargaining power for public employees in North Carolina, we are doing the work of Dr. King.

But when we talk about the longer span of history, I’m here to tell you that Dr. King's place is not secure. We do not know how he will be remembered in 50, 100, 200 years. Will he be remembered as a great American, the winner of the Nobel prize for peace, a gift to the world? Or will he be thought of as a provincial southern activist?

History is always in flux.

Professor Jacqueline Hall gave a talk the other night on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. She talked about the archives, about how the words on those old pieces of paper stay the same, it's just the interpretation that changes. And not all of the pieces of paper are even read. Some documents aren't even there. Some things never get written down; they have to be kept "in lively memory," as Frederick Douglass would say.

You've asked us to be part of a great memorial to Dr. King, the tapestry of roads in his honor. There are over 700 in this country now and some overseas. On May 8, there will be one more.

And by insisting that it not just be any street, but that it be a major street, in the white part of Chapel Hill, you have cast your vote in favor of the great historical Martin Luther King, the great American, the beacon of peace (audacious word!), our gift to the world.

I'm grateful you've taken me with you this far on your journey. I'm with you today. I'll be with you on May 8, and the day after.

Others spoke more eloquently about Dr. King's message and its crucial importance today. But none of us could come close to the power of the message delivered at the First Baptist Church by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of Goldsboro. Anyone with remaining doubts on the relevance of the symbolism of naming a road for Dr. King, rather than a monument or a building, should have heard this testimonial. For his text he took Isaiah 40, especially this verse:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

He called it a highway "to walk out the discomfort of a people that had long been denied. Tiredness brings a new kind of strength, a kind that makes you want to get out in the road and say you aren't going to take it any more." In one context after another--school equity, economic justice, national politics, international relations--he urged us to "get on the right road," the roads that Dr. King had traveled on but left unfinished. Claiming the prophetic tradition of Dr. King himself, Dr. Barber challenged us all to keep on trying.

Orange County Commissioner Valerie Foushee received the NAACP Community Service Award. Eva Caldwell received the Rebecca Clark Award. Al McSurely received a special award for his long career of service and particularly in Chatham County--he was called "a brother wrapped in white skin." Congratulations to all.

UPDATE: Renaming of road lauded as symbol

UPDATE 2: Resources for Black History Month

Street should be named for local hero

One of the more interesting things to come out of our long discussion about whether to rename Airport Road for Martin Luther King Jr. is a forgotten bit of Chapel Hill history: Dr. King is a local hero.

Picture it 1959. "Gradualism" will longer appease, but shall it be resisted with violence or coercive nonviolence? "When we look back at history," writes Tim Tyson in his book on North Carolina civil rights activist Robert Williams,

it is important to resist the temptation to view all events as part of an inexorable chain of causality leading inevitably to the present. Nonviolent direct action was a fortunate but certainly not an inevitable course or strategy. Nor did it have deep roots in Southern black culture. Though nonviolence was compatible with the distinctive Afro-Christianity of the black South, it was not interchangeable with it. To understand its full-blown emergence with the sit-in movement in the spring of 1960, we must understand what nonviolence was and what it was not. We must understand, too, that for most black Southerners nonviolence was a tactical opportunity rather than a philosophical imperative. Thus we must reconsider that time before the sit-ins swept the South, before the founding of SNCC, before the Freedom Riders rolled through Dixie, before Albany and Birmingham and Selma etched their mark on human history, and before the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. captured the moral imagination of the world, when the course of events still might have gone quite differently.

On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina A&T decided to have a seat at a Greensboro lunch counter. Their action seemed to settle the question. "[T]he sudden emergence of the student movement after the Greensboro sit-ins . . . temporarily set aside the debate over violence and nonviolence and gave the battalions of nonviolent direct action their compelling historical moment," writes Tyson.

Promptly, King got on the bandwagon with a tour of southern college towns. In the previous year he had met with some followers of Gandhi in India and conducted a pilgrimage in his footsteps. This experience strengthened King's commitment to the gospel of nonviolent direct action.

On May 8-9 he came to Chapel Hill, where, already, sympathetic sit-ins had been under way. Lincoln High students had made their stand at the soda fountain at Colonial Drug Store on West Franklin. Before King's arrival, the student protest movement had shifted from boycotting to leafleting and was now organizing a sit-in campaign aimed at movie theaters.

What the protesters wanted was a local public accommodations ordinance. The resistance they faced can be read in this conclusion to an editorial in the Chapel Hill Weekly on March 31, 1960:

As unpopular as it might be, a man's prejudice is still a personal matter. If he chooses to indulge himself in it, then he alone must take the responsibility for it. Nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory reason why a community should assume the responsibility for him.

King spoke first in Northside to a crowd of about 400. As Kirk Ross recounted in a retrospective for the Chapel Hill News in 1998, he told the protesters,

"You are demonstrating a magnificent act--a magnificent act of non-cooperation with the forces of evil. You are not seeking to put stores that practice discrimination out of business. You are seeking to put justice in business."

Next, he spoke at Hill Hall on the UNC campus to a mixed audience.

"There must be no violence in the struggle for racial equality," he told the audience. "There is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence--there is only a choice between non-violence and non-existence."

The Rev. J.R. Manley of the First Baptist Church said, "It was like a new creation. He was able to energize people, and after he left it stayed around. It didn't die down for a very long time." Further, he said, "People were angry. There was a whole lot of hate, and I think he helped change that hate, helped to transform those bad energies to focus them into something positive."

Chapel Hill had become one of the focal points for the national civil rights movement. The nation's eyes were on Chapel Hill in those days, but as Joe Straley recalled, "we had to live here once [the national leaders] were gone." It was King's inspiration that sustained the movement locally long after he went on to the next town--and sustains it today.