January 27, 2010 06:00 AM
Ed. Note: On Friday, January 22, UMKC's Division of Diversity, Access & Equity hosted Angela Davis,who delivered the Martin Luther King Jr. Keynote address. What follows is a transcript of her remarks.
Good evening, everyone. It is really a pleasure to be here. And before I thank those who have been involved in organizing this event, I would like to say that one of the organizations with which I work, and this organization has served as the terrain on which some of the collective insights I want to share with you this evening have grown, the name of the organization is “Sisters Inside.” It is an abolitionist organization that focuses on women in prison. Sisters Inside is headquartered in Australia, in Lisbon, Australia.
And attending conferences and meetings almost every year, I have learned that we must always acknowledge the traditional holders of the land before anything else can proceed. And so what I would like to do this evening as we prepare to discuss the life and work and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King is to acknowledge the indigenous people, the Native Americans who are the traditional inhabitants and holders of the land on which we gather this evening. [Applause] I have made a vow to myself, which again my public presentations of this way in order not to assent to what I call the discursive genocide that continues to be inflicted on Native Americans. And in acknowledging the history of this place, I also want us to be aware of the way in which the current moment is shaped by the colonization of Indian land. [Applause]
And so I would like to thank Chancellor Morton and his wife, Yvette. I would like to thank Derica for the wonderful introduction, and I would like to thank Karen Dace, who is the Deputy Chancellor for Diversity Access and Equity, whom I last saw at a similar event at the University of Utah some years ago. It was two years, three years ago.
And so let me say to begin that this is a very pertinent moment to reflect on the contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Freedom Movement with which we associate him. Why is this an especially significant moment? Because we are observing the first anniversary of the election of the first black President in our country’s history. [Applause] And I understand that in the 2008 election here in Missouri there was a margin of about 4,000 votes, right? Point one percent, so McCain won by point one percent. And this was the first time since 1956 when Adelaide Stevenson won here in Missouri over Eisenhower that Missouri failed to vote for the winner of the presidential election. [Laughter]
So I want to begin by saying that if you are representative of Missouri’s population, at least half of you joyously greeted the results of the 2008 election. [Applause] And it seems like here in this place at this time, most of you or perhaps all of you [Applause] were happy to see the election of Barack Obama.
Now,
I want to talk about the 
significance of historical memory as I open these
deliberations on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and on the relationship between
civil rights and the broader notion of freedom in a democratic society. Some of you may be a bit young to hold in
your memory a sense of the work that Dr. King accomplished, although it is true
that it is not necessary to have experienced an event in order to have a
historical memory. But surveys have
indicated that Dr. King is perhaps the most well-known public figure,
historical public figure, in this country.
Like every single person knows the name of Martin Luther King, perhaps
even more than George Washington. When I
was growing up, I remember we talked about George Washington, but about the
only thing we knew was that he had cut down the cherry tree. [Laughter]
“I refuse to tell a lie,” right?
[Laughter]
Yesterday I was talking to a young child, a young white child of about 8 or 9 years old, and he wanted to tell me what he knew about Martin Luther King, and it was really very moving and wonderful because he knew more than most people know. And then he said, “Wasn’t he assassinated by someone whose last name was Booth?” [Laughter] So I had to say, “No, not quite.” He got very embarrassed. I said, “That’s okay because you are really trying. You know, you are really trying.”
We may not have accurate historical memories of all of these events, but here today we can remember what happened last year. We can remember how most of the country and much of the world felt in the aftermath of the historic 2008 election. I can remember myself in the city where I live, Oakland, California. People were dancing and singing in the streets and people stopped their cars on the busy thoroughfares and got out and embraced everyone in sight. It was the most remarkable moment. And this joy, this collective joy, was experienced by people all over the world. And I know that I read that in the District of Columbia in Washington during the inauguration there was not a single crime committed on that day, and that’s amazing. [Applause] And I don’t want us to forget this, because what we experienced was a moment of promise for the future.
And today many of us are experiencing disappointments. Many of us feel that our collective hopes seemed to have receded in face of bureaucracy as usual, in face of the demands of the military, and in face of the determination of the health care industry to maintain a system that is based on capitalism profits rather than human need. [Applause] The results of the election in Massachusetts, I believe, are an example of the power of the HMOs, the pharmaceuticals, and the rest of what you actually might call a medical industrial complex. [Laughter]
As a matter of fact, even though we have seen many doctors traveling to Haiti, especially Doctors Without Borders and MedSense, but there should be many, many more. We should reflect on the fact that doctors at least here in the U.S. are encouraged to think more about money, the money that they earn, than the services they perform. I think it is especially appropriate to reflect on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King at a time when we are witnessing one of the worst disasters in the Americas. And so the question I pose for us to ponder is: How do we identify with and advocate for those who are poor and oppressed, the populations that Dr. King consistently thought to represent?
And I would like to talk a little bit about what is going on in Haiti, but I want to again keep our historical context in mind, and I would like us to remember that we would not be gathered here today celebrating the legacy of Dr. King had it not been for the fact that a movement, a vast movement, fought for the right to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday. And I want to especially remember the efforts of Coretta Scott King. [Applause] And I want to remember the efforts of John Conyers, who introduced the first legislation to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday just four days after the assassination in 1968. And afterwards, Shirley Chisholm. [Applause] I want to remember Shirley Chisholm. Shirley Chisholm and John Conyers proposed the legislation during every single session until 1983 when it was passed, when the legislation was passed [Applause], allowing for the celebration of this holiday which began in 1986.
Now, let’s remember that it wasn’t only Conyers and Chisholm. It was many of us who marched to celebrate this day. It was Stevie Wonder who wrote “Happy Birthday” [Applause] that helped to mobilize a national movement. And I think it is in the spirit of Dr. King for us always to think about what collective masses of people have accomplished. We celebrate his life, his work, his legacy; but through the celebration we are acknowledging and paying tribute to many, many more people, many of whom whose names we do not know and will never know.
The Civil Rights Era is now accepted as what we might call the Second American Revolution, and this may well be true. Major transformations, particularly in the area of the law, were enabled by the fact that thousands and tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings, black people and their allies, embraced the struggle for equality as a way of life, as a way of life.
As a person who came of age during what we now call the Civil Rights Era, I have to be critical of our tendency to think of that period only as a struggle for civil rights, and I should point out that the idea that the only goal of the mass movements of the fifties and sixties was to achieve civil rights is inaccurate. And I am not suggesting that civil rights were not important and that they are not important, but full citizenship does not by itself accomplish everything that a person needs to be free. [Applause] Full citizenship, the rights of citizenship, the rights that we call civil rights constitute what we might call the preconditions for freedom, not freedom at large. And I want to remind us that in those days the movement was called “The Freedom Movement.” As a matter of fact, you know the term “The Movement,” right? That was shorthand for “The Freedom Movement.” Freedom is far broader, far more capacious, far deeper than the rights of citizenship.
And you might say that that movement that we celebrate today, that mid-20th century movement that successfully achieved vast transformations in the realm of the law, was a continuation of a 19th century campaign to end slavery. And that is why the participants in that movement in the fifties and sixties refer to it as a “Freedom Movement” because 100 years, almost 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, black people were still not free, were still not free from the material structures, from the ideological assumptions, and the psychological impacts of slavery. [Applause]
Now, there is a connection between that 20th century movement and that 19th century movement. When we think about the movement to abolish slavery, who comes to mind? Okay, Abraham Lincoln. I mean, it’s interesting. That’s the first person we usually think about, Abraham Lincoln, who indicated publically that his greatest concern was the preservation of the union, and he indicated on many occasions that if he could save the union without abolishing slavery, he would. [Applause] And as a matter of fact, the Emancipation Proclamation only abolished slavery in those states that had seceded from the union. It retained slavery in those states that were loyal to the union. But still we think about Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.
And I suggest that we read. Read W.E.B. DuBois, read Black Reconstruction. [Applause] DuBois tells about the fact that the Civil War was won because black people conducted what he called a general strike. That is to say they withdrew their labor from the slaveholder and they gave it to the Union Army. Now, that is not the topic for this evening, but I would just like to remind us that we have a skewed historical memory. And, you know, I thought that Lincoln would be the answer that would come because, you know, we all think of Abraham Lincoln first. This is the way we have been educated, right? Even if we know what we know, we still think of him. And then maybe we think about Frederick Douglass, and then after that maybe some of the women come in, right? But they are usually like third or fourth or fifth or sixth, right, like Harriet Tubman.
But I mention this this evening because I don’t know whether anyone has learned in elementary school or high school about the role that the Haitian Revolution played in a seasoned emancipation for black people in the United States of America. [Applause] And we rarely mention the name when we talk about those figures. And you know that I have a problem with individualizing history, because I think that the most important accomplishments in history are accomplishments of collectives of people, masses of people, communities of people. Nonetheless, I think that we should be able to name Toussaint L'Ouverture [Applause] and we should be able to name Jean-Jacques Dessalines. [Applause] Both Dessalines and L'Ouverture were inspired by the French Revolution in 1789 to lead their people to freedom. That is why they were called the Black Jacobins. Right? And as a matter of fact, Haiti became the only successful instance of a slave uprising actually overthrowing the slave-owning class, the only example in history, the only example in history. [Applause] And thus Haiti became the first self-governing black country in the Americas.
Now, what do we hear about Haiti in connection with the horrible earthquake? We hear that Haiti is the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, and many journalists speak as if this impoverishment is just as natural as the 7.0 earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince last week.
Some of you may have read the story about the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line who created this playground on the north coast of Haiti so that passengers on their cruises can ride on jet skis and do power sailing and can have rum cocktails delivered to their cabinets and they can shop at a crafts market where armed guards stand at the entry of the complex to guarantee their safety. And you know that the corporate leaders of the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines have been trying to justify the continuation of their cruises. And they have been saying that, well, they are actually helping the people of Haiti [Laughter] because they are paying the people at the crafts market and they are paying. It’s like so incredible that making money seems to surpass every sense of connection or solidarity with human beings. [Applause]
And I’m certain that Dr. King would speak out against this if he were alive today, and he might even refer to Naomi Klein’s theory. I don’t know whether you have read her book, but it is a wonderful book called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and she writes about Iraq, she writes about Katrina and how the corporations like vultures have used these circumstances in order to generate more profits. And the same thing is happening in Haiti.
But let’s see if we can delve a little bit more deeply into the history, because we are here, we are gathered here today to reflect on history for the lessons it might hold for us today. We see images of poorly built housing that has collapsed in the earthquake, and many people say, “Oh, this is just housing that collapsed because it was so poorly built.” And we don’t think about why it is so many people were living in Port-au-Prince. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine who was head of the Haiti Action Center in Oakland was saying that he grew up I guess probably – he is younger than I am because he was my student at San Francisco State, but it must have been, you know, 25, 30 years ago, 30 years ago in Port-au-Prince, and there were 300,000 people there. The population of Port-au-Prince was 300,000. What we are not told is that there were plans generated by USAID. and US-based corporations to turn Haiti into a manufacturing center, sort of similar to the montadoras along the Mexican border, to create factories and manufacturing centers in Port-au-Prince and to issue a call to people in the countryside to come to Port-au-Prince for the jobs. And at the same time agriculture was retooled so that people who had a start would have been able to live off the land or faced with a new agricultural system that was based on exports. And so hundreds of thousands of people moved to Port-au-Prince. There were supposed to be, you know, all these jobs. And so now there are ten times as many, well, at the time of the earthquake ten times as many people living in that city as lived there before.
And we also think about a similar kind of migration that happened in South Africa in the aftermath of the election of Nelson Mandela. Village people assumed that with Mandela in office everything was going to change. There were moments again that was going to give rise to earthshaking change, and people thought that it would mean jobs and that it would mean housing and that it would mean education, it would mean health care just like that. You know, we don’t usually think about how complicated it is to create the kinds of systems that will provide housing and health care to everyone. But huge numbers of people moved into Johannesburg or into all the cities and to Durban, and now if you travel to South Africa, you discover that there are problems with crime and so forth and so on, and all that has to do with the dashing of people’s hopes and the difficulty of transforming a system that is unfortunately based on the production of profit.
Now, I also wanted to say about the Haitian dictators, I don’t know if anyone remembers Francois Duvalier who everybody calls “Papa Doc” and then “Baby Doc.” But I can remember when I was coming of age politically and our political struggles were international struggles, we spoke out against the dictatorship in Haiti and spoke out against Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoutes, the Death Squads that were supported by the US, that would not have been able to remain in office. The Duvaliers would not have been able to remain in office without the support of the US government. [Applause] And then when Aristide was democratically elected, Aristide was democratically elected twice, two times, and twice the U.S. government helped to depose him and to send him into exile. The U.S. government is not innocent here. It is not innocent. [Applause] And I want us to remember that this is the U.S. government that Barack Obama heads.
I’ve spoken about the difficulties surrounding Haiti in detail because I think it’s important for us to recognize the power of imperialism, the power of racism, which cannot be easily overcome, especially not simply because we now have a black man in the White House. [Applause] I like to say we have one black man in the White House, but that doesn’t cancel out all the hundreds of thousands of black men in the Big House. [Laughter] [Applause]
Last year many of us said we never expected to see a black president in our lifetime. You remember that? That statement was repeated over and over again. We were told that Robert Kennedy had said that in 40 years a black person would be elected president, but we weren’t necessarily told that Martin Luther King had said that it should only be 25 years [Laughter], right, because he said that are plenty of black people who are eligible and have the skills and the qualifications, so it should only take, you know, one generation.
I heard that comment so many times and I have said it myself, and it’s true, I didn’t, it never occurred to me. It never occurred to me to think that there would be a black president in my lifetime. Now, I was interested in why it never occurred to me [Laughter] and what that meant, and I came to the conclusion that it was not so much about a black man or a black person in the White House, because I can think of a lot of black people who could have been elected that I wouldn’t have been excited about. We all can, can’t we? [Laughter]
So it wasn’t just about the color of his skin, you know, even though there were those who said he wasn’t really African-American or he wasn’t black enough or whatever. [Laughter] But what I finally decided that what created so much excitement and so much joy was the fact that here was a black man who identified with the struggles for freedom, with the black quest for freedom that stretched back to the era of slavery. Here was a black man who identified with communities of resistance, communities of struggle. Now, what we didn’t think about was the fact that all of those struggles going back to the 19th century have been struggles against the government, struggles against the state. [Applause] You see what I mean? And so what then might it mean for someone who identifies with those struggles against the state to be placed at the helm of the state? And I don’t think we thought through that question, in the way we should have. And I am not the kind of person who says, like some people do, “Well, it’s, you know, the same old, same old. Imperialism, that was the United States of America, it doesn’t matter who is in,” because it does matter. It matters a great deal that George Bush is no longer President. [Applause]
And I think it could matter even more that Barack Obama is the President of the United States if we organized and created the kind of movement that put pressure on him to do the right thing. [Applause] You know, one of the things I have learned is that we do ourselves, we do a great deal of damage to our ideas and our movements if we assume that we always have to choose one thing or another. Now, why can’t we have both? You know, why can’t we support Obama and celebrate this historic presidency and at the same time criticize him? [Laughter] Tell him he needs to be out there. He should have helped to mobilize people to go to Massachusetts to guarantee that that election was won. [Applause] Or maybe what we should say is that it’s not his responsibility. It is our responsibility [Applause] because what was really exciting about the election was not -- I mean, of course, Obama is wonderful as an individual, but it was the people who organized their campaign. It was the young people who got involved for the first time in their lives and used all of the new technologies of communication to win that campaign. [Applause] And I want them to continue to do what they were doing then and to do it now and to tell Obama we need to bring all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. [Applause]
So we are talking about freedom at large. Freedom involves the right to be healthy and it involves education. I mean, every person in this country ought to be able to get a free education [Applause] and free healthcare. [Applause] We’re talking about healthcare reform. Our health should not be turned into a commodity. [Applause]
And I think that this is what Dr. King was emphasizing when he said that he had been to the mountaintop. There are many ways in which we narrow Dr. King’s legacy. We think about that one speech, “I Have a Dream,” and that becomes the thing that everyone knows about him, and we don’t think about the Riverside Church Speech. ‘Right? [Applause] And I could talk about other speeches and I could point out the fact that we should remember that when he was assassinated, he was working with sanitation workers. They had to support a strike that workmen had organized, and so his vision was becoming much larger. It was about economic freedoms as well as civil freedoms. [Applause]
But in that speech, Dr. King said he had been to the mountaintop, and we all repeat that and we all get sort of carried away by that. But we don’t often take note of the fact that he never told us what he saw up there on the top of the mountain. He never told us what freedom really is. And that is because it grows and it changes, and even if we could go back to the Movement of Civil Rights, right, and as I was saying before, I think oftentimes we have a vision that is too narrow because we assume that civil rights equals freedom. But even if we consider the rubric of civil rights, there are so many communities that do not enjoy civil rights in this country today. [Applause]
And they can talk about prisoners. As a matter of fact, the work of the prison is to deny people who are brought into this institution their civil rights. [Applause] Punishment through imprisoned is about taking away the rights of citizenship, negating the rights of citizenship.
But then we could also talk about immigrants who do not enjoy civil rights. As a matter of fact, the Immigrant Movement, I think, you know, black people and people who staunchly supported civil rights for black people ought to be supporting civil rights for immigrants today. [Applause]
And then I think we should be supporting civil rights for LGBTI communities. [Applause] As a matter of fact, there are those who get very upset when gay marriage is referred to as a civil right. But marriage is a civil right. Black people didn’t have the civil right to marry during slavery. As a matter of fact, interracial couples could not marry for many, many, many decades. And so if some people have the right to marry, why shouldn’t all people have the right to marry? [Applause]
And then we have to talk about in the work that I’m doing now with respect to prison abolition, we are doing work on transgender prisoners [Applause], and I truly believe that if Dr. King were alive today that he would support the movement for the rights of trans prisoners and trans people in general, because trans people are the most criminalized, especially black trans women and men are the most criminalized communities in this country and they are much more likely to go to prison than any other group. And when they go to prison, they are sent to an institution to which they are classified on the basis of their genitals, not on the basis of their choices around gender. I mean, you see what I am saying? I know it is sometimes difficult to think about these issues, but if we say that we support justice and freedom, we have to be willing to open up our lives. [Applause] We have to be willing to go places. And I have come to the conclusion as someone who has been active virtually all of my life that what freedom movements do is enlarge the terrain of freedom.
And we would have to also talk about freedom with respect to the environment, and we can’t subordinate the environment entirely to human rights. You know, oftentimes we talk about the environment as something that is necessary to preserve in order for the coming generations to have a place to inhabit. But then we think that everything that is in the environment is there for human beings and don’t realize that where are other species who may not be recognized in our legal discourse, although there is a growing Animal Rights Movement. [Applause] But other species should be able to live and thrive, and we should be able to live together.
Now, I know I have taken us far from that moment in 1955 when in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. King emerged as the spokesperson for a movement that was organized primarily by black women [Applause], primarily by black women, at Alabama State College, which is the black college there. And we really have to stretch our minds in order to grasp this. And poor black women who were servants and maids and laundresses and cooks, they were the ones who created that movement. And so by focusing on Dr. King, we have to sort of stand back and ask, “Well, who created the movement for which King emerged as the spokesperson?” And all those women, and who took the bus in those days? [Laughter] It was mostly black people who rode the bus. And it was mostly black women who rode the bus from poor communities up to affluent white communities where they worked in people’s kitchens and cleaning their houses and doing their laundry and all of that. If we think about what it must have meant then for these women to decide collectively that they were no longer going to accept the state of racial segregation, that they were going to do something about it and that they were going to refuse to get on the bus until the buses were desecrated. Now, this was something that didn’t happen automatically. It happened because people organized that movement. And, you know, I always like to point out 00 I have been doing this for 30, 40 years, and actually maybe more than that -- I have talked about the fact that historically it has been the women who have been primarily the organizers of movements. [Applause] And I think the men should applaud the role that historically the black women have played. [Applause]
And there was someone named Jo Ann Robinson, I need to mention her name in connection with Dr. King, because she was the one who was responsible for helping to create the communities that organized the Bus Boycott. And most of us don’t even know her name. You know, she was the one who had submitted a letter to the Mayor of Montgomery in which she threatened a boycott if conditions didn’t change for black bus riders, and she was the one who first acted after Rosa Parks was arrested. She wrote the text of a leaflet and she and two students mimeographed – a lot of you don’t even know what mimeographing is. [Laughter] We didn’t have all the technologies of reproduction that we have now, so, you know, they had to like turn that drum in order to create tens of thousands of flyers. And those flyers said “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown out of her seat.” It is interesting she says “Another Negro woman,” right, because there were many other black women who were arrested. It is just that we only the names of Rosa Parks. “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes; yet we are arrested or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you or your daughter or your mother.” This is the leaflet that went out to all those women who rode the bus.
The point I am making is that it was people whose names we don’t know who created that movement, and they then decided to have a gathering at Dr. King’s church. Right? And I always like to point out that Dr. King emerged as the spokesperson of that movement because he was young and he wasn’t a part of the competitive ministers’ community, because he was so young. He was just getting started and he didn’t pose a threat to anyone.
And many of us think “Oh, Dr. King had this powerful oratorical ability,” but, you know, we know black ministers in our own towns. [Laughter] So it is never just about the individual. It was about those women who did the work that never gets acknowledged, the unseen world, the invisible world. And the point is that women played perhaps the major role in the mobilization of the Freedom Movement. This is an important dimension of King’s legacy, and we should not allow our focus on the individual Martin Luther King to overshadow the work of people like Jo Ann Robinson, ordinary people whose names will never be retrieved by historians.
And so learning how to honor all of the participants in the 20th century Freedom Movement with which Dr. King was associated also teaches us to value the analyses and perspectives of Feminism. [Applause] And I think Feminism encourages us to think about leadership and dialectical interaction with the movement. Now, I know Feminism is a contested term, but, you know, this is the time of year when we celebrate Dr. King’s legacy that we really need to push the envelope. We really need to stretch ourselves. Right? And so what I am going to suggest is that it would be important to think about the ideas and the theories and the struggles associated with Feminism. Now, I know it is a contested term and I risk making what makes it, what revitalizes it from one generation to the next, and I know it took a while for me to identify as a Feminist. People used to call me feminist after I wrote Woman, Race, & Class, and I used to say, “Who, me? I am not a Feminist. I’m a black woman who identifies with the struggles of the learning class.” But what I recognized was that the category itself changed, especially as a result of the contributions of black women and women of color, and now we have created a very different Feminism that is not just about gender. I mean, you remember when Hillary Clinton was running and they talked about, they were saying, “Well, do we want a woman in the White House or do we want a black man?” So, it’s like all the women are white. All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are gray, as the title of the book goes. [Applause]
And so there are those of us who have insisted that Feminism has to be anti-racist. It has to be anti-racist and it has to be in solidarity to the struggles of working-class women and men of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and it has to be transnational in scope. [Applause] And there are a lot of ways in which Feminist theory has helped to spawn Queer Theory and Color Theory. And then there are all the debates around gender. You know, it took us so long to recognize gender, and then we began to assume that gender was binary, that it can only be about women. And then I was already talking about trans prisoners. So Feminism has had to respond to the critiques of the binarism that emanates from this notion of gender. But there are trans-gender people, there are inter-sex people, there are gender nonconforming people, people who don’t identify as either.
Ten years from now, twenty years from now, this is going to be, you know, just as we talk about gender now and we take it for granted, whereas during the period, the era of The Freedom Movement we didn’t know how to talk about gender. We talked about freedom for the black man, and if you look at Dr. King’s work, you see that he is always talking about the Negro or the Negro man, and women got excluded from that whole process.
So, I think we have to open our minds, and I could go on and on spinning what might appear to be this labyrinth of ideas that are so complicated that it makes our heads hurt. A lot of times we just want it to be real simple. Right? We want everything to be black and white. Right? We want the government to be on this side of the line and we want our movement to be on the other side of the line. But we discover that oftentimes the enemy is among ourselves. The enemy is within. [Applause] So we have to learn how to be more complicated in our ways of thinking.
And it seems to me that our job now is to create movements and get involved in projects that allow us to imagine better ways of living in the world and to imagine new human relations that are free from persistent hierarchies, whether these hierarchies are racial or sexual or geopolitical. This, I think, is the work of human beings who truly believe in the practice of freedom. And it is Dr. King’s legacy, I believe, to urge us to engage always in the practice of freedom. But freedom becomes not a state for which one yearns, because we always thought that we would – this is my timer. [Laughter] I have been speaking 55 minutes. I have 5 minutes to wind up. Freedom should not be a state for which we yearn. We tend to think that once we get there, once we get to the top of the mountain, freedom is going to be there now and forever more.
You know, oftentimes young people ask me, “Well, do you regret the work that you have done because, you know, after all of those struggles, we still have these problems? We still have 2.3 million people behind bars. We’re still confronted with an educational system that is in shambles.” [Applause] And what I say is that “No, I do not regret the work that we all did. The work that we did made it possible for us to imagine even larger terrains of freedom.” [Applause]
And so freedom becomes a state not for which one yearns. Freedom becomes not a state for which one yearns, but it becomes an incessant struggle, an incessant, exciting, passionate struggle to remake our lives, to remake our communities, and to remake our futures.
And so I want to conclude with a passage that I like from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom, because I think it captures exactly what I am talking about and it captures the legacy of Dr. King. Mandela said, “I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. [Applause] I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look on the distance I have come, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”
Thank you very much. [Applause]
Many of us feel that our collective hopes seemed to have receded in face of bureaucracy as usual, in face of the demands of the military, and in face of the determination of the health care industry to maintain a system that is based on capitalism profits rather than human need.
The Duvaliers would not have been able to remain in office without the support of the US government. And then when Aristide was democratically elected, Aristide was democratically elected twice, two times, and twice the U.S. government helped to depose him and to send him into exile. The U.S. government is not innocent here. It is not innocent. And I want us to remember that this is the U.S. government that Barack Obama heads.
And I think it could matter even more that Barack Obama is the President of the United States if we organized and created the kind of movement that put pressure on him to do the right thing. You know, one of the things I have learned is that we do ourselves, we do a great deal of damage to our ideas and our movements if we assume that we always have to choose one thing or another. Now, why can’t we have both? You know, why can’t we support Obama and celebrate this historic presidency and at the same time criticize him?
You know, oftentimes we talk about the environment as something that is necessary to preserve in order for the coming generations to have a place to inhabit. But then we think that everything that is in the environment is there for human beings and don’t realize that where are other species who may not be recognized in our legal discourse, although there is a growing Animal Rights Movement. But other species should be able to live and thrive, and we should be able to live together.
