50th anniversary nostalgia of the March on Washington helps disguise our lack of progress

This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

The 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington was an exercise in nostalgia.  Lots of fanfare. Little action.

Did you notice the separation of the speakers from the crowd?  What made the March on Washington special was that it was part of a movement where people gathered together to struggle for freedom.  When he spoke, King was surrounded by organizers and supporters.  That’s the power of the moving filmed representations of the event.  Energy for justice abounded.  You could feel it.

Concerns for security are signs of our time.  Nonetheless, it raises doubt as to whether movements for social change outside of the official political process and the courts are possible any longer.  The separation is also part of our increasingly individualized and isolated (though ostensibly connected) Facebook culture.

The commentaries surrounding the anniversary that compared Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama were misplaced.  President Obama’s own erroneous distinction between King and himself as preacher and politician, as if King and the Civil Rights movement were more religious than political, was calculated to release him from his own responsibility as the first African-American president. It doesn’t.

If anything in American history was political, the Civil Rights movement was.  King was a political leader that had to be – and was – reckoned with.  President Obama cannot explain that away, nor should we.

King is properly enshrined in American history in a way that no other American has or will be.  Nonetheless, he is now romanticized and contoured for purposes other than his own.  The celebration yesterday proved that its time stop looking back to those glory years. Listening to the speeches yesterday King and the Civil Rights struggle seemed remote, as if it had occurred in another century.

Sure, there’s the dissonance of the unworthy powerful saluting the fallen resistance hero.  However, we can’t fault the less worthy or salute the hero by making him more than he was.  Even Amy Goodman in her coverage on Democracy Now fell into this trap.  On King and the Civil Rights movement, Goodman has been overly dramatic. She mixes time periods and causes without missing a beat.   Whatever the rhetoric, the March on Washington is past.  It won’t spur a new mass movement for justice.

King isn’t coming back to life again either.  And we don’t know what would have become of King had he lived.  Like other figures cut down in their prime, King’s prophetic image looms large.  Living longer would have placed King’s limitations in an evolving and more complex relationship with his image as the doomed prophet.  Inevitably, he would have come up against another set of American realities within and beyond the color line as did his Civil Rights cohorts Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young.  Who knows, if King had lived he might have morphed into an older version of Barack Obama.

The broadening of the Civil Rights movement to include a panoply of worthy issues is a problematic reading of the March on Washington.  True the march was about poverty and jobs for the poor and working class.  Nonetheless, its primary thrust was the struggle to liberate Blacks in the context of American history.

For other issues to claim center stage is to confuse and – in my view – to diminish and even expropriate the struggle for African-American freedom.  This is in line with the universalization of issues which has its place.  Nonetheless, the danger is that who suffer and struggle within a particular community may also lose their privileged place in that universalization.

Obviously the domestic American scene can be critically evaluated with regard to the anniversary celebration but the immediate backdrop – in real time – is the deepening crisis in the Middle East.  As the anniversary was celebrated, more Muslim Brotherhood officials and family connections were rounded up by the Egyptian government and the threat of missile strikes against Syria intensified.  Gas masks were being distributed to the Israeli public while the Palestinians continued to be pushed to the edge – minus the gas masks.  After all these years are we back in the Scud Missile (Saddam Hussein, Iraq) era?

Sometimes it is easier to look backward as we remain running in place.  The main issues of our day haven’t changed much nor have our responses.  Nostalgia helps disguise our lack of progress.

As the missiles are ready to strike, we should call an end to commemorations and change the world we live in.  Or has the world changed us?