Dr. King: the remix

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From AlterNet.org

Dr. King: The Remix
Chris Vaeth, AlterNet
January 15, 2004
Viewed on January 16, 2004

While much of the world will pay homage to Martin Luther King's 75th birthday on January 15, the eyes in many hip-hop heads will again glaze over the revival of grainy black-and-white footage from 1963.

Is it any wonder that the most commercialized, mass-marketed and misunderstood figure of the Civil Rights Movement offers little more than surface appeal to the hip-hop nation? The paradox of overexposure of a particular image of Dr. King is his resultant inaccessibility to young people.

While we love to hear the story, again and again, well-intentioned teachers and less-benevolent revisionists have hidden from us much of the good stuff about the good Reverend Doctor. His legacy has been reduced by many interpreters to a still portrait of a pacific dreamer in a contextual vacuum. We have been conditioned to think that everything we need to know about King we learned in kindergarten. While we remember that he was born in Atlanta and became a timeless orator, nonviolent dreamer and national martyr, many in the hip-hop nation have yet to be introduced to the radical Martin Luther King, Jr.

Call in P. Diddy, or whoever invented the remix. The revolutionary King has been lost on the B-side for much of the last four decades, while the facts of this year in our nation's history accentuate the significance of understanding the true King legacy.
Dr. King's "triple evils" of racism, poverty and war have emerged in all-too-familiar form: the Bush II government abandons American children to kill in Iraq and to perish in prison here at home, cuts off unemployment benefits and closes welfare centers, locks up innocent immigrants, and rewards the rich for their patronage of these policies.

Reinterpretation is often a struggle, and like most spaces in hip-hop, the memory of King has long been a battleground. The national celebration of his birthday is itself a product of a committed fight, not only in the dirty South but in places like New Hampshire and "by the time I get to" Arizona. There is a role for the hip-hop generation -- ever primed for battle since creating one of the few post-Civil Rights forums for honest communication about race and class in American society -- in reclaiming the legacy of King.

While his death predates the birth of hip-hop culture by almost a decade, his legacy pervades it. For many purist King gatekeepers -- excepting frontline scholars like Michael Eric Dyson -- any juxtaposition of his image with those of rap artists would amount to blasphemy. Admittedly, despite their shared capacity to move a crowd and to call-and-respond with the liveliest of Baptist church revivals and Summer Jam concerts, the vocations of King and the artists have little in common.

But the most significant thread connecting civil rights to hip-hop is King's fundamental concern with the souls and the opportunities of the young people who find meaning in hip-hop today. His spirit is present, even if his style is not.

The lifeblood of hip-hop needs the example of King, and the memory of King would benefit from young people in hip-hop culture injecting it with new meaning.

Tradition of Resistance

Ever since those 1970s days when forgotten South Bronx youth transformed their invisibility into the predominant code of global youth culture, a tradition of resistance has permeated even the most apolitical hip-hop expression.
Stretching across centuries of struggle, and in the company of figures from Harriet Tubman to Muhammad Ali, Dr. King is one of many fore parents along this spectrum of resistance. But conservative elites of interpretation have fundamentally stripped the prophetic, threatening content from the story of his life and leadership.

Four elements of this truth are egregiously absent from the played-out presentation: King's call for the massive economic restructuring of American society, his vigorous opposition to war and imperialism, the militancy in his method of nonviolent resistance, and his life as a prism through which we can better understand the long, slow, grassroots organizing of African Americans whose names don't appear in history books.

While much is recalled of Malcolm X's changing path before a bullet took his life, conservatives -- and often, the rest of us -- tend to freeze MLK in March-on-Washington-time. Of his brief 13 years of leadership, the first 11 were spent fighting for social and political rights, from desegregation to the vote, in southern towns like Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma. These are the campaigns of common King lore: Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, police dogs and fire hoses in Kelly Ingram Park, Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the climactic "I Have a Dream" speech. But what King subsequently said about these hard-fought victories is generally forgotten.

By 1967, King made the critical decision to shift his moral focus.

He confronted head-on the capitalist economic structure and the military complex of the United States, and he articulated the links between the two. He witnessed a tragedy that has reappeared in recent years with frightening parallels: a "war on poverty" that mutated into "not even a good skirmish" as funds were diverted to an unjust, immoral war in Vietnam.

Dr. King was murdered just weeks before his Poor People's Campaign, a multiracial mobilization of poor African Americans, whites, Latinos, and Asian and Native Americans, descended upon Washington. The plan was to create such a crisis of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience in the nation's capital that Congress and the Executive would be forced to deal with the crime of widespread poverty.

In his book "Bearing the Cross", David Garrow cites one meeting during these last weeks of King's life when he asked that the tape recorder be turned off. Rejecting the notion that "capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people," he argued that "we might need to look at a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism." These are the convictions of a leader that the hip-hop nation has unlikely heard, contributing to a confusion between the contemporary strategies of "get rich or die tryin'" and "get free or die tryin'."

In the months before he was killed, King consistently spit lyrics like "radical," "revolutionary," "structural transformation," "massive government shutdowns," "an end to modern economic imperialism," and "mobilization of a nonviolent army." His demands for reparations, aggressive affirmative action, fair welfare policies, and a guaranteed income for every American foreshadowed the courage of Public Enemy and dead prez more than most interpreters would allow.
Likewise, as poor black and brown kids were being sent in disproportionate numbers to kill poor people of color in Vietnam, King risked a position that almost completely evaporated the budget of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference and made him a pariah in the press. He warned that any nation that spent more on military aggression than on programs of social uplift was headed for "spiritual doom." How could he advise against the riots of prior summers -- which he did consistently -- without addressing the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," the American government?

We were on the wrong side of a world revolution, he said, battling a Vietnamese people who had quoted our own Declaration of Independence in their fight for freedom. In language that eerily resonates in the present moment and has special meaning for the generation that moves to 50 Cent, an increasingly internationalist King admonished that somehow this madness must stop.

While even mainstream civil rights leaders complained that he was hurting the cause, he replied that he had spent far too long fighting segregation in the South to segregate his moral concerns.

Truth Force

Nonviolence was central to King's opposition to the war in Vietnam, but today this strategy might be better understood as "truth force" or "soul force," the literal translation from Gandhi's satyagraha. To many young people, the negative in the term "nonviolence" sounds like simply the opposite of violence. But King's version was a technique that actively and powerfully resisted untruth and injustice, often in the streets.

King outlined a third way between non-resistance and violent resistance that first turned upside down, and then restored, human community. His was a way of engaging conflict and power with integrity, and overcoming evil without becoming evil. His understanding of love was critically different from the lyrics of R. Kelly ballads; it was an unconditional love, "agape," that acknowledged the interdependence of all life and offered the most potent weapon in the struggle for liberation.

Perhaps the greatest injustice of the misplaced idolatry of King is the failure to acknowledge the unknown foot soldiers who enabled his leadership. African American resistance long preceded the world's introduction to the voice of Martin Luther King Jr., and while he provided vision and articulation, he was a product rather than a creator of the black organizing tradition. Like the DJ who built hip-hop culture only to be replaced by a rapper with a DAT tape, there are hundreds of thousands of grassroots organizers and plain folks who paid the price of the ticket.

Their contributions might be recognized on the King holiday not simply for the sake of assigning credit, but to illustrate how a struggle becomes a movement, and how young people can play a primary role in shaping that movement. Such a clarification of how social change happens, and how King's superhero symbol only stagnates progress toward "the next leader," might help to sharpen the hip-hop nation's distinction between LL Cool J's appearance at an education budget rally and the long, hard work of organizing a community of hip-hop heads.

Martin Luther King Day is as much a day to learn the names of Ella Baker, James Forman, Amzie Moore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Hampton, Bob Moses, Septima Clark, Assata Shakur, Diane Nash, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, Myles Horton, and George Jackson, and to honor the sacrifices of so many other unnamed freedom fighters.

Among the most tired questions to be rehashed in classrooms this January 15 is what Martin Luther King, Jr. would do about the state of the world were he still alive on his 75th birthday. A hip-hop nation's artistic and activist remix of the story we have been told -- a reinvention of King's persona as complete as that of Missy or Outkast -- might offer an answer.

Chris Vaeth is a community organizer in New York City.
� 2004 Independent Media Institute.