On Aug. 26, a 21 year old white racist left his Florida home, bringing with him his swastika-festooned assault rifle and a handgun. He headed to Edward Waters University, a historically Black university in a largely Black section of Jacksonville, then got out of his car and donned a bulletproof vest. Chased off campus by a university security guard, he drove to a Dollar General store and executed three Black people in cold blood: Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Jerraid Gallion, 29 and Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre, Jr., 19. The murderer’s racist writings and rants left Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters with “no question” that the killings were racial. “He hated Blacks, and I think he hated just about everyone that wasn’t white,” said Sheriff Waters. “He made that very clear.”
This latest targeted killing by white Americans of Black Americans for being Black Americans came only hours before America marked the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. One might say that flagrantly racist assaults by whites against Blacks take place every day in one place or another in our country, except they occur multiple times a day in more than one place, and generally go unnoticed. Writing in the 1950s about our race problem, James Baldwin noted that “(w)hat it comes to, finally, is that this Nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life.”
Dr. King’s speech to a crowd of 250,000 in Washington that day is so iconic that there’s a danger his personal courage – his heroism, in fact – and his historic role in galvanizing support for civil rights will be forgotten in the passage of time, and that what he meant to this country will seem remote to those who only associate his name with a day off from work or school. Jonathan Eig, the author of the new biography “King: A Life,” aims to prevent that. Subjected to beatings, fire bombings, trumped-up jailings and death threats, the young minister inspired boycotts, protests, sit-ins, marches and legislation, in turn spawning countless acts of courage and belief that have not stopped reshaping America, even as events like that which occurred in Jacksonville illustrate the steepness of the remaining climb.
Setting the stage for the recounting of King’s role in leading the boycott against Montgomery, Alabama’s segregationist bus companies in the mid-1950s, Eig writes about the lasting legacy of slavery there. Alabama’s slaves comprised about half of its population by the Civil War. “Many of those enslaved men, women and children,” Eig writes, “were bought and sold in downtown Montgomery, marched through the city’s streets, made to stand on auction blocks, shackled, inspected and traded for cash or animals. More than half of all enslaved families were broken up.”
Rosa Parks, the quiet seamstress who in refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus sparked the boycott intended to bury slavery’s legacy for good, told a historian “Treading the tight rope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought, is a major mental acrobatic feat.”
On her 56th straight day of walking to and from her job as a domestic worker rather than riding a segregated bus, a Montgomery woman named Dealy Cooksy told an interviewer that she was indeed tired, but had no intention of backing down. “I ain’t begging, and I sure ain’t getting back on the bus ‘til Reverend King say so, and he says we ain’t going back ‘til they treat us right. There ain’t nothing they can do but try to scare me. But we ain’t rabbit no more.”
The white supremacists and assorted racists have their moments – in Jacksonville, Charlestown and Buffalo, and elsewhere. Gone three generations now, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most enduring legacy has been motivating millions of Americans who, in Dealy Cooksy’s words, “ain’t rabbit no more.”
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
