March on Washington: Reclaiming the Legacy

Reclaiming the Legacy on the 40th anniversary of the historic March on Washington

By Frances M. Beal

Submitted to portside

August 24, 2003

It was truly a sight to behold. On August 28, 1963 a
quarter million people descended on the nation’s capital
to demand that the politicians listen to their demand
for jobs and freedom. Never before had the country seen
that many people amassed at one point for any purpose
let alone the fight against Jim Crow and the demand for
racial justice.

Commemorations of that historic gathering are taking
place this week around the globe and across the United
States. But the true birthright from Martin Luther King,
Jr. and his famous ’I have a dream’ speech and the
purposes of the racial justice forces that confronted
discrimination in that era are in danger of getting lost
in all the fanfare surrounding this year’s 40th
anniversary celebrations.

Let us remember that Dr, King and the other black
leaders in motion at the time were hated and maligned by
the U.S. power structure while they lived. Today, that
same power structure is working hard to portray him as a
harmless reformist whose political vision consisted
mainly of advocating the philosophy of non-violence. His
name is even used by today’s racists, asserting that
King would be against such modern anti- discrimination
tools as affirmative action and would support those
asserting the need for a ’race-blind’ society and racist
measures like California’s Prop 54.

This distortion of King and the civil rights movement
cannot be permitted to stand, particularly since this
impotent assessment of that era and its leaders has
influenced some of the younger activists of today. In
fact, King’s true legacy endures as a source of
inspiration for radical social change and only by
reclaiming our true history can we reclaim that
transformative legacy for the struggles of the 21st
century.

Rather than the passive philosopher that the ruling
class presents, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for
mobilizing the broadest mass of people against racism
and every form of social injustice. He stubbornly
insisted on preaching that injustice, economic
deprivation and militarism were inseparably related and
that all are legitimate aspects of the struggle for
liberation from racial oppression. And, his support for
the liberation of the oppressed world wide was
especially focused in his work in opposition to both the
genocidal U.S. war against Vietnam and the complicity
between the racist South African regime and the U.S.
government.

King’s social consciousness was forged initially in
response to the specific segregationist conditions
facing Black southerners in the mid-20th century. But
the experience of northern Black ghettos also drove home
the fact that the formalities of Jim Crow were no longer
required to sustain racist oppression. Black political
power was minimal so the mobilization of the oppressed
themselves, conscious of the task that had risen to the
top of the liberation agenda and united in the
determination to see that task through to the end, was
the essential element required to compel the Dixiecrats
(comfortably situated within the Democratic Party) to
submit.

Indeed, King’s great contribution rests in the fact that
he grasped the imperatives of that historic moment and
placed himself wholeheartedly at the service of pressing
his people’s freedom struggle on to a higher level. From
the earliest days he understood Frederick Douglass’
famous dictum: ’Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.’ And he understood that
the demand had to be backed up with an irresistible
force â€" the masses in motion. King combined tactical
imagination and initiative with a reliance on the masses
that was (and still is) unknown to the mainline civil
rights groups.

It is in this context that King’s adherence to the
principles of non-violence should be placed. His non-
violence had nothing to do with passivity or
accommodating the movement to the status quo. Its
political thrust was to bring massive pressure to bear
on the various levels of the state apparatus in order to
extract concessions on specifically identified demands.
It explicitly sanctioned the defiance of unjust laws
through appeal to higher humanitarian and religious
principles.

As a result, King and the civil rights movement in
general were consistently prepared to question and
challenge the political authority of the U.S. state in
its capacity as enforcer of Jim Crow laws and issuer of
injunctions to prevent peaceful protest. As for the
moral authority of the U.S. government, King recognized
that it had been fundamentally undermined by centuries-
long perpetuation of racist oppression.

The 21st century racial justice movement has not fully
understood that the attempts to sanitize Martin Luther
King, Jr. and turn the man (and the movement he led)
into a harmless icon are tactics that we need to resist
today. Much more than an accurate reconstruction of
history is at stake here: the lessons King learned and
eloquently articulated in the course of his life are
rich legacies for us as we struggle for a radical
transformation of U.S. racial relations and economic
justice.

As the commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the
March on Washington abound, let us also work to reforge
the anti-racist movement in 2003 on the basis of
resurrecting the real lessons handed down from our
heroes. To do so, we must strive for a clearheaded
appraisal of their actual contribution to the fight
against racism and for democracy, and not the
distortions that are propagated by the foes of racial
justice and democracy.

Frances M. Beal is a political columnist for the San
Francisco Bayview newspaper and a contributing editor to
Black Scholar magazine.