Questions of Truth & Justice

“Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Technically speaking, it’s winter here on the Platinum Coast of California, but this morning the sun is shining and it appears we are in store for another unseasonably warm, summer-like day. We’re desperate for rain. The fig tree in our yard is budding, at least a month ahead of schedule.

February is Black History Month, when Americans take a moment to appreciate the contributions made by African-Americans to our society and culture. Take away these contributions and America is a desolate and soulless place.

In the sphere of music I think of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Ella Fitzgerald, to name a few.

In the world of sports, I think about the impact made by Jackie Robinson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hank Aaron, Curt Flood, and Muhammad Ali. 

I’m glad Spike Lee makes the films he does.

How sad would our literature be without the likes of W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, Alice Walker and Edward P. Jones?

After Ferguson we heard that black lives matter, but African-American writers and artists and intellectuals have said that for more than a century.  Blacks have always been at the center of our history – no matter how we try to deny, or ignore, the fact. Blacks have held the mirror in which we see our reflected image, the image of a people who claimed to champion freedom and justice for all, but relegated black people to the back of the bus, the separate bathroom and drinking fountain, the segregated hotel, and, far too often, the end of a rope.

I happen to think that Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the greatest people ever born on American soil. What I admire about King is his intellectual ferocity, the way he wrestled with fundamental questions of truth and justice, and his courage to follow his convictions. As author Tavis Smiley points out in a new book, King, in the last year of his life, risked losing political capital by speaking out against the Vietnam War and American militarism. Against the advice of his inner circle, King took that risk.

I am also reminded that this year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Watts Riots – or Watts Rebellion – when thirty-four people were killed and hundreds injured. King arrived in Los Angeles a few days after the riots erupted, and remarked that the environment – poverty, lack of opportunity, racism – was the root cause of the rage in Watts. That rage was still present in Los Angeles in 1992, and again in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. What city will be next?

We’re still waiting for King’s battering ram, even with an African-American man sitting in the Oval Office. When it comes to race and justice, America has a long way to go. Sitting on death row in 1993 for a crime he didn’t commit, Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote, “The police, tools of white state capitalist power, are a force creating chaos in the community, not peace.”