On this day, in 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis, Tennessee and gave his “Mountain Top” speech in support of striking sanitation workers. He told the audience he had seen the Promised Land, but that he may not get there with them. The next day, April 4th, at 6:01pm, he was assassinated.
Until I finished composing this anti-racism reflection, I was not aware of April 3rd’s significance. I am truly humbled by it, and hope my words honors it.
Books.
Be Here Now, the 1971 book by the late Ram Dass, came to mind as I initially thought about the theme of today’s service. It brings back memories of those heady days of clashing cultures—conservative and liberal—and uplifting civil rights progress.
But I am here now, and it seems progress on our humanity to each other is slipping back to inhumanity.
D.L. Hughley said, “ultimately America is aspirational. Obama is what we would like to be. Donald Trump and his supporters is who we are.” I ask you, are we?
I see some Americans wanting to return our nation to Thomas Jefferson’s Anglo-Saxon state of landed male privilege. I see angry parents banning books, and dictating what history is taught in schools—returning us to inhumanity.
The inhumanity to Black people followed by Jefferson, America’s leading “enlightenment thinker.” In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson implied Black people were lower order beings because they lacked the “finer senses” necessary to produce good literature. And worse.
Jefferson was wrong. Black poets and writers were producing great literature then, and definitely today.
Case in point, Bellingham author Clyde Ford and his personal coming-of-age story, Think Black. Ford writes compellingly about a dark-skinned Black man, his father Stanley Ford, competing in the whitest of worlds—1950s IBM—and preparing his son Clyde for the same; which amounted to needing to be twice as good with only half the resources.
In Think Black, Ford educates us on life seen through a Black man’s eyes, the brilliance, the heroism, and the self-doubt, and the arc of American racism, all cleverly woven around the march of technology. There is a quiet drama to it. It is, as he writes, authentic. Something I think we would all like to be.
Along the way, Ford exposes IBM as the ultimate soulless, capitalist machine, reaping huge profits from racism—the IBM behind Hitler’s efficient eugenics and South African apartheid. Ford also takes us on a journey from early computing, and how the future was envisioned, to how the digital tools of our current world have been co-opted to abet hatred and inhumanity. And how to push back on that.
Ford is at heart a teacher. And that comes through in this well-conceived, well written book. A book “it is useful to have met,” to quote Be Here Now.
Interestingly, Ford relates that in the 1960s he attended Community UU Church in New York, drawn by their civil rights activities. But he left UU in anger after MLK’s assassination. Had white people failed him? 54 years later, we are trying not to.
Thank you.
