Can We 'Sing Down the Walls' of Anti-Trump Disunity?

Sixty years ago this month, Martin Luther King Jr. began the Chicago Freedom Movement, marking a real shift in the nature of his work. Starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ending with Selma in 1965, King had worked primarily to win “civil rights” for Black people in the South by ending “de jure” – official and government authorized – segregation. Gradually, he built a cadre of allies – labor unions, white liberals, diverse religious and ethnic organizations, even a president – who, at least in part, supported these efforts.

But beginning in 1966, as King broadened his goals, advocating a more expansive and inclusive moral vision, heartbreakingly, many of these allies abandoned him. King was not necessarily surprised by those who, “questioned [him] about the wisdom of my path." But he was, “nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.”

Launching what was later called the Poor People’s Campaign, he spoke more urgently about economic justice. When you ask, “why are there forty million poor people in America?... you are raising questions about the economic system, [and] when you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. … Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

It shouldn’t surprise that his call that America be more “person-centered than profit-centered,” alienated the same people who denounce democratic socialism today.

King was the first major political figure to demand an immediate end to American war on Vietnam. He called the United States, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” denounced the, “triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism,” and warned that, “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

For that prescience, Time Magazine denounced King as a traitor, and President Lyndon Johnson never spoke to him again. Perhaps worse, it divided King from much of the labor movement, since George Meany’s AFL-CIO backed the war till its bitter end.

King’s Chicago Freedom Movement

Meanwhile, King saw his Chicago campaign as the opening of a fight against the de facto – unofficial, but still very real – segregation of the North. The campaign’s immediate goal focused on ending housing segregation and redlining, which isolated people of color, whether poor or middle class, in separate ghetto-like communities.

As King marched to Marquette Park, protesters waved Confederate flags and screamed “Up with the KKK!” They threw rocks and bricks at the marchers. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and hate-filled as in Chicago,” King said later.

Until housing was desegregated – even under the most favorable conditions, a long process – busing seemed like the only remedy to the vastly unequal schooling produced by the educational segregation of northern cities. (In New York, the alternative of allowing communities of color to control their own schools, was bitterly opposed by the UFT, poisoning community-union relations.)

Although active cross-community organizing sometimes produced relatively harmonious busing programs, in too many cities – like Boston, where the “liberal” judge who ordered busing sent his own children to private school – it seemed like the black and white working classes were purposefully pitted against each other over the dregs of underfunded education.

Too many white liberals, previously eager to counterpose their enlightened views to “bigoted Southern whites,” now denounced the Freedom Movement demands as too much, too fast – the same argument King had so eloquently challenged in his Letter From Birmingham Jail. Meanwhile, challenges to the de facto exclusion of people of color from craft union jobs became another nail in the coffin of faith-labor unity.

The Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Chicago near the entrance to Marquette Park.

Marc Kagan

Can We Restore King’s 1965 Coalition Today?

A key aspect of the Minneapolis ICE protests this winter was that labor, faith, community and left organizations, along with thousands of unaffiliated liberals and progressives, worked together and in some type of coordination. In other words, it represented a restoration of King’s 1965 coalition.

If we are going to build effective opposition to Trumpism and incipient fascism, we need more of this.

Yet building that type of cross-organization, cross-ethnicity, cross-religion, cross-class, cross-cultural unity has been difficult. One of the Minneapolis organizers said it relies on identifying points of common ground rather than requiring unified agreement on a particular set of demands. (Think about busing then, or abortion today, as disunifying issues.)

It means accepting cultural dissimilarities as acceptable and natural, not an obstacle that must be overcome. Can we, despite differences, build a basically shared understanding of the world we want, and the actions necessary to get there?

This is hard: it requires good faith, trust, a lot of solidarity – and maybe also a lot of familiarity.

And that, finally, brings me to questions posed by the National March into Marquette Park, where I spent last Saturday, after a very long bus ride with about two dozen mostly faith activists. We stopped briefly in Summit, New Jersey for dinner with a Unitarian congregation doing work at the Delaney ICE detention facility in Newark.

They’ve participated in vigils outside. But they’re also assisting families who often travel long distances to visit their loved ones with food, accommodations and clothing.

They “accompany” children in to see a parent, when the other parent might also be at risk of arrest. Delaney is one of the rare New York-area issues where many different types of activists are participating side-by-side, contributing their own styles of work.

The next morning, we joined faith-based activists from Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Charlotte and Jackson (Mississippi) and the local community for a prayer vigil at a notorious ICE detention center in central Indiana where 800 people are incarcerated within a maximum-security prison.

Back on the bus, people explained why they were going to Chicago: I want to represent the struggles of our ancestors and those we are going through now; scripture requires us to do justice; how god’s creation is being dealt with hurts my heart; showing up is an act of living my faith; I want to be part of the collective of people that believe in something better. One person said that they think of ‘when the saints go marching in’ not as a heavenly aspiration but as a guide to everyday moral activity and, “I want to be in that number.”

What about me?

Partially, I was excited about this commemoration of King’s historic turn. But also, I wanted to get out of my left-labor comfort zone.

I was right about that too – all that faith-based singing throughout the weekend left me uneasy; I wonder if the choruses of the few labor activist songs I know, like "Which side are you on, which side are you on?" would leave the faith activists similarly unsettled.

We give lip-service to unity but there are obstacles that need to be overcome.

'A Faith Uprising'

Saturday’s march gave a glimpse of those problems, and also, perhaps, a path to working together, by looking at goals rather than the way we talk about achieving them, or ourselves. Although the marchers were extraordinarily demographically diverse in age, gender and nationality, this was definitely a faith-based crowd, with one speaker exulting that, “different faiths are coming together in one freedom trail.” (Interestingly, the main organizers of the event, and the ones that placed a statue in the park commemorating the march, were Muslim organizations.)

Just a handful of people were wearing union t-shirts, and there were no labor unions on the list of Chicago-based endorsers. I don’t know if they were not invited or chose not to mobilize, but Mayor Brandon Johnson was there (and Bernice King, MLK’s daughter), so this event was no secret.

The issues of the march were the same as those raised by left-labor activists: “It’s not okay to be locking people up, to be suppressing people’s rights to vote, to be denying people economic justice, and all of the intolerances and hate that are so wide in our world today.” Yet there’s no denying the rallying cry in opposition was different than the words most of the activists I know would use: “we are a light of morality against it.”

Another leader reached the same conclusion on building the movement as those Minneapolis labor organizers but used markedly faith-based language to explain it.

“Concentrating on what we have in common is more powerful than concentrating on what’s different," the leader said. "We are not here in spite of our differences; we are here because our different traditions. All walk us to the very same conclusion: that all human beings are sacred; that when any human being is degraded, God himself is degraded; and we, who are amongst the human beings, are going to do something about it.”

Of course, not all faith communities agree with King’s belief that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and that evil flourishes wherever human dignity is ignored. But that same problem exists in the labor and NGO community group worlds too – the organizations that are silent, for fear of Trump, or even flirt with him. In all these cultures, there are plenty of bystanders – and worse.

How, then, to foster common ground among activists of different cultures? Perhaps the chorus of a song written by some faith activists and the children they were visiting at an infamous family detention center in South Texas, that was a sort of mantra for this weekend, provides a clue: “I sing from here, and you sing from there / Together we’ll sing down the walls everywhere.”

Where we have fundamentally similar visions of what is wrong, we need to learn to sing from here AND sing from there. If we can learn to listen to the songs of potential allies – whatever our different traditions and languages – with respect, perhaps we will be able to both stop Trumpism and set about initiating that “radical revolution of values” that King dreamed of so many years ago.