The King Identity

I have already written a version of the now requisite "Martin Luther King was a progressive/radical" entry. I am confident I will write similar posts in the future. While having King as a sanctified American hero is certainly a merited and wonderful reality, it has also led to a collective amnesia about the scope of his vision. Put simply, King was both a transcendent figure who could rise above politics and someone who progressives and radicals clearly can claim as a member of the family. To claim otherwise requires a heady mixture of denial and ignorance.

Given that, let me talk about a (hopefully) upcoming event that holds potential to introduce the complete King to a larger audience. Recently, I came across the news that English director Paul Greengrass has written a screenplay and is looking to make a film entitled Memphis. Greengrass is best known to a wide audience as the directer of the second two Bourne movies. According to NY Mag, "Greengrass wrote the movie . . . based on his own original research, and that it looks at King’s life while trying to organize the city’s sanitation workers in the spring of 1968, just before his murder on April 4 of that year."

While some of the web gossip is concentrating on the potential for the movie to tackle conspiracy theories around King's assassination, I hope that is not the case. Certainly Greengrass has trafficked in conspiratorial thinking in the Bourne movies, as well as in his (in my opinion) very underrated film Green Zone, but he is not an Oliver Stone. Focusing on conspiracies would, among other problems, distract from the true (and very fraught) drama one can find in the story of King's involvement in the Memphis strike and the turmoil of his own life in those last days.

While a director best known for creating incredibly visceral action scenes might seem problematic, my eagerness about him tackling this project comes from some of Greengrass' other films, namely Bloody Sunday and United 93. Both films are superb examples of how to compellingly present historical episodes on screen; they hew closely to the real history, while creating real tension and drama. For the moment, I will focus on Bloody Sunday, which recreates the events of January 30, 1972, when English soldiers killed thirteen protesters in Derry, Ireland. The film has been compared to the Battle of Algiers, which is both an apt comparison and an impressive complement.

As with The Battle of Algiers, Bloody Sunday evinces an intense fascination with the mechanics of political activism (how do protests get organized, the internal politics of movements, etc). This in itself is promising, for the politics of King's involvement in the strike and the dynamics between the many players are a vital part of this story. Furthermore, Bloody Sunday shows not only Greengrass' interest in these matters, but also his ability, through sharp dialogue, strong acting, and his ever restless camera, to keep such scenes interesting and even spellbinding. In addition, Bloody Sunday, while clearly taking a side, allows for the nuances and complexities of politics to shine; time is given to the English soldiers to show the context they were operating in, without excusing their actions.

To make this more concrete, here is a scene near the end of Bloody Sunday which captures much of what I mentioned above:



Suffice it to say, I believe Greengrass to be an excellent person for this job. Returning to the idea of historical memory, the potential of a major film being released centered on King's work in Memphis is quite exciting. While I doubt the film will transform the popular narrative about King, it can at least open up an avenue for challenging the "Santa Claus" version that dominates popular discourse. By choosing to depict King not during his heights at Birmingham or Selma, but rather as a much reviled radical prophet, Greengrass' film can educate more people about the King who stood firmly for workers' rights and believed that true justice meant profound change to our economy and society.

"The Best and the Brightest"

Governor Christie committed a verbal irony that's quite common, but still worthy of note. In calling for a new system for hiring school superintendents he stated that the new system would allow the hiring of "the best and brightest." This phrase has of course entered the popular lexicon via David Halberstam's book on the Vietnam War. Of course, Halberstam meant the term to be ironic; a bitter comment on how individuals and groups possessing the most impressive of credentials can still exhibit no real understanding of a situation and make horrific and disastrous decisions as a result.

If By "Anybody" You Mean "Most Men"

Anton Scalia has raised a ruckus with his statement that the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect women or GLBTQ folks from discrimination. I will leave to those more knowledgeable to parse the legal questions. What I found troubling were certain underlying assumptions embedded in the language of the question and Scalia's response. Here is the text of the question:

California Lawyer: "In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation."

What appears problematic is the idea that it is foolish to think "anybody" would have conceived of the Fourteenth Amendment protecting women at that time. Tell it to Susan B. Anthony! As noted in this piece, feminist activists of the time advanced their own interpretation focusing on section 1's use of gender neutral language to make the case that the Fourteenth Amendment did protect suffrage rights, at the very least. This in fact led to a great act of symbolic protest as women activists in 10 states attempted (and in a few cases) succeeded in casting ballots, leading to Anthony being put on trial.

More broadly, we must be wary of statements regarding prevailing views in society which it is said that "everybody" or "nobody" held a certain belief. Such assertions usually consist of taking a certain sub-group of people (often "most white men") and universalizing their perspective to all of society. In doing so, we erase whole populations and histories; making unjust ideas and structures seem a universal norm. Men had greater power in the 1860s and could create laws and social structures enforcing that superiority; that does not mean everyone believed that this was "the way it ought to be."

Forgetting Reconstruction

The end of last year witnessed a perfect storm hit of news stories on race and history in the United States. At one end was Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s nostalgic reminisces of the Citizens Councils, which attempted to put a “respectable” (and more effective) face to white supremacy. The story breaking on the 150^th anniversary of South Carolina’s declaration of secession seemed too perfect as a demonstration of how alive the gap between ideals and realities of equality remain.

At the same time, these incidents illuminate a profound deficit in how the history of racism and the struggle for equal rights are remembered. For in our popular imagination, the great struggles over these issues exist at two poles separated by exactly a century: the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. With regards to historical memory, the Civil War in the next years is sure to burn brightly, as the 150^th anniversaries of innumerable battles, the Emancipation Proclamation, etc arrive. However, as obviously significant as the Civil War is, focusing on the actual conflict does a disservice to understanding the full history. Certainly the war created many dramatic and concrete transformations, most notably the end of slavery and the intensification of modern capitalism’s emergence. Yet, especially when talking about the African-American community, the war’s greatest importance lies in the possibilities it created for even deeper changes and which, albeit with limitations, were seized upon during Reconstruction.

As well known as the Civil War’s contours are, outside of academics who study it, Reconstruction appears lost in a haze. The single best known depiction of the period remains Gone With the Wind, which traffics in the frankly racist viewpoint which received academic validation from historians of the “Dunning School” (think a somewhat toned down Birth of a Nation in footnoted book form). For the Dunning school, Reconstruction was a tragedy in which the North (or more specifically the Radical Republicans) imposed unfairly harsh conditions on Southern states' re-entry to the Union and Northern opportunists (so-called “carpetbaggers”) swept into the South to take financial advantage of a defeated land. Furthermore, in this interpretation, African-Americans were unable to take advantage of freedom; proving dangerously incompetent at governing or building independent lives. The advent of Jim Crow and the return to Democratic rule are thus seen as the forces that rescued the South from further misery.

Corruption and exploitation by Northern businessmen, entrepreneurs, and politicians of the Southern states did exist. To see Reconstruction as a tragic period is certainly apt, yet the tragedy lies not in its severity, but in its limitations. Many of the struggles for civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s were in fact efforts to regain rights that African-Americans enjoyed, briefly, one hundred years earlier. The period saw significant reforms to southern society beyond those directly concerned with the freedmen and women, such as the establishment of public school systems, economic development (such as railroad lines and non-agricultural industry). The reversal of the period’s gains, especially regarding African-American rights and dreams of fairness, represented a severe blow to creating a United States whose policies reflected its highest ideals. To forget it is to forget one of the most concentrated attempts to build a true “land of the free.”

Note: In a second post (and I’ll actually do it!), I’ll go into more detail on the specific history of the period, its gains and failures.