Editor’s note: Special thanks to Kaitlyn Molinere Seal and Victoria Kingrey of the Margaret Reed Crosby Memorial Library in Picayune, Miss. for research assistance.
Even from the beyond, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Showdown for Nonviolence,” published in Look magazine almost two weeks after his 1968 assassination in Memphis, spoke to why “the chief destructive cutting edge” of white racism still hadn’t been transformed by the presence of nonviolence, love and a lot of patience from a nonviolent movement seeking reform for Black Americans and the poor.
“All of the misery that stoked the flames of rage and rebellion remains undiminished,” King said in the 1968 post-mortem article, an eerie last will and testament for the Poor People’s Campaign. “With unemployment, intolerable housing and discriminatory education a scourge in Negro ghettoes, Congress and the administration still tinker with trivial, halfhearted measures.”
King had a deep resounding agape love for all people, but those words remind us that we don’t have to like the oppressor’s politics.
That part.
Today, of course, is the annual celebration of King’s birthday or #MLKDayofService, the one national service day. The King Center in Atlanta, led by his daughter Rev. Bernice King, made this year’s theme “Shifting the Cultural Climate through the Study and Practice of Kingian Nonviolence.” MLK50: Justice Through Journalism can’t help but focus on the King we consider the root and branch, the man who offered a truth for those pushing for progress then and wisdom for leaders of a new school of resistance.
Like when he said that white racists (and their Black allies who claimed it took time for reform) only got loud when there was progress during a “morally appealing movement” for “people of goodwill, churches, labor, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves.”
Or when he began to organize around federalizing reparations for Black folks still captive in Jim Crow’s chase, a position he outlined in “Showdown for Nonviolence.”
“We know from past experience that Congress and the president won’t do anything until you develop a movement around which people of goodwill can find a way to put pressure on them, because it really means breaking that coalition in Congress,” King said.
“It’s still a coalition-dominated, rural dominated, basically southern Congress. There are Southerners there with committee chairmanships, and they are going to stand in the way of progress as long as they can.”
Here we are, 56 years later fighting to get into the People’s House and pushing Memphis city leaders to protect us from our own police. As you face down your oppressor, personally, professionally and/or spiritually, wherever you are, we offer some King quotes for standing on the front lines of resistance.
The universe is with you, mane.
Dealing with haters, racists and detractors
“I’m very happy that [Jesus] didn’t say like your enemies, because it is pretty difficult to like some people. Like is sentimental, and it is pretty difficult to like someone bombing your home; it is pretty difficult to like somebody threatening your children; it is difficult to like congressmen who spend all of their time trying to defeat civil rights…love is greater than like. Love is understanding; redemptive, creative, goodwill for all men.”
“Love, Law and Civil Disobedience” (Nov. 16, 1961)
“We hear this quite often, that only time can solve this problem. That we will only be patient, and only pray – which we must do, we must be patient and we must pray…[I]ndividuals in the struggle must come to realize that it is necessary to aid time, that without this kind of aid, time itself will become an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of social stagnation. Therefore, this movement is a revolt against the myth of time.”
“Love, Law and Civil Disobedience” (Nov. 16, 1961)
“Nonviolence was a creative doctrine in the South because it checkmated the rabid segregationists who were thirsting for an opportunity to physically crush Negroes. … This is the reason there was less loss of life in ten years of southern protest than in ten days of northern riots.”
“Showdown for Nonviolence” (April 16, 1968 Look Magazine)
When it’s time to #FightThePower
“[T]here are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to the tragic militarism…God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization …”
“The Power of Nonviolence” (June 4, 1957)
“[T]he northern cities have taken on the conditions we faced in the South. Police, national guard and other armed bodies are feverishly preparing for repression. They can be curbed not by unorganized resort to force by desperate Negroes but only by a massive wave of militant nonviolence.”
“Showdown for Nonviolence” (April 16, 1968 Look Magazine)
“It’s a strange thing how demonstrations tend to solve problems. The other thing is that it’s little known that crime rates go down in almost every community where you have demonstrations … Anytime we’ve had demonstrations in a community, people have found a way to slough off their self-hatred, and they have a channel to express their longings and a way to fight nonviolently — to get at the power structure, to know you’re doing something, so you don’t have to be violent to do it.”
“Showdown for Nonviolence” (April 16, 1968 Look Magazine)
What to remember when getting in formation
“A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.”
“The Power of Nonviolence” (June 4, 1957)
“Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as the cooperation with good.”
“Love, Law and Civil Disobedience” (Nov. 16, 1961)
“To end poverty, to extirpate prejudice, to free a tormented conscience, to make a tomorrow of justice, fair play and creativity — all these are worthy of the American ideal.”
“Showdown for Nonviolence” (April 16, 1968 Look Magazine)
Melonee Gaines is the audience engagement manager for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at melonee.gaines@mlk50.com
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