The Eternal Flame at the King Centre in Atlanta which I visited in 2013
I was born in Toronto two months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The US civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were as distant to me as was apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War. Even as I grew up through my first 16 years, the heightened social justice actions and liberations struggles of the 1960s were mere whispers across time and borders. Neither the Globe and Mail or the Star, the CBC or CTV, offered us much in terms of what was really happening in the world. No internet. No videos. No social media.
On October 20, 1984 I participated in a huge anti-nuclear march in Toronto and that day met dozens of people who handed me pamphlets, bent my ears to their causes and opened my eyes to what was happening in the world from Kurdistan to South Africa, to the revolutions in Nicaragua and the resistance in El Salvador, and to issues at home, the recognition of Aboriginal rights, the pursuit of justice and equality for women and queer folks and people of colour. It was a carnival of struggle and hope.
A few weeks later the US held an election in which Ronald Regan won a second term. Jesse Jackson ran in that election, for the Democratic Party nomination, but it was Walter Mondale and Gearldine Ferraro who were on the opposite ticket. Nevertheless, Jesse Jackson had become a voice for the continued struggle for civil rights, turning his prophetic attention to the damage that Reaganomics was already starting to do in the world, decades before that economic philosophy had been debunked. (Even today, after 45 years of wealth inequality and economic violence, people seem to believe that trickle down economics is still worth a go – “cut those taxes!” they say, plunging us further into despair).
Jesse Jackson was my generation’s Martin Luther King Jr. His era as THE public face of civil rights and racial justice has been over for some time, due in part to his illness, but also due to the new faces of the struggle that have emerged in this century, speaking to and meeting this century’s challenges and needs. Nevertheless, reading of his passing today sent me to a state of nostalgic gratitude for how his work and voice and presence brought the spirit of Martin Luther King to a new generation of social change activists like me. We could see and hear him speak. We could catch the cadence of his voice and the relevance of his message to the times we were living in. When you heard him speak, you could look around yourself and confirm the truth of his observations, and take inspiration from his calls to action and his “perfect mission.”
I liked this obituary from the Guardian this morning. It contains some quotes that resonate.
“My leadership skills came from the athletic arena,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 1984. “In many ways, they were developed from playing quarterback. Assessing defenses; motivating your own team. When the game starts, you use what you’ve got – and don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strength. You also practice to win.”
You work with what you have, and you play the field in front of you.
“The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, but you have to pull it to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr King used to remind us that every time the movement has a tailwind and goes forward, there are headwinds…[in these times] he would have said: ‘We must not surrender our spirits. We must use [these times] not to surrender but fortify our faith and fight back.’”
I think that teaching is the one for our times, one for all of us, and one for the legacy that Jackson, King and others have delivered to us all along the long arc of the moral universe.
Rest in power.
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