King and the Universal Struggle for African Freedom - 50 Years Later

Wednesday, August 28, 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington. On this day in 1963, 250,000 people came to Washington, from all corners of America, to march for freedom, jobs and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. It was on this auspicious occasion that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his most well known speech. The most significant parts of his address to the March focused on the failure of the American “Bank of Justice” to honour the “promissory note” it had given Black people, 100 years earlier, for freedom justice and equality. In fact Dr. King said that we had been given a “bad check” that had come back marked “insufficient funds”. Coincidentally, August 28 also marked the 5th Anniversary of the historic speech of Senator Barack Obama, in the summer 2008, accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party for President of the United States.

Beyond this specific date this year, 2013, is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation which, by executive order in 1863, freed the enslaved African population, in the rebellious southern states, during the Civil War. It is also the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) by the African heads of states, from the 32 newly freed African nations, who gathered in Ethiopia, on June 25, 1963, for the founding summit. As he stepped on to the podium, and into history, on August 28, 1963, Dr. King was keenly aware of all of these important events with the exception of the presidential acceptance speech that a two-year old African American boy, from the state of Hawaii, was destined to make in exactly 45 years, to the day, in the future.

From the very beginning Dr. King saw his role as that of “Drum Major” in the universal struggle for the freedom of all people of African ancestry. Just three months after his first victory in the year-long Montgomery Boycott, in December 1956, Dr. King found himself in West Africa at the independence celebration on Ghana on March 6, 1957. While there Dr. King met with the great Pan Africanist Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who became the first Prime Minister and then President of Ghana. As Dr. King observed the Union Jack flag of England coming down and the new beautiful multi-colored flag of Ghana going up he turned to the Rev. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., on his right, and Dr. Ralph Bunch, the first Black Nobel Peace Prize winner on his left, and said: “That old flag coming down represents and old order passing away. And that new flag going up represents a new order coming in”.

Dr. King was very moved by this experience in Ghana and spoke of it often, most notably at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church immediately upon his return in a sermon entitled “Birth of a Nation” and later in a famous speech to a wider audience entitled “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution”. He always put Ghana’s independence in the context of the freedom struggle of Black people in America as well as Africa. And from that day on the 6th of March 1957 to the 11th of May 1994, 37 years later, when Nelson Mandela was sworn as the first Black President of South Africa, more than 45 African nations have joined the ranks of political freedom.

Dr. King was also on hand in Jamaica in 1964 at the ceremony for the re-entombment of the body of Marcus Garvey. While there he laid a wreath at Garvey’s shrine and said: “Marcus Garvey was the first man of colour in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man, on a mass scale and level, to give millions of Negroes (African people) a sense of dignity and destiny, and to make the Negro (Black People) feel that he was somebody.” I believe that if Dr. King had survived his assassination attempt in 1968, he would have been in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s leading the struggle to free Nelson Mandela and secure freedom and democracy for Black people in South Africa through non-violence. Through his efforts we may have seen Mandela free and elected the first Black President of South Africa a decade earlier in the 1980s.

Here in America, it is well past time for the “Bank of Justice” to make good on the promissory note that Dr. King and the Freedom Marchers came to Washington to cash 50 years ago. The recent decision of the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is moving the nation in the direction of revoking the 15th amendment to the Constitution of the United States that gave African Americans the right to vote, in the century before last, on March 30, 1870. The acquittal of George Zimmerman, who stalked and murdered a Black teenager, whose only crime was walking home with a cold drink and a bag of candy, is in keeping with the long tradition set by the Supreme Court, in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which said that Black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect. In the movies today we see the father of a future black “Butler” killed in cold blood in 1926 and his white murder, who had just raped his wife, gets away with it. In real life, and right before our eyes, Zimmerman, and others who do not share our continental origins, have gotten away with murder, this year, in the case of Trayvon Martin; 1999, in the case of Amadou Diallo; 1955, in the case of Emmitt Till. And the list goes on…

As people gathered in Washington D.C. on this year’s anniversary it was not enough simply to commemorate the great March of 50 years ago and drum up good feelings and warm memories about our great leaders “back in the day” and the “progress” that has been made since then. The best way for today’s Freedom Marchers to honour the great legacy of our past is to make specific demands and proposals, comparable to the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Right Act (1965), that will remedy the ongoing racial injustices in the 2nd decade of the 21st century that continue represent a very clear, present and real danger to us as a people. In my humble opinion, the emergence of a politically united Africa, as a world power, will only serve to “speed up”’ that process. In the words of Dr. King: “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

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