Martin Luther King – Prevention of the usual observances of the day this year – The attitude of cautious optimism concerning race relations impacted by recent events – The possibility of Trump being indicted for attempts to defraud the voters of Georgia – Evening statistics
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
We owe so much to Martin Luther King and his colleagues in the Civil Rights movement. The monstrous Jim Crow laws began to exert their malign influence from the 1880s onwards, after the failure of Reconstruction, and the segregation they enforced was raised to the level of a national institution by the unspeakable Woodrow Wilson in 1913, after which it spread like a cancer all over the country. For decades these laws appeared to be unassailable, and the bitter struggles to overturn them lasted well over a half-century. King knew in advance that the role he played in overcoming these abominations was likely to result in his own assassination, and he could easily have elected to live in comfortable and secure obscurity. Many people in the black communities of his day were not in the least anxious to remove the barriers between them and their white countrymen; the prevailing sentiment being, quite understandably under the circumstances, that it was bad enough to have to encounter them during work hours, without being obliged to come into contact with them socially. It was very fortunate that King decided upon the course he eventually took; had he decided not to enter the cause of civil rights at all, no one would have reproached him and he would avoided a great deal of personal discomfort and grief by choosing to be safe and unknown. Like the philosopher Spinoza, he had the quality of selflessness.
Martin Luther King Day is not a festive occasion, but in a strange sense it usually is a joyous one. As the above quotation indicates, blacks were not the only ones who paid heavily for the legislative perversion I have mentioned; the hatred and resentment generated by segregation were like a poisonous miasma that penetrated nearly every corner of American life. It is fortunate for our nation that King had a singular incapacity for resentment; he never expressed any hostility towards those who opposed him and injured him, and on numerous occasions he spoke of them as more deserving of pity than censure. His policy of non-violence was often questioned by numerous fellow Civil Rights members, but it proved to be the most effective strategy in the long run, and it certainly was a blessing for the country as a whole that the social change he helped to bring about was purchased with a relatively small cost of human life.
It has been the practice of many, myself among them, to visit the Memorial at this time of year and pay the tribute of respect to one of our great national benefactors. On such occasions I always linger before the panel on which the quotation cited above is engraved. But it is not possible on this day.
For a time, after the removal of the disenfranchisement of black voters in 1965 and of various other methods of implementing segregation, it really did appear, especially in recent decades, that we were in remission at last. The recovery is not complete, of course. Some inequities remain, such as those imposed by the GI Bill (passed in 1944, years before the Civil Rights movement overturned the segregation-related restrictions) and by the fact that schools in predominantly black communities tend to have the lowest budgets and the least up-to-date facilities. By and large, however, the impression was that the disparities among the races were disappearing and that the vision King expressed in his “I have a dream” speech was becoming a reality. After all, in the space of 50-odd years after King’s victory, we have seen (among others) African-American business executives, city mayors, prominent lawyers, Cabinet members, state governors, astronauts, Supreme Court justices, a Nobel-prize writer of fiction, and of course, a President. Under quite recently it seemed that we had turned the corner.
Can it be that the cancer of racial divide is on the verge of metastasizing once more? Matters certainly have the appearance of it at this point. The city of Washington at the current moment resembles a beleaguered garrison in a plundered country and will remain that way until the day after the inauguration at the very least. Any non-resident enters the city at his peril. Once Biden is officially our president the overt demonstrations will probably diminish, but the racial hatred that is one of the components that fueled the recent siege on the Capitol will not vanish; it will merely go underground. Access to the Memorial is impossible for the time being. Police are stationed there to prevent would-be rioters from defacing it and, more importantly, from assaulting those who wish to visit it to honor King’s magnificent achievements. Usually on this day we celebrate the triumphant overcoming of mindless bigotry, but this year we are haunted by the fear that marches on behalf of ensuring the eradication of racial oppression via skewed legislation may have to occur all over again.
On a slightly more cheerful note – One deficiency in the drawing up of the impeachment (which I neglected to mention in previous entries) is that it is a single article only, dwelling upon Trump’s incitement of the siege of the Capitol, and that his blatant attempt to overturn the election results in Georgia by fraud was not included in the charges. However, Georgia prosecutors are considering the possibility of bringing charges against Trump on their own. This course would have the advantage that even if Trump issues a pre-emptive pardon for himself, it applies to federal crimes only and would not apply to crimes against a state government. How strange it is to feel that the best possible outcome is an indictment of some sort for our current President. But nothing else will have the power to neutralize him.
What a gloomy entry this is! I am out of sorts today. I suppose there is a personal element in my state of malaise, as well as a socio-political one. I had planned earlier in the month to go to the King Memorial in the morning and afterwards lead a few others on a 15-mile circuit via Anacostia, NoMa, and the Cathedral, but obviously such an undertaking could not be attempted under the current circumstances. No doubt being balked of this hike plays a role in my current state of grumpiness.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 95,989,749; # of deaths worldwide: 2,048,487; # of cases U.S.: 24,626,175; # of deaths; U.S.: 408,615. Another day with a decrease in new cases and new COVID-related deaths. Then again, who could have predicted earlier in the year that a day that witnessed less than 1,500 deaths would be something to rejoice about?