| Vol. 3 No. 7 April 3, 2008 |
| I have been quite upset since last Tuesday’s election. In one of the nastiest Wisconsin Supreme Court races on record, Justice Louis Butler was defeated by Burnett County Judge Michael Gableman, 51-49 percent. Butler became the first Wisconsin Supreme Court justice to be defeated in 41 years. With his defeat, the Court does not have a justice from Milwaukee sitting on it for the first time in over 100 years. Butler, appointed by Gov. James Doyle to the Court in 2004, was the first African American to sit on the highest court in Wisconsin. He was highly qualified for the Court, having approximately three times the judicial experience of his opponent, having served as a Milwaukee Municipal and Milwaukee Circuit Court judge. Butler had argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was an instructor at the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada. Butler has an acute understanding of the law. And yet, he was defeated. I can’t help but feel that race played a big role in Butler’s defeat. While Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) opposed Butler because of votes he has taken on product liability and medical malpractice cases, WMC knew that the voting public wouldn’t side with them because of this issue. So WMC and other special interests — not to speak of Gableman himself — ran a massive number of ads portraying Butler as somehow being soft on crime. Now keep in mind that the Wisconsin Supreme Court is not a criminal court. But these ads with their low flickering light and photos of criminals labeled Butler as “Loophole Louie,” as if he was disdainful of the law and almost criminal himself. These slick ads, which distorted Butler’s record, played, in my opinion, to deep-seated prejudices. They subtly played the race card against Butler. As Butler put it, he was “Willie Hortoned,” referring to the 1988 Republican presidential ads that used race against the Democratic candidate. This is totally disgusting. Wisconsin appears to be a once Progressive state that is trending Mississippi. There’s an old African American adage that African Americans have to be twice as qualified and experienced in order to get the same position and pay that Euro-Americans have. This Supreme Court race shows that now even being three times as experienced and qualified is not enough to overcome the race factor. People who say that racism is no longer a factor in American life need to take heed from this election. Jim Crow Jr. is alive and well. *** It is 40 years ago today that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an assassin’s bullet on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. At this time, I think back to an interview I had with Comedian/Activist Dick Gregory last fall during the commemoration of Milwaukee’s open housing marches. Gregory asserted that King was assassinated because he was the only African American in the United States who could personal impact U.S. policy, both here and abroad. Suffice it to say that Gregory did not believe in the lone assassin theory. And while King did have a tremendous impact on the U.S. and the civil rights movement when he was alive, his death had an equal impact on the direction of the United States and civil rights. When word got out that King had been killed, riots broke out across the U.S. That was just a sample of the violence that American society would experience in the years to come. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if King had survived the assassin’s bullet that day. How would our society be different? What follows is a bit of idle speculation on my part of what would have happened if he had survived. While violence began the night of April 4, 1968, in a televised speech from his hospital bed, King deplored the violence that had erupted after the shooting. Calm is restored in most major American cities. The arson has been kept to a minimum and downtown commercial districts have been spared. While White flight to the nation’s suburbs still continued, the central cities are not totally abandoned and a certain level of integration occurs in the nation’s cities, particularly in the transitional areas between urban and suburban communities. Dr. King recovered in time to lead the Poor People’s March on Washington. 500,000 people participate in the march on the Washington Mall. President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty is given a new political boost and full employment legislation is passed. The drug trade is minimized in America’s urban areas as young and old are able to find jobs that pay them a living wage. King continues to voice his opposition to the Vietnam War and leads an anti-war march in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. King’s presence helps ensure that the march is peaceful. Since there is no spectacle of a riot at the convention and since America’s cities did not burn the previous April, Hubert Humphrey receives the Democratic nomination and goes on to win the 1968 election. Richard Nixon is twice defeated and retreats from the national political stage to Yorba Linda, California. There is no massive bombing of Hanoi under Humphrey’s administration. The Vietnam War comes to an end in 1971 in time for the 1972 election. There is no Watergate and the majority of the American people continue to believe that government can do positive things to improve their lives. Before he dies in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover releases tapes that reveal King’s marital indiscretions in order to reduce King’s impact on American policy. The release of the tapes is effective. King’s approval rating in public opinion polls, which are coming into vogue, declines. While King continues his role as civil rights spokesperson, the media begins to reduce its coverage of King. King begins to give more prominence to Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Ralph Abernathy and others and retreats somewhat from the public eye. Over the course of the next three decades, King works behind the scenes to ensure there is sufficient investment in America’s urban areas. While crack cocaine is introduces to the inner-cities in the early 1980s, its impact is minimized because the inner-cities are not ghettos filled with hopelessness. When the administration of George Bush begins to set the foundation for invading Iraq, King comes out of retirement to lead a massive protest against U.S. involvement. While Bush still invades Iraq, the effort stalls as the number of enlistments by people of color plummets due to King’s opposition. The Bush administration is forced to implement a universal draft and massive protests ensue. The Bush administration is forced to negotiate and end the Iraq War and withdraws American troops in 2006. In a final march against the Iraq War, King collapses and dies of a massive heart attack. There is no question that the assassination of Dr. King impacted all of our lives. In many ways, it ended an era of hope, of belief that America could do something about injustice and poverty. I can’t help that we would be a better, more moral America if he were alive today. His moral vision has been unequaled and his call to action unparalleled. We are a different America than what we would have been if he were to survive the assassin’s bullet that day. |
| Reflections/Jonathan Gramling The Day the Dreamer Died |
| The Day the Dreamer Died 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
