Revolution Reflection
A coalition of activist organizations is calling upon us to join in a reflection on the direction of our country and what we can do collectively to advance justice and peace. They are inviting us to listen to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech on Breaking the Silence read by a diverse group of people dedicated to King’s ideas. The reading will be followed by a conversation among activists from around the country. The event is set for April 4th at 7pm. You can connect at: kingandbreakingsilence.org.
We hope you will participate. The Boggs Center has a long history in encouraging serious reflection on this speech and King’s ideas as a touchstone for actions. We think this event is important for all those who are working toward a revolutionary transformation in this land.
In 2004, Grace Lee Boggs and I were part of an effort called the Beloved Communities Initiative. We wanted to find and connect the places in the country where Dr. King’s idea of community were coming to life. Entitled Beloved Communities: Growing our Souls we aimed to form “a network of communities committed to and practicing the profound pursuit of justice, radical inclusivity, democratic governance, ecological responsibility, health and wholeness, and social/individual transformation. It continues to be informed by the 1965-1968 visionary thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., combined with indigenous cosmology and social ethics.”
A cornerstone of that initiative over five years was to encourage the reading of this speech on Martin Luther King Day. A decade earlier, it was King’s insights to call young people to engage in the work of transforming themselves as they transformed the structures of our dying cities, that provided the foundation for Detroit Summer.
In 1969, James Boggs wrote about the revolutionary moment unleashed by The Montgomery Bus Boycott, offering the possibilities of revolution, or counter-revolution, as never before. Protracted struggles across the country, he argued, were forcing people to recognize the inability of a system rooted in genocide, enslavement, and exploitation to be humanized through reforms. In Racism and the Class Struggle, Jimmy wrote:
King's movement, based as it was on the reclamation of the white man, did not intend to be a revolution. It was revolutionary, nonetheless, in the sense that from its inception it went further in confronting whites and in creating conflict between black and white over issues than any blacks, North or South, had ever dreamed of trying to go before. And even though civil rights are only the normal common rights that a nation should grant to its citizens, the civil rights struggle in this country was a revolutionary struggle because blacks had been denied these normal rights. (109)
Jimmy explained that in the fifteen years since Montgomery:
It is quite apparent that what we are now engaged in is not just a revolt, not just a rebellion, but a full-fledged movement driving toward full growth and maturity and therefore requiring a serious examination of the fundamental nature of the system that we are attacking and the system that we are trying to build. (133)
Violence is at the core of this system we oppose. This lead King to name the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
Jimmy and Grace shared with the King the understanding that to build anew, to “to save the soul of America,” we need to counter this violence with love and compassion.
Dr. King was “convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin... the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
This April 4th we hope you will join us to reflect together on a long legacy of struggle and to ask, “Where do we go from here?”
The National Council of Elders, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, the SNCC Legacy Project, Highlander Center, The Zinn Education Project, and the Shalom Center are among the organizations endorsing the event. The speech will be read by a series of people who advocate for progressive change. They include well know voices and those from the front lines of change. They include Alice Walker, Tantoo Cardinal, Ibram X. Kendi, Saru Jayaraman, Jane Fonda, Victoria Kirby York, Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, ,and Ambassador Ton Nu Thi Ninh.