Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels

Raise a praise song to the King of foresight

    Like most high school students, I had the radio while I did my homework. The station was turned to WVON in Chicago.  Herb Kent, “the Cool Gent,”
was on the air.  In between the sounds of the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Four Tops, Herb joked.  More April Fools Day. More of Herb, on
April 4, 1968, trying to trick his audience.  
    “Martin Luther King has been … ” I looked at the radio and waited.  I thought for an instant that this announcement was a joke.  Then it wasn’t Herb’
s voice, and I didn’t wait until he finished the sentence: “Martin Luther King has been…” I was up from my chair and standing before my mother, sitting
in the kitchen.  The voice on the radio continued with the news bulletin, but my mother and I were no longer listening.
    In subsequent years, whenever I thought of King, I was reminded of the “turn-the-other-cheek” phrase. A dead King became an American hero.  In
the daylight, politicians, pastors, teachers, and even a new “talented tenth” echoed “I Have a Dream” while more covert and sinister practices filled the
night.  The arrest or the killing of Blacks, particularly the Black Panthers, resumed the sport of hunting human targets.  The Moynihan Report cited
Black women villains in the break up of Black families.  Drugs and guns infiltrated the Black communities on their own accord!  Viet Nam, Watergate,
and Iran Contra — crimes against humanity — were invisible because the face of crime was Black.  We have heard the dream of integration rhetoric,
but we have experienced its nightmare of struggle and contradiction.  
    But in April1967, very few heard Martin Luther King’s prediction: “difficult days” were coming our way.  
    King’s shift from the dream of integration to the nightmare of reality for Black Americans came when he witnessed how “the daily ugliness” of “this
other America” transformed “the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair” (“The Other America,” Speech, 1967).
Black gains during the Civil Rights struggles, King admitted, would only ensure that the subsequent struggle would be “much more difficult.”  It would
be a struggle not merely against “extremist behavior toward” Blacks: “I’m convinced that many of the very people who supported us in the struggle in
the South are not willing to go all the way now.  I came to see this in a very difficult and painful way in Chicago,” he said.  Those who supported the
struggle then, he realized, were really outraged about the “extremist” behavior of Bull Connor and Jim Clarke” toward Blacks rather than “believing in
genuine equality for Negroes.”
    Instead of progress, “we see many problems existing today that are growing more difficult” and reveals the “unpleasant” knowledge that “racism is
deeply rooted all over America.” King continues:
    And this leads me to say something about another discussion that we hear a great deal, and that is the so-called ‘white backlash.’ I would like to say
to you that the white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon.  It’s not something that just came into being because of shouts of Black
Power, or because Negroes engaged in riots in Watts, for instance.  The fact is that the state of California voted a Fair Housing bill out of existence
before anyone shouted Black Power, or before anybody rioted in Watts.
    King saw the pattern of past actions and attitudes toward Black Americans that as consistently cruel.  During Reconstruction, President Andrew
Johnson proposed that Black people ship themselves “to some other country” and then he initiated his plan to uproot freed Blacks from the land.
Today, progress is the reclamation of Black homes through the practice of gentrification and hustle of predatory loans.  In New Orleans, the victims of
government indifference are exemplary of an historical callousness toward Black Americans.       
    It was wrong and tragic of the Negro ever to allow himself to be ashamed of the fact that he was black, or ashamed of the fact that his ancestral
home was Africa…There is a great deal that the Negro must do and can do to amass political and economic power within his own community and by
using his own resources.  And so we must do certain things for ourselves but this must not negate the fact, and cause the nation to overlook the fact,
that the Negro cannot solve the problem himself.
    We have lived a long night of tyranny and terror. And now we must decide to awake to the day or succumb forever to the night.
Raise a Praisesong to the King of foresight:
    “And I say that if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face, including the so-called white backlash, will
surely fail.”