History Lessons

From digby: excerpts of a 1966 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. The occasion: Dr. King's being among the recipients of Planned Parenthood's first Margaret Sanger award, for "excellence and leadership in furthering reproductive health and reproductive rights"—

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. 

With the second inauguration falling on the MLK Day observance, there's no shortage of painful ironies. They're in the president's pursuit of policies antithetical to Dr. King's philosophy. And his very presence in office is used by the usual suspects to claim the country has moved beyond race. Just as the Right (and its media enablers) promotes a fake version of MLK's message as one of mere color-blindness, not social justice.

Still, history refused to be past; not when the inauguration and MLK Day included this:

Down in the Gold section, everybody was quiet, and you could hear that great river moving again under everything, a history that this country too often resists, but that is irresistable because of the great contradictions within which this country was born. Myrlie Evers-Williams was the first person ever to give an invocation at a presidential inauguration who wasn't a preacher. Didn't matter. Down in the Gold section, they knew who had won and who had lost, and what had triumphed, and what had been defeated, They knew grace when it fell on them.

Tragic

Have been trying to catch up with this terrible story in the last couple of weeks.

I knew nothing about Aaron Swartz before his suicide at twenty-six, when I caught some mass media coverage along the lines of "tech boy-genius gone wrong." Since then, learning about his talent and commitment only underscores what a tremendous loss his death is.

There's much speculation about his having made powerful enemies with his work on internet freedom, along with extensive social and political activism in general, as well as a connection to Bradley Manning.

As it happens, I've been reading Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power . One focus of the book is an account of another brilliant young man; also sensitive and emotionally troubled, and someone who would pay for his ability to spur people to action.

From the FBI records on which the book is based, Rosenfeld found ample and very sad evidence of how much effort was made to harass Mario Savio. Hoover, Reagan, local politicians, UC administrators—acting on varying agendas of "anti-communist" fears and career ambitions—for years blocked Savio's school re-admission applications; warned employers against hiring him; enlisted landlords to report on his movements. The harassment continued long after Savio had stopped being publicly active, trying to focus instead on family and personal problems; official surveillance wasn't dropped until 1975. There's no knowing how much the years of persecution might have undermined Savio's health (he died in 1996, at just fifty-three). Yet the authorities' campaign clearly took a toll on someone who had never sought the spotlight, but had merely tried to speak truth.

Charles Pierce this week suggests the incredibly heavy-handed legal action against Swartz is attributable to the political ambitions of the prosecutor; that "if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz for Governor campaign commercial one day." Which sounds much like the way a Reagan inserted himself into politics by running against Berkeley and Savio.

Who is destroyed, and what it does to the survivors—it's always an abstraction.