Real change requires risk and going against
the status quo. It comes with discomfort and sometimes confrontation.
It might be a cruel
illusion, but I live every day guided by You were put here for a reason, a belief that running a community TV in a suburban community near the city of my maturation
is indeed justice work. Justice work, what Dr. King intended many of his generation to finish. Since
leaving the city that gave bloom to my curiosity, I venture into New Haven
whenever possible in the company of my son, poet, playwright and educator,
Josiah Houston.
I was a city of New
Haven resident on the first Martin Luther King Holiday, a neighbor of John C.
Daniels who would become the first black mayor nearly a decade later. In this
city divided, economically stagnant and challenged by the crack epidemic,
housing shortages, crime, and racial strife, I had become a civic leader and an activist as President of the League of Women Voters of New Haven. It was during
this time that unintentionally, I became acquainted with public access
television.
Honestly, I still
hunger for the city. Maybe it was just easier to feel connected to something
bigger there or maybe it was how life-changing my experiences there were. But
truth be told, the New Haven I knew then is different now. Still, each return
visit is wistful. There is something about a city with nine-squares that you
can walk, as in a game of checkers, to navigate one’s destination, differently.
It is my go-to when I need to be revitalized with a lecture or performance or a
City Seed open market or free museum or be mesmerized by the translucent marble
architecture of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. For me, New
Haven is like Jefferson’s Philadelphia. Borrowing from the ‘projector’, Thomas
Jefferson, whom I truly discovered at this library, New Haven is my “philosophical evenings in the winter.” Thus, the city has been my frequent go-to on Martin
Luther King Day.
My go-to event for
connecting better with the meaning of this solemn day is The
Environment & Social Justice Program at the Peabody Museum with an
abundance of performance poetry, testimonials to lives for which the struggle
remains different than mine. This visceral connection to injustice through poetry is a reminder of
both my privilege and my purpose as a citizen media maven. Here, in this space, it is easy to know I am privileged A condition that should not be, ever.
Here, listening to the voices of people who do not look like me. Here, where
people, whom I presume Dr. King would be ashamed to know all these years later,
have not yet journeyed far enough in the Promised Land he called out in his
last speech, The Mountain Top. Here.
A safe space in my city of promise among those defiantly promising the gathered
that they will neither be still nor silent.
A kaleidoscope of
poets takes the stage: Rebel, Chavon, Yet, Jazz, Zulynette, Lyrical Faith,
Influence, Midnight, Abioseh. Each poet echoing, "It is not my
English that's broken." And, “Behind the mountain, there are more
mountains.” The choice to literally be the minority, to listen to poetic words
about the human condition of 'other' and reset my personal clock for work as a
conscientious resister of systematic injustice reconnects me to my ‘self.’ Much
needed.
It is 2020. The poet,
N’Goma, the Master of Ceremonies of the 24th annual Zannette Lewis
Environmental and Social Justice Invitational Poetry Slam dedicated to
raising sociopolitical and spiritual consciousness, shifted my paradigm decades
earlier. We appreciate each other. We both cherished Zannette Lewis, our Ms. Z. Our community lost Zannette,
just over a decade before. A passionate empowerment justice worker, her legacy is
appropriately entwined with the legacy of Dr. King. She would have been
twenty-two when Dr. King’s death took root in her life.
Houston and I met
N’Goma and Zannette in New Haven at an Open Mic at the Daily Caffe, a location
said to provide the downtown neighborhood with a taste of coffee and Bohemia.
Houston was eight years old, a chess enthusiast and sponge. That first day, and
in every subsequent encounter, I have been moved, informed and even scolded as
a white person by N’Goma in performance. We have aged into a better knowing. I
am still a mother to Houston first, and an occasional poet, Adele Houston, and
community maven in my adopted role as volunteer Executive Director of WPAA-TV
and Community Media Center.
N’Goma says of himself,
“I’m in recovery from western civilization.” And I know am here to unlock my
own recoveries door. There is much recovery to be had. Poetry sometimes gives
us a needed change of conscience. Stories, when shared on stage or in video,
can be an organizing tool for building what collectively is signaled in us. On
this day of remembrance, in loss, in resistance, in leadership, dedicated to
the man and his light, we greet each other with an intimacy of travelers within
the same city on a different nine square paths to rebellion with purpose. It is
from this place that events of the day are similarly rooted.
When a Poetry Slam
Judge for the invitational slam sends last-minute regrets, N’Goma asks me,
Adele, to be the replacement judge. I defer. I wanted to be with my son,
already a judge by invitation. This request means we cannot sit together for
the next few hours over concerns about influenced scoring. Invitational Slams
rarely see a score below 8.9 out of 10. There is money involved. This is a
serious business for all competitors.
I am also very aware
of the optics of adding another white person as a judge. They would not see
Adele, a person involved in the performance poetry movement for many years;
they would see an old white lady casting judgment. And they did. I was directly
asked, “How did judges get picked?” Meaning, “How did you get picked?” To
which I replied, “I have been doing this since 1999 Likely before you
were born.”
For
over fifty years, the country as a whole has wrestled with the movement and
legacy of Dr. King. I was 14 when King was assassinated. The television in our
house was in color unlike when President Kennedy was shot. It began to feel
like assassinations of leaders and stories of war in distant places were part
of the fabric of America. Robert F. Kennedy had yet to fall. He would attend
the funeral of Dr. King.
My Dad
had finally given up on his idea of a full-fledged civil preparedness bunker,
but when the news reported riots he seemed ready to repurpose the cellar bunker
for other unknowns. It is hard to imagine what school shootings and heightened
security measures for entering schools today make fourteen-year-olds feel Dead
students are much more personal than assassinated leaders.
Early
television and public access television has eerie similarities in appearance—public
access often still looks and feels much the same—however, public access never
had a much-trusted voice like broadcast news had Walter Cronkite. Unconsciously,
my journey began with my Dad called my life’s work the day Dr. King was shot. I
was transfixed as many were with the announcement and updates on the ‘murder’
of this well-respected leader. But, hearing Dr. King mention the First Amendment,
made my education feel astonishingly connected to my life.
CBS Evening News Breaking Report: The
ever-trusted Walter Cronkite appears in color in a ‘Just in Live TV’ report. As
his eyes dart about for cues from the production crew he adjusts his suit
jacket collar. In his well-modulated, unemotional voice he reads the scripted
announcement from a paper in his hands:
“Dr. Martin Luther King, the
apostle of nonviolence and the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in
Memphis, Tennessee,” Cronkite said. "Police have issued an all-points
bulletin for a well-dressed, young white man seen running from the scene.” … He
reports that in a companion’s words, “The bullet exploded in his face.”
The story facts and carefully
selected adjectives speak volumes: the Nobel Peace Prize winner; the turbulent
racial situation; on the scene almost immediately; high powered hunting rifle;
dusk-to-dawn curfew; 4,000 national guardsmen Will my dad be called-up.
They rushed the 39-year-old Negro leader to a hospital where he died of a
bullet wound in the neck. Police report that the murder has touched off
sporadic acts of violence in a Negro section of the city. Cronkite trips over
the word violence That is how he spoke of being mobilized for military
action.
After referring to sporadic acts of violence in a
Negro section of the city, CBS cuts to President Johnson expressing the
nation’s shock “… Saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther
King, I ask every citizen (the president looks down to read more and concludes)
to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King who lived by
nonviolence.”
Returning again to Walter Cronkite reporting on
the assassination, the story is crafted to ask and answer the question as to
why Dr. King was in Memphis, suggesting King was “determined to prove that he
could lead a peaceful mass march in support of striking sanitation workers most
of whom are Negroes.” In another cut-away to news footage from the prior day,
Dr. King appears mid-speech, "Maybe I could understand the denial of
certain basic First Amendment privileges because they haven't committed
themselves to that, over that," King said. "But somewhere I read of
the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I
read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is
the right to protest for rights." The audio track cuts off the crowd’s
enthusiastic reply as CBS news producers cut back to Walter Cronkite who echoes
the President’s reference with “shock across the nation.” He mentions a place
well-known to people like me. A place where black people live: Harlem. Then,
the subtle spin. An anonymous quote of a young person in Harlem, “Dr. King
didn’t really have to go back to Memphis. Maybe he wanted to prove
something.”
It has become routine for
WPAA-TV to schedule the MLK Day Democracy Now Special in
the daily playout spot for Democracy Now. This special edition gets
a few additional plays from Sunday to Tuesday. Independent journalists like Amy
Goodman embrace community TV as a major platform for their audiences even with
the evolution of the Internet. Each annual edition of this special programming
contains content curated from Dr. King’s speeches, recorded from 1962 to 1968,
and commentary about the man and the meaning of his legacy. The station also
plays a remix of lesser-known speeches our youth team compiled in 2015. It
purposely excludes the historic August 28, 1963, I have a Dream speech
made during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom when Dr. King called
for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. The
station is closed for the day. We rarely close.
Remembrance seems to
make the media world a remix. Dr. King’s face is ubiquitous on the Internet.
Quotes and misquotes characterize the man. Facebook is afloat in memes. Politicians,
justice workers and pseudo evangelists for people’s rights post some
quotes I am not denying that it is hard to eke understanding out of
days of reflection and possibly action. Like his initials, MLK
celebrations are simplified, peaceful, non-threatening, and most important to
the program organizers, they must be digestible I could even say shallow.
As reported in our town’s newspaper,
our Mayor is once again the keynote speaker Using
the ceremony to parent the community as the benevolent dictator he sees himself
as.
Let me share some history here. The
state began recognizing Dr. King’s birthday as a holiday in 1973, 10 years
before President Reagan signed the Federal law declaring the third Monday in
January as the designated holiday. In 2000, a bill submitted by Wallingford’s
State Representative to officially recognize the holiday statewide, became
Connecticut Law. The only community not already doing so was Wallingford. Paid
days off and this holiday was central to a multi-year dispute between the Town
and its workers’ union. As Rev. Jesse Jackson said, referring to our Mayor's
resistance to recognizing the King Holiday, ''Maybe he hadn't gotten the word.
But he has got the word now, and the law, and I think he'll do the right
thing.''
The following year, the last of the longstanding
inclusive commemorative MLK Day morning services sponsored by the clergy
association welcomed a standing room only crowd. The first town-sponsored ‘remembrance’
to honor the civil rights leader with the Mayor presiding was the same day at noon
at Town Hall. Wilbert Lawrence "Robby" Robinson, a town resident who
founded, and led, until his death, the new Wallingford Coalition for Unity was
involved in the planning. For the next thirteen years, Robby interacted with the
Mayor in supplicant fashion, as he himself described it to me “... it is more
important to me that our youth know about Dr. King. I just
wanted to make things better and to rid my hometown of its very bad reputation.
It is not about me.”
Robby was in the crowd at the March on Washington shoulder to
shoulder with believers in nonviolence, experiencing the ether of the ‘I have a
Dream’ speech first hand. He was now living as Martin said of that dream
“sometimes it is a nightmare” as a black man in Wallingford.
"I think one of the best things that
happened to this town—and it's a sick way of saying it —is Matt Hale (founder
of the white separatist group, World Church of the Creator), coming here, or at
least his feeling that this was a place he could be … It really got people to
open their eyes, to look and think. To think about how members of the KKK
could march by our Town Hall.”
In 2015, Robby was honored during
the annual MLK commemorative event. I attended and heard once again, for myself,
a deep lack of understanding about the struggles for decency and equality then,
and now. The Mayor spoke about Rosa Parks, "Would we have been there? What
would we have done? ... Had this surfaced today, let it be known that his
message is not forgotten." Mr. Mayor,
the message must be heard not to be forgotten. It is not about slaves and stories
about the back of the bus. It is about the promise of a decade of open struggle
to break the barriers of ‘legal’ segregation to attain citizen rights followed
by the ongoing, to this very moment, struggle for equity. The Mayor is
speaking to his choir. Robby, this is not
good enough.
In 2020, the Mayor chooses to reflect
on the life of orator Frederick Douglass relating Douglass’ courage to Dr. King’s
in their respective struggles for abolition and for civil rights roughly 100
years apart. It is reported the Mayor said, “He (King) didn’t grow up a slave,
but he recognized what the problem was, and through peaceful living and example
brings us to the point to just follow
the truth.” Again he entwined his milquetoast world views
peppered with slavery stories and avoided the truth of our times. King did grow
up with a knowing quite different than his own.
Among the commemoration
highlights were essay readings by three local
high school students. This portion is what had disappointed me most
in the past when with camera in hand Which meant a bit of optimism,
I did go to the Town Hall ceremony. In our town, authorized events coverage is
in the purview of the Mayor and when covered it is to be handled by Government
TV, the channel he controls. Since I believe that every story can have many
tellers and points of view, as with the day Rev. Jackson came to town, and that
exposure to the many stories best informs our 'knowing,' I brought a camera
along. However, each time the essays were so unremarkable, the video I captured
never even made its way to the pending queue for production. I erased it,
thereby distancing myself from the experience I do not want to uplift
the shallows.
It is Tuesday, shortly
after 9:00 PM, and our longest-running WPAA-TV show is airing. Host, Citizen
Mike, has actively journeyed in our community media space since 2010. The voice
I hear is familiar but it is not the voice of Citizen Mike. The stand-in host,
a current Town Councilor says, “I think the Mayor did an excellent job at the
Martin Luther King ceremony.” The guest, another Town Councilor, replies, “I
agree.” They each call out the strengths of the Mayor with such community
gatherings and speeches.
I immediately go in my
head to that place that anything about the Mayor makes me go. It is a dark
place full of suspicion. I am not a fan. I am someone he wishes never stepped
foot into ‘his’ community If only there were a video of the Mayor’s
speech which I could play, a video that could inform my sensibilities about
my hometown. I am left to wonder ‘what would MLK do?’ recalling
the “What Would Jesus Do?” the book which popularizes WWJD bracelets
and other paraphernalia meant to be a reminder to act in ways that personified
Jesus and his teachings. Would he remind me that “Darkness cannot drive out
darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do
that.” Do I need to reread A Testament of Hope, to stay the course,
to avoid the temptation to subvert my own work?
I am certain that unlike
these students with search and find quotes and no deep dive into meaning, the
Mayor did not need Snopes' advice on Dr. King's quote accuracy.
Being the technophobe that he is, and likely yet to be a cherry popped
Google–Virgin, his Amishness sheltered his access to 'The 201 best ... the 17
inspiring ... the 123 most powerful … and the 31 MLK quotes that can inspire
the greatness in you! Google's code of conduct is "Don't be evil,"
but the Mayor believes technology is And without digital literacy, it
can be.
While I cannot prove it
without video capture of the ceremony, I am near certain the Mayor did not
represent Dr. King’s vision of citizenship: voting
rights, a living wage, adequate housing, access to health care, and excellent
and racially integrated education.
Indeed,
the community I serve is proof that we can commemorate Dr. King on the one hand and
eviscerate his legacy on the other. Remembrance is not just for storytelling to demonstrate that we have a collective past Collective here, with intent. It is not about slavery or reparations. It is not about the past. It is about being in our own time, with awareness, waging contemporary battles. Dr. King called the American racial revolution, a revolution to 'get in' rather than to overthrow. It remains so, in our own time. Dr. King intimated the need not
only to see injustices but understand how we all participate in them. Constantly asking himself, Where Do We Go From Here, he answers "We cannot afford to make these choices poorly...the issue is injustice and immorality." We can
and must consciously do something to change within and around us. Even using
this day as a day of service is a digestible cop-out that distracts. If inoculated with a mild form of commitment, thus immune to genuine moral injustice, there can be no transformation.
And then in an Aha moment, I realize the WWJD concept is best
applied to Dr. King whom my son as a young poet boldly personifies in his poem Martin Made Sound for
an MLK day event about 20 years ago. The poem's styling intended from a heart of admiration, to echo N'Goma, and respect the legacy of a person committed to justice for all.
MARTIN made Sound
It was rumored God lied when
Martin died.
Stated he flied
too high to abide by this world’s rules.
A sacrificing
wife sighed when
Martin died.
Contemplated the
loss of her tears by pools.
Children were left
wide-eyed when
Martin died.
Rotating their
emotion’s molecules.
Martin died
While others
sought a place to hide.
He took the
ultimate ride to the other side.
World watching.
Not
easy swimming against the tide
Martin
died.
Looking at a sky
an imagination length wide.
Martin pried open
the heavens and took a look inside.
Went so fast,
evolving our past
Into the sun he
did collide.
Fried, denied.
Multiplied by extremes, a great divide
Left baptized in
a cold seaside.
Martin took we
Or who we thought
we be
Added dust of
saints’ plus milky-way paints plus
the never-ending
smile of this sphere
Squared to the
sky
And got the last
decimal of pi
It’s our 3rd
eye to the 7th power, math gone sour
Divided by the
ratio of Venus to Mars
Times stars once you
subtract infinity
How easily the impossible becomes reality.
Take life in
stride
Upside down flat
and round
There was no
sound when to his life
Eternity was
implied
Martin died.
After he
reapplied the ripcord to our hip-side and found
The curbside of
social suicide. Turned our view topside, undried his eyes
And saw hatred
glorified. Lullabied homicide to sleep and mummified
devotions deep.
MARTIN leaped
from sleep counting flaming sheets, accepting no defeats.
MARTIN broke
locks, caught rocks, led flocks.
MARTIN made
sound.
Found the brain
of Mark Twain and left still spinning.
Complementary
controversy teaching a new beginning.
Lessons of past,
future wound.
Both to be
understood as their words rain down
Profound.
Martin’s lips
brought tips of fire to ice
precisely sliced,
diced; what thrice was known
As the price of
life called death. He broke hell’s weather.
I know Martin and
Lucifer cried together.
Eternal
damnation. Internal assassination
Warfare led by a colonel with no hair and a black cat
wearing
Bonaparte’s hat, speaking in Rhyme of Dr. Sues,
desperately
seeking life’s hypotenuse
Where there is a
cavern lost designed with Saturn’s pattern of rewind
Martin tell me -
Is hell just a cell for the mind?
Skull seven and a
quarter
What is free is
what is undefined, eternity just got shorter.
Pacified the
purified. Ratified and clarified.
Crucified for
having pride.
MARTIN died
MARTIN died in a
landslide
Magnified the
mystified
And left heaven
petrified.
Prophesized the
riverside
Would be satisfied
with the change he left behind.
Testified the
preoccupied would miss
what they were
sent here to find.
Lived the two
extremes
found their means
so his soul survived.
MARTIN died
Un-amplified,
un-clarified, unbeatified
But God knows. We
know.
For what Martin
died.
