Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 5 November 1999 — Page 11
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5,1989
THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER
PAGE All
farewell to a great Pan-African leader
they were giants of their time. W'.'E.B. DuBois, an African American. Kwame Nkrumah of CJhana. Kenneth Kuanda of Gambia. Leopold Senghor of Senegal. Felix HouphouetB$gny of Ivory Coast. Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. ' .fden (alas, yes, all men) who could see beyond the narrow confines and false boundaries of colonialism to a free continent of Africa. Men of courage who wep willing to risk all to free the^r people. Men who could ev^n see beyond their own national interests to the welfare of .the whole continent. Pan Africanists they called themselves. With the death of Julius tyyprere of Tanzania, all but one have now joined their ancestors. Nyerere, lovingly called M walimu or Teacher by his people, was the founding father of Tanzania and a moral compass for the whole continent. Indeed, Myerere taught by example and was an extremely modest and humble leader who refused the rich trappings which some African leaders chose and lived an. extremely modest lifestyle. He npver earned more than $8;000 a ypar as president and always wore a plain dark safari suit. He rp^e through the streets of Dar es Salaam with a single driver in an unpretentious car. I ( fn many ways Nyerere was a mpn before his time, as if seeing tbp missteps and traps which ipany other African leaders wpuld fall into. In his 1967 Ajfysha Declaration, for example, ht; .called on his people to be-
come self-reliant and established a leadership code which required his own government officials to give up outside sources of income in order to avoid government corruption. Beginning in 1980, he struggled with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), resisting its insistence that he divert funds from education to debt repayment and change crops grown for his people to export crops which would pay off their debt. Thus, nearly 20 years ago, he saw that the nations of the South would become indebted to and dictated to by those of the North. For his stand against the IMF and his adherence to socialist policies for his extremely poor nation, Nyerere paid a high price in the world arena. The Reagan administration, for example, cut off all but emergency food allocations to Tanzania, whose people earned only $200 per capita per year. But even though Tanzania remained a poor country, because of Nyerere’s vision and commitment to education, it was able to achieve goals that even rich nations still have not. For instance, when he became president in 1962, most of his people were illiterate, but when he retired in 1990,83 percent could read and write. While some other African leaders focused on amassing their own personal wealth, Nyerere established rural development as the country’s priority. Moreover, many western economists have denounced his ujamma (family or community) concept, which attempted to take
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the best of the African concept of community and the best of the policies of socialism and combine them. But the reality is that ujamma was one more evidence of Nyerere’s visionary ability. Indeed, ujamma was his attempt to make his people self-reliant and focused on helping each other rather than acquiring personal material goods. Nyerere angered the United States in the 1970s and 80s with his uncompromising position on the freedom of all African nations. Thus, he opened Tanzania to liberation fighters from South Africa and Namibia for many years. But he also spoke out against Idi Amin, the neighboring despot and ultimately sent in Tanzanian soldiers to help unseat Amin. Ever the teacher, Nyerere used slogans to help his people understand what he had learned about nation-building. Signs like “We Must Run While Others Walk” or “A Poor Country Cannot Rule Itself if It Relies on Foreign Help” were often seen throughout Tanzania. They were true then, and they are true now. Farewell, Mwalimu, and thank you.
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The Ku Klwx Man: From Greensboro to Now York City
Twenty years ago, on Nov. 3, 1^79, five principled and dedicated activists for social justice - Cesar Cauce, Dr. Mike Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandi Smith and . Dr. Jim Waller - were brutally mprdered in Greensboro, N.C., by the Ku Klux Klan. History hap recorded this tragedy as the "Greensboro Massacre.” .These five anti-racist organizeps and 10 other activists who were seriously wounded had been participating in an anti-Klan public march and demonstration, held in a largely African-Ameri-can community. In broad daylight, a car caravan containing about 73 Klansmen and Nazis descended on the public rally. For about 90 seconds, they opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators, and then drove from the scene of the crime. Local police had been given airiple warning about the threat of Klan violence, but had chosen to do nothing to protect the demonstrators. There was also direct evidence indicating that law enforcement officials gave the Klan the exact location and rdiite of the march, several days prior to the attack. 1 The Greensboro Justice Fund, a nonprofit organization, was established in 1980 to finance a civil rights suit against the killers, and to educate the general public about the outrageous violation of human rights. Television videotaped recordings of the massacre indicated that the killings had occurred coldly and methodically, with the Klansmen and Nazis actually looking for and identifying individuals to murder. Six murderers were eventually tried, and an all-white jury acquitted the racists. After years of legal struggles, a successful civil suit was won by the victims and survivors of the massacre. Today, the Greensboro Justice Fund provides tens of thousands of dollars in financial support to dozens of social justice organizations throughout the United States. In 1998 alone, the fund contributed to 24 groups, such as the Citizens for Police Review in Knoxville, Tenn., for its work against police brutality in that city; to the Black Workers for Justice in North Carolina; to anti-Klan organizers in Gainesville, Ga.; and to a Youth Task Force in Atlanta, for general support of anti-racist education among students and
young adults.
For those who still think of the Ku Klux Klan as a marginal fringe group, consider what happened last month in New
Yoric City. Leaders of the Church'
of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, estimated to be the fastest-growing Klan faction in the country, sought to stage a rally in New York City. The Klansmen announced plans to
wear their traditional white hoods racism,
and robes, masking their identi-
ties.
Despite an 1843 New York State law prohibiting demonstrators from wearing masks, two Federal District Court Judges ordered city officials to allow the Klan to march through the city streets, wearing their hoods to protect their anonymity. The Klan’s legal battle was led by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which argued that despite the racial hatred and long history of violence by this organization, that it nevertheless had a constitutional right to freedom of assembly and expression. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously disagreed, overruling the lower court. A last-minute appeal on the Klan’s behalf to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied by Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Progressives in New York were divided over the issue of whether the Klan, as a white supremacist and terrorist organization, should be granted the right to publicly demonstrate. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network, as well as Conrad Muhammad, former head of the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. Seven in Harlem, supported the right for the Klan to demonstrate. Despite these differences over the issue of civil liberties, all progressives agreed that the Klan should be confronted and denounced by united action. On the day of the demonstration, only 18 Klan members showed up in lower Manhattan. And they were challenged by thousands of anti-racist demonstrators. New York police estimated the anti-Klan protesters at 6,000, although most observers placed the crowd at more than 10,000. The anti-Klan demonstrators were black. Latino, Asian and white. There were trade unionists, clergy and students, all brought together by a tremendous spirit of solidarity against the ugly face of unambiguous
Elvis? Hitler? or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? (Pt. 2)
The editors of Time Magazine are in the final stretch of their drive to pick their “Person of the Century.” They will make their announcement in December. Elvis Presley and Adolf Hitler are among the leading contenders for the top spot. But the global impact of their deeds should, and must not, rank above those of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. There’s no mystery why. King’s moral vision and reach extended far beyond the questions of war, and peace and racial injustice. He also saw that true democracy could never be realized without economic justice for the poor. The key was wealth redistribution and economic restructuring. He pounded away on the need to end class oppression and poverty. His Poor Peoples March in 1968 was a flawed, but sincere effort to bring the poor of all races together in that common fight for economic justice. That fight cost him his life. King was not gunned down in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968 after leading a civil rights march. He was killed after he led a strike by the city ’ s garbage collectors for equal pay and fair treatment. The red-baiters and professional King haters tagged him a Communist. The Lyndon Johnson White House turned hostile. Corporate and foundation supporters slowly turned off the money spigot. But he refusedTObock down. He slung everr'mortTbbflif imperatives at America for its mindless descent into materialism and violence. Thirty-one years after his mur-
der, King’s name still resonates on the battlefield of human rights. School children everywhere still enthusiastically write about him. His writings and speeches on religion, ethics, morality and social problems are still widely quoted. Legions of writers, scholars, activists and political leaders still uncover new and precious gems of insight from his philosophy and tactics that can be used to confront today’s social problems. Diuring much of this decade, liberals, minorities and conservatives have jockeyed hard to claim that the few stray remarks that King uttered on affirmative action before it was even called affirmative action backed their embrace or hatred of it. AH were anxious to drape themselves in his mantle. And in one of life’s perverse ironies, conservative Republicans owe a debt of gratitude to King. They parlayed the white backlash that King and the civil rights movement triggered into a national resurgence. ' I The ^ivfl rights and votihgrights ■ legislation, increased civil liberties protections and the vast array of social and educational programs
of the past 30 years permanently transformed American society and enriched the lives of millions of Americans of all races and income groups. The social and political remake of America was the direct by-product of the King-led civil rights movement. The moral contradictions and inconsistencies between King’s public image and private life style have piled up since his assassination in 1968. King has been accused of plagiarism, purveying smut and engaging in sexual hijinks. This merely proved that he was not a deity, but a man who wrestled with and tried to purge the personal demons from his life. The human vulnerabilities that plagued him made his single-minded pursuit of justice and equality even more amazing. Despite King’s huge personal and social dilemmas, he never broke his pledge to struggle and sacrifice until racism, poverty and injustice were, as he put it “crushed by the battering rams of justice.” This pledge made King an eternal leader not only for his times but for all times. Again, this is what we must tell the editors at Time when they pick their “Person of the Century.” Time Magazine email: [email protected] fax: 212-522-8949 Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a natiowlty syndicated columnist and the director of the National Alliance for Positive Action, e-mail: [email protected] '
History never repeats itself the same way twice. Yet there were some parallels between Greensboro in 1979 and New York City in 1999. While the NYPD protected the Klansmen, 14 antiKlan demonstrators were arrested by police. Many observed that it was more than curious that more than 3,000 police officers had been ordered into Harlem to intimidate and disrupt the 1998 Million Youth March, but only 200 cops were detailed to the Klan demonstration, primarily to insure the safety and welfare of
the Klansmen.
Instead of Klan executions, we have witnessed the assault and murder of unarmed black people by the New York Police Street Crimes Unit. There is a clear connection between what happened in Greensboro with the murder of Amadou Diallo. It is not surprising that a number of counter-demonstrators in New York shouted, ‘Cops and Klan go hand in hand!” Yet the destruction of white supremacy will require more than simply pushing back the Klan off our streets today. The fight against racism also requires us to team the lessons and to honor the sacrifices of those who died in Greensboro two decades ago. It means taking the initiative to stop racial profiling and harassment by the police. It also means that we must rededicate ourselves to the struggle to remove from public life those politicians and government officials like New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who may wear business suits, but who pursue Klan-like objectives through their public policies.
\
Dr. Manning Marable is professor of History and Political Science, and the director of the Institute for Research in AfricanAmerican Studies, Columbia University. “Along the Color Line ” is distributed free of charge to more than 325 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally.
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