The 20th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day march and celebration at Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC) was attended by more than 1,000 people yesterday. The march, taking off from the GRCC fieldhouse at noon, spanned nearly three blocks and closed downtown streets for nearly half-an-hour to the favorable reception of those who saw the march pass. As has traditionally been the case, primarily students attended the event from local elementary, middle, and high schools and many of the signs reflected the students’ understanding of King’s message and encouraged people to continue King’s legacy and to promote a vision of a society in which people no longer understand race as a means to promote inequality.
Following the march, a program featuring local students and politicians was held at the GRCC Fieldhouse where it was relocated after several years of being held at Fountain Street Church due to substantial increase in its size. The program, titled “Remember! Celebrate! Act! A Day On, Not A Day Off!” in reference to the ongoing debate over whether or not people should get the day off from school and work for MLK Day, highlighted the vision of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In delivering the program’s opening remarks, GRCC President Juan Olivarez described how we have “all benefited from King’s voice” and stated that King would have been proud of those attending the march who were thereby “acting as Dr. King dreamed.” Following Olivarez’s remarks, local Republican Senator Bill Hardiman and Democrat member of the Michigan House Michael Sak cited the need for people to come together each year not only on MLK Day, everyday, to promote king’s legacy. Following the presentation of a commemorative award on behalf of the Michigan Legislature to GRCC for their 20 years of celebrating MLK Day, a moment of silence was held to encourage people to reflect on how King’s words could guide us today.
The brief introduction to the moment of silence was the only time during which the audience was encouraged to consider how King’s words could guide us today, yet there was no mention made of any specific ways in which King’s words could provide insight to the problems of today, despite the fact that they could very clearly provide valuable insight into the substantial racism that still exists, King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and likely opposition to the Iraq War, the inherent racism of the Iraq War, and even King’s experience with FBI surveillance and its relationship to the current controversy over the NSA’s spying. The ignoring of King’s insight into today fits easily within an overall effort to present a “safe” Martin Luther King in which all people can “celebrate” Martin Luther King Jr. without stepping outside of their comfort zones. This has resulted in many official commemorations that ignore King’s later years when he began to question the structure of US society and called for systemic change and, more shockingly, ignore the fact that the very racism that King opposed still continues. Anti-racist activist Tim Wise has argued that all most whites “know” about King is a portion of his “I have a Dream” speech and understand it only as a plea for color-blindness. The focus, largely at the behest of white Americans and the corporate media, on King’s “color-blindness” has created a barrier to a discussion on the racial inequality and social justice that motivated King.
The fact that the majority of the performers came from suburban school districts provided one example of how King’s message has been ignored, as very clear social and racial injustices exist in the public school system, yet there was no questioning of this, nor did anyone question Michael Sak after he made a joke about how he should hire Senator Hardiman to run his reelection campaign, reflecting what has become the frequent exploitation of King’s legacy by politicians. Moreover, the parade was led once again this year by a color guard from the local Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), despite the fact that King likely would have been opposed to the presence of the military in a parade held in his honor and would have voiced his opposition to the Iraq War. Especially in his later years, Martin Luther King Jr. was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War and on April 4, 1967 delivered a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” in which King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War and called for a citizens to work towards stopping the war. Moreover, King understood the connections between the military, the Vietnam War, and racism:
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
While King’s stance on Vietnam has been largely ignore in mainstream discourse, local activists have used his opposition to the Vietnam War and the presence of the ROTC at the local parade to encourage people to question the Iraq War, as has the national antiwar movement. For the last several years, activists have distributed flyers to students on military recruiting and King’s opposition to the war (see last year’s flyer), specifically focusing on how the military targets the poor and people of color.
