Today, Monday, January 19, is being celebrated in the United States of America as a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a black civil rights leader who was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
From the time of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955 in support of Rosa Parks, who had rebelled against segregated seating on Montgomery buses, until he was actually shot dead, Martin Luther King, though he preached absolute non-violence, lived in daily fear of assassination.
It would take too long to try to give you a sense of the climate in the American South during the time of Martin Luther King. Suffice to say that all public facilities were segregated, many public officials (all white) belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, and blacks who were considered as stepping out of line, could be beaten and murdered with impunity. Many innocent blacks were lynched. White supremacy ruled the American South in an untrammeled fashion.
We are not experts in American history, so we cannot say why the Southern states were so vicious in their hatred of black people. Much of it was the sexual fear of any kind of racial integration, and no doubt some of it could be traced back to the Haitian slave rebellion of 1791, which ended up crowning a black emperor, Christophe, in 1804. The triumph of the Haitian blacks under the leadership of Toussaint L’Overture had created panic in slaveowners in the United States. (Remember, Haiti is only a few hundred miles away from Florida.) When slave rebellions in the U.S. itself were led by people like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in the first part of the 1800’s, these were crushed in a mercilessly frenzied manner.
Slavery in the settlement of Belize was a unique institution, for several reasons. What the Battle of St. George’s Caye had established in 1798 was that the whites in Belize could not survive without the blacks, who were the majority. Whereas the whites in Belize had opened schools from early in the 1800’s, in the American South blacks were denied education. In the rest of the British Caribbean, missionaries were encouraged to open schools. But to teach a black person to read was a crime in Dixie.
As a result of the attitude of slaveowners in America, as compared to the position of the British in the Caribbean, black Americans were, on average, uneducated compared to West Indian blacks. As a consequence of the civil rights struggle, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., many jobs were opened up to blacks, beginning in the 1960’s. With the United States having become the world’s largest economy at that time, these were great opportunities. Because West Indian blacks were better educated and trained, they benefited from many of the jobs which the militancy of American blacks had made possible in the United States.
The white supremacist process has always been about dividing and conquering, from the time slave ship captains began hiring Africans to enslave other Africans on the West African coast four or five centuries ago. Belizeans and West Indian blacks have tended to look down upon American blacks. This is because we do not know the real hell American blacks went through. For their part, American blacks tend to resent Caribbean blacks, because American blacks have been fighting America’s wars from the time of Crispus Attucks and the American War of Independence in the 1770’s. It is they who created the jobs made available when segregation became illegal in the United States, and yet Caribbean blacks benefited and did not pay their respect.
Today in the United States, as preparations begin for tomorrow’s inauguration of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president, American blacks are remembering the sacrifice and heroism of MLK. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, was a fag and racist who hated Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead of trying to protect MLK, which was his constitutional duty, Hoover made his priority the gathering of tapes and other evidence of MLK’s philandering, which he used to blackmail King and defame him. In British Honduras during the 1950’s and 1960’s, schoolchildren were taught by American clerics that J. Edgar Hoover was a hero, the reason being that he was a member of the majority church.
Under the crushing pressure which dominated his life from 1955 to 1968, Martin Luther King’s adulterous behaviour must be understood and forgiven. This was a great man, who was flawed. Which of us is not? On this day, our newspaper salutes the life and memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.
At the same time, we pay our serious respect to the black people of the United States of America. They have done well, but they now need to take up the righteous leadership of black people in the Western Hemisphere diaspora. Life does not end at the Rio Grande. Below the Mexican border there are many, many millions of us who traveled in the same slave ships. Though it doesn’t really seem that way, we are in the same boat in 2009. The world is now one village.
Power to the people.