Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America

Copyright © 2022 by Randal Maurice Jelks

All rights reserved

Published by Lawrence Hill Books

An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-64160-557-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946428

Typesetting: Nord Compo

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

To

Lerone Bennett Jr.

(October 28, 1928–February 14, 2018)

Your Ebony magazine features instructed me

in the artful lyricism of a people’s history.

Jess Gill

(February 24, 1932–April 4, 2001)

My uncle, I love you more today than yesterday.

You stood alongside Martin and fathered me

when I needed it most.

Dr. Darlene Clark Hine

My PhD mentor who insisted that Black women’s histories

reconfigured US history itself.

Edward Nelson III

(March 16, 1928–June 13, 1989)

My beloved Uncle June, the first man in my life,

you taught me quiet determination and dignity to overcome.

Every morning I wake up I am reminded

to imitate your courage.

Contents

Prologue

1     Network of Mutuality

2     The Highest Ethical Ideal

3     A Revolution of Values

4     Like a King

5     Drum Major Instinct

6     The Strength to Love

7     We as a People

8     The World House

9     All Labor Has Dignity

10     Growing Up King

11     The Content of Our Character

12     A Stone of Hope

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Prologue

The Constitution

A noble piece of paper

With free society

Struggled but it died in vain

—GIL SCOTT-HERON, WINTER IN AMERICA ¹

Martin,

In late 2016, I was invited to Elmhurst College, the alma mater of two great theologians, brothers H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr. Their legacies in academia and in public life still resonate. They were, of course, titans in your student years at Crozer Seminary and Boston University. Their books were required reading. As your fame rose, you would have occasion to converse and correspond with the both of them. So I was deeply honored to be invited to this small college that shaped these two vitally important theologians who influenced your thought.

It was a propitious moment. The country had been shocked by the presidential election of 2016. Like the presidential election of 2000, the forces of conservatism that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 still vice-gripped political power. The election of Donald J. Trump was the apotheosis of Reagan-era conservatism. Both Reagan and Trump were masters of television, and they both used it to reward the superrich. While Ronald Reagan won his election with the legitimacy of an overwhelming majority of the American voters, Trump lost the popular vote by two million but won the electoral college, assuring him the presidency. His presidency, like that of former president George W. Bush in 2000, had an air of illegitimacy. In 2000, the Supreme Court awarded the election to Bush over his opponent Al Gore, instead of ordering Florida to have an extensive recount. It left the nation in a tizzy. The Bush administration used the court’s decree to nearly ruin the country in an inadvisable war, worse than Vietnam. Bush forty-three’s global aggression and domestic flubs were so reckless they opened up the lane for Barack Obama to be elected as the country’s first African American president.

The Obama administration was deliberate and overall above reproach when it came to scandals within his administration. His presidency was No drama Obama! The problem for President Obama was that he was unwilling to be Machiavellian against his GOP opponents at the start of his administration. He thought being a Black patrician necessitated honorable politics. Though Obama was an outstanding steward of the office, his politics did not make his opponents, or his allies, fear him. Further, he allowed the Tea Party to fester. The Tea Party was funded by some of the country’s wealthiest families, who were looking to end the limited social safety net of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its expansion under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. This was a long-term strategy that of course required dominating the federal courts with conservative appointees. These moguls of finance, media, and technology, using Orwellian doublespeak, pushed monopoly as free enterprise. Obama responded carefully and responsibly, but not aggressively. His noblesse-oblige style of politics did not serve his rainbow coalition or hold them together after he left office.

Obama supported his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who by all measures was more qualified than any of her male counterparts. The problem for Clinton was her political tin ear and her past politics tied to her husband’s moderate conservatism. In 1992 Bill Clinton ran as a Walmart Democrat, a southern politician who recognized that, to get elected, he had to accept a low-wage service economy. He won, but his policies tended to favor corporate and financial sectors over labor. He was friendly, but at a distance, with organized labor. In addition, fearing his GOP opponents, he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This draconian crime bill put the onus on women alone to take care of their children, with limited support from the state in terms of public education and access to childcare. This bill was baked with sexist flour and decorated with racist icing and welfare-queen figurines. It was a bootstraps approach to the economic deindustrialization that had begun tearing through all sectors of working-class America in the late 1970s. Construed with racist and sexist bias, the bill harmed the Black communities who overwhelmingly voted for Clinton.

Hillary Clinton was the bearer of her husband’s legacy, and she had no good defense of his or her former actions in the wake of Michael Brown Jr.’s murder by police in Ferguson, Missouri. They had asked Black voters to vote for them, but their policy actions did the greatest harm to a community that was the most loyal to the Democratic Party. Black people, both as a racial group and as working-class constituents, lost with the policy conservatism of the Democratic Leadership Council. Hillary Clinton’s campaign stumbled in 2008 against Obama, and once more it stumbled in 2016. She was unable to address her own past policy decisions robustly, especially when it came to race and class status. In addition, conservative propaganda spewed enough misogynistic tales that blurred who she really was as a candidate. Though Clinton won the popular vote by two million, she lost the electoral college to Trump. She failed to speak to the woes of the working classes and lost the Great Lakes states. Her loss was crushing.

I was invited to Elmhurst College a few weeks after President Trump’s inauguration to office. In the quarters I keep it was a dispiriting time. So I wanted to say something hopeful to the young people that I would address. I wanted them to know that democracy in the United States has always been difficult to secure. It is a constant fight. Like Reinhold Niebuhr I believe democracies are not always assured. He knew this from witnessing the rise of Nazism in Germany and a totalitarian form of communism in the Soviet Union. Niebuhr was right to be theologically pessimistic. Human self-aggrandizement throughout recorded history is a constant reality. It is a reality being witnessed today in every outsized leader who manages to control state power and enshrine themselves monarchically. However, different from Niebuhr, I recognize that hope and struggle are central to our sojourn as a people. Our collective sojourn demands that we think about ways to create a better democracy. Our forebearers stubbornly held onto the idea that freedom of the self and self-governance are sacred realities. They are to be cherished. They are sacred because our freedoms have always been tenuous and always in jeopardy. This has been central to our spiritual histories.

So the day I arrived at Elmhurst I wanted to acknowledge Reinhold Niebuhr’s clear-eyed pessimism but also center the hope that you embodied. In my mind, you personified many of the central spiritual themes of Black histories. In your sermonic mobilizations, you called us to resist an all-encompassing, dehumanizing political apartheid. As you learned from your mentors, this struggle was to overcome disfigurement of the self, as well as a disfigured society. ² This struggle was always as much spiritual as it was material.

I arrived at Elmhurst on what was, for February in the Chicago area, a wonderful, partially sunny day. I came with a buoyant and open spirit, hoping to uplift students gripped by fears. What I wanted them to know was that spirituality, however they defined it, is as much a part of building, maintaining, and spreading democracy as anything else in their lives. Thus came the idea of these meditations.

I thought what I could offer these students were my thoughts on how to use their spirituality to engage in democratic struggles. I wanted them to know that the struggle to live democratically is lifelong. It is a never-ending battle on multiple fronts. But also, my intention was then, as here, to critically inspire and reassess the meaningfulness of democratic struggle by giving reflection on your words. In my mind their spirits needed bolstering in the face of this overwhelming labor, and I wanted the young people at Elmhurst College to hear a message of solidarity and hope. The greatest lesson the civil rights movement teaches us is how to face our fears and push back against powerful collective self-interests, even in the face of death. As I prepared for the talk, I kept listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Ella’s Song. The goal of my talk came to me in this stanza:

Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize

That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives. ³

I wanted to ignite the students’ spiritual imaginations and for their spirits to not be dampened. I wanted them to know that we could face our difficult days together. I decided to offer them a meditation, not solely analysis—like the Apostle Paul and the epistle form that you, Martin, used so beautifully in Birmingham to answer your critics regarding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) organized protest. So it was my desire to define democratic struggle through an inward journey.

These pages, too, are an exigent spiritual appeal. Democracy is more than consumerist choices that are so easily manipulated and algorithmically controlled. The heart of democracy is the internalization of genuine equality and respect for others, no matter their persuasions or incomes. This respect must be at the core of our being. Democracy is about the recognition that limitations must be placed upon absolute power—the power to enslave, the power to politically dominate, the power to make destructive warfare and murderous genocides. This is the essence of our fight in rebuilding our society’s foundations. Our difficult days call for us to summon democracy’s winds and fill our lungs with fresh air. In the words of your longtime Christian spiritual mentor, Howard Thurman:

The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men and women often calls them to act against the spirit of their times or causes them to anticipate a spirit which is yet in the making. In a moment of dedication they are given wisdom and courage to dare a deed that challenges and to kindle a hope that inspires. ⁴

1

Network of Mutuality

Wake up, everybody

No more sleepin’ in bed

No more backward thinkin’

Time for thinkin’ ahead

—HAROLD MELVIN & THE BLUE NOTES,

WAKE UP EVERYBODY ¹

Martin,

I read that some of your closest peers called you Martin, and others called you Mike. I thought of you as Martin after seeing your photograph in John Williams’s book The King That God Didn’t Save when I was thirteen. There was only you and Andrew Young in the Birmingham airport, around 4:00 AM. You were slumped over with a cigarette in your hand, exhausted. You were weary like the men who labored in my childhood neighborhood of New Orleans, drooped over after a week’s worth of physical toil from jobs that paid too little money. They were, like you, trying to preserve enough energy to enjoy families and friends. They, too, slumped over in barrooms and on their front porches with a cigarette and a beer, fatigued. That photograph reminded me of southern Black and White men known only by their initials, not their full names. To me, you were not Mike, your former birth name and nickname. That name bore a childhood familiarity I dared not broach. In my eyes you were Martin in the same way they were the E.J.s and A.B.s throughout the South. At thirteen years of age, that photograph offered me a lesson in your humanity. You were not the icon of Ebony magazine. You were an exhausted worker. That photograph was not the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was Martin the overworked laborer. The toil of your labor had taken it out of you.

As exhausted as you appeared to be in that photo, there was still something beautiful about it. You were James Brown short. You looked like the dark-skinned men in my communities whom I saw at the barbershop, in church, and on the street corners—you held the same Black handsomeness that US society so fears. This is something men in our community loved about you secretly, even if they disagreed with you on questions of self-defense. You were dark as they were, short, with a wide Black African nose, and you had hair that you brushed to smooth out the naps.

Further, you shared Black hilarity. Behind closed doors you exhibited stylistically the irreverent ribald humor that I heard from men on my streets and from my uncles. ² You were filled with off-color remarks, wisecracks on topics from politics to sex. Though you looked dog-tired, I wondered what you told Andrew Young as the two of you waited for the airplane back to Atlanta. I am certain that, even in your weariness, there was a funny exchange. The blues is serious merriment. As I look back on that captured moment now, I am sure you and Young had a laughable signifying moment about the dire situations the movement faced. You had to laugh to keep from crying. The fact is that your constant toiling on the road took you away from home too much. You spent nearly all your adult life on the road, organizing to build a truly democratic society. This was your zeitgeist, the spirit of the time.

And here we are once more with the spirit of the time moving folks out to march in the streets, this time fraught with a deadly global virus. They are righteously outraged that democracy, the participatory self-governance that was supposed to have been created to deliver justice for all, is slipping the public’s grasp. They fear the United States has become unexceptional. The election of President Trump evoked mass protestations from Black men and women, women generally, and scientists. These marches have had one aim: moving to build a more inclusive democracy, one where economic and social inclusion meet to build a more participatory and just society.

It has been over fifty years since your death, and as you prophesized shortly before your death, our struggles have been difficult. The optimistic dream you exhorted before the Lincoln Memorial in hindsight sometimes seems Kafkaesque. ³ Your dream was a burdensome responsibility. You realized that it was more systemic than personal and made up of more structural considerations than individual impressions. And today the battles in our streets are even more explicitly about the corporate economic disparities and militarized police departments who enforce a rule of law to protect power, not people. Martin, you would be surprised to know there are still too many Bull Connors on our streets who carry out their brutality with the blessings of governors, judges, mayors, and robber barons. All attempt to corral our resistances using intimidation and force, as though our humanity does not count. However, as you knew, and I know too, our lives have always mattered. This has been the religious doctrine instilled in us. We are all God’s children. This has been our great spiritual equalizer, and it has followed us in our histories. It is profoundly democratic.

You were of my parents’ generation. It would have been impossible for me to have called you by your first name in your lifetime. I was a child, and you were an adult. I was born ten months after the Montgomery bus boycott began. I was witness, participant, and beneficiary of the unfolding drama called the civil rights movement. Strange as it may seem, as a youngster, I felt an intimacy with you as I do today—call it our network of mutuality. This mutuality for me came in my adolescence.

I think of you now because the consensus is that the United States as the greatest moral country in the world has come to an end. That idea was promoted by a corporate elite who touted a God-fearing America, though they behaved godlessly in defense of capitalism. They promoted the idea that the United States’ God-fearing citizens lived in opposition to the godless Soviet Union. ⁴ They preached private property and felt menaced by the likes of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Now there were and still are real political differences at stake regarding governing philosophies. But no matter the government, aggrandizement of power is perennially an original sin. In the United States, the stain of the forbidden fruit has been racism. Black men’s and women’s visibility constantly reminded the country of its inglorious fiction—that all people have equal advantages to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Blackness of the United States, let alone throughout the Americas, serves as counternarrative to fictive notions of Jeffersonian democracy.

In our country the histories of Black people were intentionally hidden. Even today American history is mashed up like white potatoes without the brown gravy, belying the nation’s Eurocentrism. Truth is, Black people have been the most democratic because we had to