MLK day in Trump’s America: Open thread

https://twitter.com/JamilSmith/status/1087427837152223232

Celebration and town hall with Jemele Hill, Common, TaNehisi Coates, the Notorious AOC, and many more at Riverside Baptist in NYC

I found myself thinking of my late father today, who so admired Dr. King and the civil rights movement. “We Shall Overcome” was a bedtime song for us, and we’d make up new verses. One of the last votes Dad was able to cast was for Barack Obama in 2008. He wasn’t able to vote for Obama in 2012.

Miss you, Dad.

For some reason, I find myself remembering the 2008 Presidential election, and how 109-year-old Amanda Jones, whose father was born into slavery, got to cast her vote for Obama–a juxtaposition that underscores how fresh are the old injustices–even if they weren’t being regularly topped up and the pot stirred.

@Moggie

Right? The man openly called himself an extremist (albeit with important qualifiers).

Re-read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” today, this struck me:

“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

One thing I’ve always wanted to dig into about King is what he thought about Muhammad Ali Jinnah, if that is even documented (although if he did say or write anything about him, it seems likely that it would be documented somewhere). This has always intrigued me because both scholarly and popular images of King make much of King’s opinions on Gandhi (a good starting place for that being, in my opinion, the page on King and Gandhi at the Stanford University King Institute https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/gandhi-mohandas-k — it conveniently has citations right to the various volumes of the published King papers volumes!) I’ve been meaning to check the standard King biographies on this and Stanley Wolpert on Jinnah but just haven’t yet.

When they finish all the volumes of the King papers that will likely be the authoritative primary source. It’s an NHPRC-funded publication (hard to believe we still HAVE the National Historical Publications and Records Commission grants!) — and that means this thing will be thoroughly annotated and thoroughly indexed.

In the meantime, though, what King thought of Jinnah really has my curiosity — popular American understandings of Gandhi talk about his successes as if only independence, equality and social justice was his goals. He cared as much about unity as independence and social justice.

And he lost on the matter of unity. And understanding how and why means one has to understand Jinnah, the Muslim League and the origins of Pakistan. So for every great historical figure who was inspired by Gandhi, I always wonder what that person thought of the Pakistan Movement.

I would love to see a poll that measures how many U.S. people who have heard of Gandhi and/or know anything about him have even heard of Jinnah. It’s not hard to encounter people in the U.S. who know of Gandhi but talk about him as if he’s the entirety of the India independence movement.

@Alan

Yes, I read Bal Ram Nanda’s biography of Gandhi in graduate school; our South Asian history professor told us that was the most thorough and balanced. For the Partition and the founding of Pakistan I had read two memoirs: Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman’s Pathway to Pakistan and Alan Campbell-Johnson’s Mission with Mountbatten. Neither is hardly objective (but that was kind of the point — the professor wanted us to get examples of those particular points of view). As I recall Campbell-Johnson portrayed Jinnah and Nehru as the main players, although Gandhi was still beseeching Jinnah up to the end to somehow agree to an independence-with-union plan and no partition.

And I agree what with both MLK and Gandhi there are those who are willfully selective because it suits their narrative.

Gandhi the passive peaceful man makes for a “noble savage” figure palatable to those who cling to imperialist and white supremacist ideas. To accept that image one has to ignore or write out of the story not only Jinnah and the Muslim League but B. K. Tilak and the Hindu Nationalists and — someone whose life and career is very jarring for many ideological constituencies — Subhas Chandra Bose.

And thinking about the Hindu Nationalist contingent is a good reminder that along with independence, social justice, equality and unity Gandhi advocated a *secular* demography. (Jinnah advocated the same for Pakistan — which is quite clear if one reads pretty much anything he wrote or said — great way to blow the minds of modern day western alt-right Islamophobes who will make up all kind of claims about supposed essential incompatibility between Islam and democracy. Jinnah’s Pakistan is *not* Zia ul Haq’s Pakistan, that’s for sure.)

That raises the great question of what King thought of Gandhi’s secularism. I don’t imagine he would have objected to it, per se, but it would be interesting to know. And I wonder what King knew and thought about not just Jinnah but the rest of the India independence movement besides Gandhi.

@Alan

People forget about his early career at the Bar; his pro apartheid advocacy not really in line with the mythologising.

Yep, and more broadly, also *off* the popular memory is that not only that Gandhi but Jinnah too was a lawyer — a *really good one*.

I think Jinnah was on Tilak’s defense team when Tilak was tried by the British.

@WWTH

Thanks. Long time lurker (hence enough knowledge to address you as “WWTH”), but only occasional commentor.

@Doethreetwoone
Welcome! Glad to have you. 🙂

Yaay! Welcome, Doethreetwoone!

All of this is so strange to me. I grew up in the Northeast (NJ) in the 60’s and 70’s. My elementary, grammar, and middle schools were well integrated. I learned about Martin Luther King, Malcom X and other Black activists as well as black inventors, authors, politicians etc. It never occurred to me to think any less of my classmates because of the color of their skin. It was only when I went to school down in Virginia that I heard the “N word” fly about freely. I used to be one of those naive people that thought we were done with racism. That was until I became a therapist and heard people’s stories. Up until recently, it was just well hidden. I can’t believe we have to do this crap again.

I went around Reddit earlier, looking for posts claiming MLK as a Republican, so I could post responses pointing out that he urged people to vote for Johnson instead of Goldwater. So he was an LBJ Republican?

Also, I’m quite weary of Alveda ‘Professional Niece’ King calling herself ‘doctor’. She got an honorary doctorate from a college she never attended.

The quote from King earlier about white moderates made me think of “Love Me I’m a Liberal” by Phil Ochs. “An outspoken group whose compass is ten degrees left of center in good times, ten degrees right of center when it concerns them personally.”