Measure with care whose history you accept for neither the past nor the dead can loudly contend how they are dressed.
Before being granted mainstream entry, selected chapters of minority history are given a thorough wash. After being pasteurised, they are given broader exposure. By then, they are no longer Black history. They have been transformed into White history in blackface. Every commercial retelling of Black history dons this mask of a mask. Subtle distortions in presentation produce grave distortions in the lessons derived there from much like an initial deviation in the course of a vessel will take the ship to a vastly different destination unless the course is swiftly corrected.
Those who control the medium do more than control the message and the messenger. They pick them. As the years transpire, popularised Black history has been steadily turned into a false light. It no longer serves to enlighten; it now often obscures the deeper questions raised by the actual march of history. Events are recast so that history becomes a stranger to itself. Black history has been bent and domesticated. It now indoctrinates both Blacks and Whites to believe the society we now have is the product of a great awakening that broke old chains by the force of new law.
The Civil Rights Movement (CRM) is portrayed as the second American Revolution, made this time without weapons and battle but with moral suasion and compassion. Although important, the CRM has been overstated. The fruits of the CRM are the fruits of political compromise; political compromise is always preceded by a moral one. The CRM changed America for the better but that change was more incomplete than comprehensive, more fragile than it was full.
Most Blacks remain estranged from what they seek. For everyone one part of this failure for which they bear responsibility, society bears two parts. Yet, they are being told, by the commercialised salesmen of Black history, that reform has run its course. Your condition is your fault. Go get some bootstraps then pull yourself up by the odd contraptions. Once a progressive, educative too, Black History is now an instrumentality of those who would rather maintain the extant power relationships underlying the political economy. That which was instituted to help us from the hole is now being used to deceive us that we have already escaped. All the while, the hole gets deeper and we sink deeper in it.
Despite being the work product of a brilliant, highly talented Black filmmake,r the movie Selma falls into this genre of misconception. It is the telling of Black history purposefully made palatable to Whites because its message is the needed reform has been had. This means that the story of the current Black condition is not that reform has been insufficient but that the people have been to insufficient to live up to the reforms. Most Whites now insist that this blanched interpretation is the only credible one. If Black history is to retain any meaning except as an appendage of mainstream history we must not become gulled by seeing a finely crafted production featuring heroic black figures. While devoid of the flash and glitter of a Hollywood production, our analysis must strive to be more apt and enlightening that the people may better see the limited dimensions of what has been accomplished in their true behalf and the vast expanse yet to be travelled.
Selma is the latest attempt to homogenise Martin Luther King into an establishment icon. King has been reduced to a slice of himself. He has become a civil rights amulet. In the popular image, King’s work is almost wholly defined by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington and the Selma demonstrations which helped galvanise political support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, seen by many as the legal culmination of the CRM.
Mainstream history treats the Selma episode as King’s best hour. This error tosses aside the last three years of King’s life as if they were lost years. Those years contain his most humane efforts. The works performed during this challenging period are more instructive to our present condition than are the civil rights achievements so publicly heralded. The Bus Boycott, the March, and Selma brought King fame. The hard work he did after 1965 confirmed his greatness.
This more progressive aspect of his contributions is willfully ignored by the mainstream. They do not want many people to know this part of his life, fearing the people too may walk this line. This could change the structure of America in ways the civil rights legal measures could never contemplate and in ways that would discomfit the establishment.
1965 was a watershed year, but the water did not all shed into the same channel. The CRM had joined different streams of Black political thought in an often tendentious coalition. Traditional Black elites and radical activists agreed to work toward the agreed goal: the end of legal racial discrimination. (The only recorded meeting between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was at the Capitol when both attended congressional hearings on the Voting Rights Act.)
The decision to focus on civil and political rights was apt as it represented the largest yet most attainable goal to which all Blacks could agree. It was the common denominator to which all major strands of Black political thought could agree. With Voting Rights Act’s passage, the ad-hoc political coalition began to crumble.
Upon winning this battle, the conformist Black elite had its full. They attained their key objective. Destruction of the most obvious racial barriers would allow them entry into the mainstream. The door of Integration well served them because they were positioned close to it. They just needed the legal key to open it. The majority of Blacks remained miles from the door without means to close the distance. Having a key would do them little good except to serve as a cruel joke of which they were the butt, a stinging keepsake of the oceanic expanse between the high promise of civil equality and the lowly reality of their economic weakness.
The elite would expand and grow in absolute numbers yet remain a small fraction of the overall Black community. Having achieved most of what they wanted, they would exit the politics of protest to enter mainstream electoral politics. They would no longer posture to change the system. Their modest aim was to gain greater security for their class not be fighting the establishment from within, but by becoming loyal to it, come what may.
With each year, the Black political class would become more glued to the power establishment. Their role changed without outcry from or due notice to the people. They would no longer represent the Black community to the White establishment. They would serve as establishment envoy to the people, explaining to the broken and poor why more could not be done and to be patient and grateful because their decrepit condition was the best attainable at the given moment. The phrases, “We are doing all that we can” or “All that can be done is being done,” are almost always dismissive lies used on those whom the speaker does not feel are entitled to any intelligent explanation.
Today’s unimaginative Black political leaders are the direct heirs of the moderate, CRM elite. They both enjoy the same easy conformity to Money Power and an establishment devoid of goodwill toward the majority of the people.
On the other side of the spectrum were the young activists. Many of them performed the heroic, dangerous grassroots civil rights work mobilising people to protest and vote. The foci of their grassroots activity moved from the rural communities of the south to major cities across the nation. These activists recognised civil rights legislation by itself would not answer the question of the worsening ghettoes and super-ghettoes into which too many Black communities had turned.
Many young activists openly shunned CRM nonviolent tactics. This was not as radical a departure as portrayed. The CRM always contained re was always an important armed element in the CRM. During a meeting at the height of the movement, a senior national leader wanted to poll how many of the grassroots organisers attending the meeting carried weapons while doing their work. They all raised their hands; they all were armed.
The Black Panthers symbolised this aspect of Black political thought. They saw the Civil Rights Movement as a first step toward radical revolution that would likely prove violent. More because of their revolutionary message than because of their access to weapons, the Panthers were hunted down like dogs. Reactionary groups like the Black Muslims carried weapons. Since they did not challenge the status quo, they were not targeted as severely as the Panthers.
Between the moderate establishment and the radicals, stood Dr. King. By appearance and vocation, he seemed to belong with the elite. To his eternal credit, he did not limit himself to their cause. His vision was much broader. The Voting Act did not end the campaign. It signaled the beginning of the more fundamental battle.
King charted unexplored territory for someone considered a member of the Black elite. He remained loyal to nonviolence but would pursue goals that beckoned a drastic, near violent restructuring of the American political economy. In his ways and means, he remained true to the established norm. Yet, his ends borne more affinity to the radicals than to the Black establishment.
Thus the Black establishment put him at arm’s length. When he publicly denigrated the Vietnam War and when he espoused the rights of the poor by supporting workers and their unions, moderate Blacks joined the White chorus, labeling him a “troublemaker.”
Meanwhile, radical blacks said he was too much an establishment figure due to his reliance on dialogue and nonviolence.
King saw himself not solely as civil rights leader. The CRM was part of a larger struggle, the fight for depressed minorities and the poor in the land of plenty. That fight was itself part of a greater struggle: that of human dignity in all lands for all people.
King was not killed for his CRM role. The Voting Act was penned three years before his death. America had already absorbed the initial shock of the legislation and had co-opted much of the CRM by then. Rarely is a man assassinated for events several years removed. Famous men are more often assassinated in fear of what they may yet do. He was brought down in Memphis because the work he was doing there was consonant with a larger vision to radically reform America’s political economy. Thus, the mainstream will forever downplay King’s journey to Memphis. Instead, it will act as if his march ended with Selma.
The Voting Act did not challenge the power structure; it confirmed. For Black people, the Act is rightfully viewed as a major achievement. On another level, the legislation was merely a tool in a fight about which Blacks were dimly aware. The measure was a bit of leverage in the tussle between the moderate and conservative wings of the White establishment. In a way, this echoed the end of slavery a century before. When North and South fought over slavery, the quality of life of the bondsmen was not the main consideration. The true issue was which segment of the national elite would stamp its name on the shape of the nation for the remainder of the 19th century. The status of the Negro was essentially a device by which the two sides kept score in this intramural power scrum.
In a subtle way, Selma exposes the limited nature of the Voting Act. The film inaccurately portrays President Johnson as opposing the Act. While Johnson had no personal love for blacks and amply directed expletives at us in his private discourse, his record of supporting Black voting rights is incontrovertible. As Senate majority leader, he shepherded the first voting rights legislation outmaneuvering vehement filibuster by fellow Southerners in 1957. As president, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson supposed the 1965 Voting Act as a logical progression of the 1957 measure.
However, the film portrays him as a negative force. Portraying him as a hero would lessen the dramatic impact. By sending the message that the Act had to overcome presidential opposition, the film depicts it as more radical a reform than it really was. If the film showed Johnson as a cooperative agent, discerning people would begin to notice the skunk among the minks, the maggot in the honey jar.
The aims of the CRM and the Voting Act, in particular, were modest ones more favorable to the elite than the Black majority. Most of White establishment was assuaged that the Act would not damage their position. Some knew they would benefit by gaining the elite as pliant junior partners in a national political coalition.
Black people gain the right to vote without molestation. Due to their lack of economic muscle, they remain restricted to choosing between the two parties created by the establishment. Thus, they remained on the leash owned by Money Power. Occasionally, an individual race may present a progressive alternative. In the main, the parties and their candidates guard the status quo. The differences between the parties are those of nuance and style, rarely of substance. They offer no workable solutions to the conditions of those living in maw of poverty.
Yes, if you ask a slave, he would select the less serfdom over pure servitude if his choices were thusly limited. My wager is that he would rather a third option: actual freedom. Yet, that option was not on the menu then and is not on the table. Neither major party offers an economic agenda to relieve the American working class from three decades of stagnant wages, increasing household debt and growing poverty.
Well-acted and crafted, Selma seems to be an attractive bundle of political sophistry. A joint venture between members the White and Black establishment, it leads you close yet astray. Its implicit message is that the CRM is the zenith of the struggle for racial equality and dignity. Everything that follows is epilogue. King realised the CRM was but a chapter in a larger, more important book.
To proclaim victory at that point would have been like the America’s Founding Fathers celebrating victory because they signed the Declaration of Independence. The signing of that document did not end the Revolutionary War; it was the true beginning of it in all of its ramifications. Selma and other messages like it caricature King as his one-dimensional, civil rights miniature. They tame him, turning this ever-evolving progressive and humane figure into a symbol of a status quo that would make him bristle. The things he abhorred 50 years ago still hold sway.
King has become an object of political taxidermy. They have brought him inside the hall of political legitimacy only after having killed him and stuffed his political legacy with their own notions. They mount him on their walls and tell us to be glad because King has won. They have made him a hero, they say. In reality, they have turned him into their trophy and have tried to obscure his true legacy in the process. This expropriation will not stand forever. Truth comes if slowly. One day, we shall take him back and display his fuller legacy because that is where the greater good and justice lie.
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