Editor’s Note: Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Political Values and Ethics and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently “Stokely: A Life.” The views expressed here are his.
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Peniel Joseph: It's no accident that Trump went after Lewis on the eve of MLK Jr. Day
Every president (until now) has taken racial justice as good for the republic, he writes
This year’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the last that will be commemorated during the Obama presidency, offers the opportunity for sober clarity about the present leavened by defiant hope for the future. The King holiday, a hard-won victory by veterans of the civil rights era alongside of black elected officials, became a crucial part of a new national consensus on racial equality.
Dr. King’s complex iconography can be understood with a simple lesson: He brought racial justice into the mainstream as a fundamental element of American democracy.
On this score, King served as the civil rights movement’s most important political mobilizer, a global Nobel Peace Prize-winning figure capable of bridging racial and economic divides by participating in bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, writing a passionate letter from a Birmingham jail cell, leading a March on Washington, and traversing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a demonstration that galvanized world opinion in support of the struggle for black dignity.
In the shadow of continued moments of racial strife, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday represents America’s political and rhetorical acceptance of civil rights as a moral and political good. President-elect Donald Trump’s recent assaults on civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John L. Lewis, however, signal the potential end of this consensus, diminishing our nation’s moral stature on race matters at the precise moment we need it most.
Lewis is a genuine American hero, a humble and courageous foot soldier and civil rights leader, who suffered severe beatings in 1961 as a Freedom Rider and four years later during the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama. He is the last major speaker from the 1963 March on Washington living in America.
But this legacy was not enough to insulate him from the President-elect’s political wrath. After Lewis explained on “Meet the Press” that he did not consider Trump to be a legitimate president elect because of Russian interference in American elections, the soon-to-be occupant of the Oval Office pounced.
Trump launched into a racially charged smearing of the congressman’s Atlanta district as being in “horrible shape” and “crime infested.” That he engaged in this latest Twitter war a few days before the King holiday is no accident.
Throughout perhaps the most racially divisive presidential election campaign in history Trump used terms like “Chicago” to signal his open disdain for black America. His comments on “inner cities” revealed a man stuck in a time warp, a place where African Americans all reside in seething urban ghettoes whose potential for violence threatens to wreak havoc on law-abiding white citizens.
Almost as in response to Trump’s racially charged fantasies of black lawlessness, poverty, and violence, Attorney General Loretta Lynch reiterated the federal government’s need to “defend the constitutional rights of the citizens in this great country” by holding law enforcement accountable when they violate their sworn duties to serve and protect.
Just as it is no coincidence that Trump is targeting Lewis as we prepare to mark a day remembering Martin Luther King, it is not accidental that Lynch will deliver her final speech as attorney general in Birmingham, a major site not only in King’s life but also in the civil rights movement writ large – and located in a state that is home to her successor.
Trump and his nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, represent the post-consensus face of American politics on racial justice. By normalizing the demonization of predominantly black neighborhoods across the nation as unworthy of federal protection and resources, Trump signals to both ordinary citizens and political institutions the value that should be placed on the black folk who live there.
Sessions, meanwhile, has adopted less combative rhetoric but has called the Voting Rights Act “intrusive,” prosecuted civil rights activists for voter fraud and expressed support for voter ID laws.
2017 promises to offer a racial landscape at the federal level that echoes aspects of King’s era more than our recent past, where President Obama’s rise gave way to grand expectations that the nation had finally turned the corner on race.
Yet one of King’s most important legacies, though less talked about, is the embrace of defiant struggle against long odds. During the last three years of his life, King fought hard for economic justice in Chicago, spoke out against the Vietnam War, organized alongside welfare rights activists and attempted to lead a poor people’s movement whose multi-racial makeup formed one strand of a global community that King characterized as the “world house.”
King’s willingness to speak truth to power helped to transform American democracy, expanding the vision of the Founding Fathers into one that included a larger cast of characters than they could have ever conceived. What he characterized as “great wells of democracy” became a metaphor for a panoramic movement for social justice that reshaped every corner of American society and inspired Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to make the cause their own.
Indeed, every president since then, despite disagreements over how best to achieve racial equality, has accepted this goal as an article of faith.
Until now.
Yet the genius of King and the larger civil rights movement is in unleashing the power of ideas that transcend political leaders, democratic institutions, even nation-states. King faced obstacles larger and more enduring than presidents or election cycles, yet he never lost faith in the capacity for citizens to recognize their own humanity in the lives of others and to use this knowledge and empathy to transform the world.
“The arc of the moral universe is long,” King reminded the nation, “but it bends toward justice.”
Permanent change required, he argued, a “revolution of values” that included but also transcended policy changes, legal victories and legislative breakthroughs.
The power of King’s message in these times is reminding the world that justice is what love looks like in public, even when new leaders emerge willfully bent on forgetting.
