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The
Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. -
who was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, while
helping striking sanitation workers - left a deep and lasting impact
on America through his activism and his advocacy, his philosophy of
nonviolent civil disobedience and his radical vision of a just
society free from racism, militarism and poverty.
And
although we tend to focus on the impact on his life’s work,
rarely do we focus on the effect of Dr. King’s death on the
community - specifically the ongoing trauma of Black America, and the
impact on the movement for Black lives.
Black
America mourned King with grief, anger, hopelessness and a range of
emotions. His assassination altered the lives and psychology of Black
people and arguably continues to impact the community today.
“King’s
assassination was an example of a shattering experience that
propelled Black people into becoming more politically active and into
searching for a deeper understanding of the Black Power
movement,” Kevin
Cokley wrote in
the Dallas
Morning News, calling
his death the inheritance of current social movements.
“Black
people realized that being patient and trusting the country to
eventually do right by Black folks was a dream at risk of being
permanently deferred. Blacks did not have the luxury of sitting on
the sidelines in the pursuit of civil rights. For many, King’s
assassination aroused what had been a sometimes muted yet simmering
anger fueled by injustice toward Black Americans,” Cokley
added.
The
death of the civil rights leader sparked the urban
rebellions of
1968, although there were other factors at play, such as
unemployment, housing segregation and police brutality and harassment
- the factors of Black grievance that incited the uprisings across
America the year before. Close to 50,000
federal troops occupied
American cities in this, the largest unrest of the 1960s, where 39
people were killed and 3,500 were injured.
Further,
the loss of Dr. King was a devastating blow to the civil rights
movement, raising questions about the effectiveness of nonviolence.
On the night of the assassination, Floyd
McKissick,
director of the Congress of Racial Equality, proclaimed that
nonviolence was a “dead
philosophy” because
white racists killed it.
“When
white America killed Dr. King last night, she declared war on us. It
would have been better if she had killed Rap Brown … or
Stokely Carmichael,” said Black
Power activist Stokely
Carmichael,
later known as Kwame
Ture.
“But when she killed Dr. King, she lost it … He was the
one man in our race who was trying to teach our people to have love,
compassion and mercy for white people.”
The
Civil Rights Movement and movement for Black lives were both
triggered by Black murders, notes Aldon
Morris, Leon
Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at
Northwestern University and president of the American Sociological
Association. Sustained protests resulted from the systemic wounds of
Jim Crow segregation, not unlike the present-day devaluation of Black
people that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“A
more pertinent lesson was that overreliance on one or more
charismatic leaders made a movement vulnerable to decapitation,”
said Morris. “Similar assaults on leaders of social movements
and centralized command structures around the world have convinced
the organizers of more recent movements, such as the Occupy movement
against economic inequality and BLM, to eschew centralized governance
structures for loose, decentralized ones.”
Contrary
to the present-day whitewashing of King as a dreamer who gave great
speeches, King articulated a “fierce urgency of now” that
speaks to the rage and frustrations of his time and resonates with
our present-day realities.
“Many
are now hearing for the first time King’s quote that
‘a riot is the language of the unheard’” said Omid
Safi,
professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, who noted King’s
position during social unrest was far from moderate. After all, King
said “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it
must be demanded by the oppressed,” and he expressed his
disappointment with white moderates he viewed as more of an
impediment to Black progress than the Ku Klux Klan.
“The
question today is whether the white liberal (and their allies) will
overcome their own privilege and listen to the rage of the Black folk
who are shouting that they too cannot breathe,” Safi added.
Understanding
Black America’s response to King’s assassination requires
a grasp of the role of trauma in the Black community. Kidnapped from
our homes and sent across the Atlantic in deadly slave-ship dungeons,
only to face hundreds of years of torture and enslavement in forced
labor camps - followed by Jim Crow segregation and institutional
racism - we suffer from intergenerational
trauma linked
to fatal tragedy.
And
the “gruesome public spectacle” of lynchings traumatized
Black people. White people brought their children to lynchings with
picnic lunches, attended as spectators to a sporting event, and
participated in the murders and claimed Black body parts as
souvenirs.
This
intergenerational curse of trauma has compromised
Black health over
the centuries. As James
Baldwin asked
in Go
Tell It on the Mountain, “Could
a curse come down so many ages? Did it live in time, or in the
moment?”
And
Black children experience that trauma today, on a variety of levels.
“Seeing Black men die on TV - that produces complex trauma. It
is interwoven in an interpersonal yet indirect way that gets into
your psyche,” said Merland
Baker,
a mental health counselor licensed in Georgia and Florida.
In
addition, the psyches of Black students are damaged when they are
rendered invisible academically, yet very visible through police
surveillance, says educator and activist Dena
Simmons.
“When
Black students experience a world that devalues their humanity -
including through curricular content that perpetuates narratives of
inferiority and excludes their lives and full histories - and when
they witness people who look like them being beaten or slain in the
media, they are subject to the trauma of being made to feel worthless
and unseen, of being made inhuman,” Simmons said.
Experiences
with racism range from common yet vague microaggressions to blatant
hate crimes and physical violence, says Monica
T. Williams,
Ph.D. “The unpredictable and anxiety-provoking nature of
the events, which may be dismissed by others, can lead to victims
feeling as if they are ‘going crazy.’ Chronic fear of
these experiences may lead to constant vigilance or even paranoia,
which over time may result in traumatization or contribute to PTSD
when a more stressful event occurs later.”
Further,
it is painfully clear the grief-stricken souls who witnessed George
Floyd’s
murder by Minneapolis police Officer Derek
Chauvin grapple
with trauma
and survivor’s guilt.
In a year marked
by collective grief over
lives lost to COVID and police violence, the public mourning of
individuals such as Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, Ahmaud
Arbury and
Black Panther actor Chadwick
Boseman has
unearthed our unaddressed collective Black trauma. At a time when the
pandemic of racism remains, are we still mourning Martin Luther
King’s death?
The
George Floyd protests were wrapped in the COVID-19 pandemic and the
racially disproportionate impact on health and economic devastation.
“I
think all of that creates a sense of social unease and social unrest,
that when you layer on top of the pandemic another, yet another
episode of … just cruel violence against an unarmed black man
posing no threat, that the two came together and exploded,”
said Monica
Peek,
MD, MPH,
an internist at the University of Chicago Medicine who researches
health disparities.
From
King to Langston
Hughes,
Black activists have documented the effects of “long-term
poverty and hopelessness and disinvestment within the African
American community and what that does to the emotional psyche of a
people,” Peek added.
Peniel
E. Joseph of
the University of Texas at Austin believes the King assassination
reverberates even today in small and large ways. Just as the 1960s
witnessed the long, hot summers of unrest and protest, culminating in
the urban rebellions after Dr. King’s murder, people have taken
to the streets following the deaths of Black men by police half a
century later.
“In
many ways our nation is still trying to recover from King’s
death and the opportunities for racial equality, economic justice and
peace - what King referred to as a ‘beloved community’ -
that seemed to recede in its aftermath,” Joseph wrote in The
Washington Post,
arguing Black Lives Matter - with its intersectional approach linking
race, class, gender and sexuality - reflects the radical protest
environment of 1968.
“Fifty
years after King’s assassination, struggles for racial equality
appear as acute now as they did then, except the juxtapositions
between signs of racial progress and the reality of continued racial
injustice are even more stark,” Joseph said.
The
2020 protests of the murder of George Floyd resulted in the most
cities under curfew since
the King assassination, and the largest nationwide
protest over
the murder of a Black man since 1968 - not to mention the largest
mass protest in U.S. history with
15 to 26 million participants. Last June, then-Democratic
presidential nominee Joe
Biden insisted
the killing of George Floyd had more
of a worldwide impact than
the assassination of Dr. King. Biden may have a point.
Meanwhile,
Black Lives Matter continues the struggles Martin Luther King and the
civil rights movement waged to end
white supremacy and systemic racism,
this time led by Black women. Times have changed, but in many ways,
things remain the same. Black America still carried the trauma it
experienced when King died, because America still suffers from the
pandemic of racial injustice and white supremacy, with no vaccine in
sight.
This commentary was originally published by The Grio
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