Struggle exists to keep MLK legacy beyond holiday
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.once said: “We’ve come a long, long way... and we’ve got a long, long, way to go.”
He said that in a speech he made in 1965. The same can be said today, according to Davida Mathis, a Greenville attorney and member of Rainbow PUSH Greenville.
As the nation pauses on Jan. 18 to recognize the accomplishments of the slain civil rights leader, many of the issues King was speaking about then are issues today, Mathis said.
Among them, she said, are the killing of young African Americans by police and unrest in many areas because of perceived as discrimination, particularly by police.
Beyond the local and nationwide celebratory events of King’s life, the struggle continues, said Mathis and other community leaders.
The struggles include sustaining King’s legacy, keeping his dream from growing dim.
Some progress was made to help keep the dream in front the community when, in 2005 and after a decades-long battle, a Greenville County holiday was approved honoring King.
Soon after the holiday was approved, the MLK Dream Team, led by the Rev. Curtis Johnson, launched the county’s largest annual series of events celebrating King’s life and legacy. This year’s events are organized by Rainbow PUSH Greenville.
Beyond the weekend's activities, Johnson said his prayer is that the community carries forth the legacy of King, and begins to truly embody what he stood for.
The Rev. Ennis Fant, a pastor and former councilman who was the first to propose a King day in 1986, said parents and grandparents need to use the weekend celebrations as well as Black History month, and day-to-day experiences to “emphasize work that Dr. King did to help us be where we are, but also recognize that we have to continue to move forward.”
Progress made
The approval of the holiday in Greenville County helped move King’s legacy forward in many ways.
Greenville used to be very black and white, according to Fant.
It was a place where either you were black or white and you knew your place, he said.
Now everybody's more open, he said.
"Greenville is more of a melting pot where you see African Americans and whites working together on different projects to advance the community," he said. "I think it gave the opportunity for relationships across racial lines to be built that were not available to be built prior. I think that's a step in the right direction."
Johnson said the goal of the first MLK Dream Weekend in 2006 was to celebrate diversity in the community.
"I'm glad to see that there are many diversity initiatives that have taken place over the last 10 years in Greenville County," he said, citing the Diversity Leadership Academy and the Diversity & Inclusion office at Greenville Chamber as examples.
"Our city has seen a lot of growth coming from the international community and from different places around the country," Johnson said. "There are a lot of reasons people are attracted to Greenville."
He believes that since the King holiday was passed there has been a greater focus on celebrating the community's diversity and celebrating Greenville as an international city.
King talked about education, Mathis said. Rainbow PUSH is too.
On Jan. 18, as part of the King Legacy Weekend, the group will dedicate a computer lab to the Phillis Wheatley Community Center in Greenville.
"There's a gap of people who may be poor and uninformed, but who will be left behind if they don’t excel in science technology engineering and math," Mathis said.
"We want parents who may not be able to afford computers to have a place to go for free so they can study and keep up," she said.
Stepping back
Even with all the progress made, there are instances, Fant said, where progress is stepping back.
He cites continued attacks on Affirmative Action, “less and less" access to educational opportunities for African Americans, and the erosion of the middle class with jobs being given away to automation and robotics.
Racism, he said, still exists but it’s more covert and more systemic.
“You still have police brutality where African American males are at risk every time they walk out the door,” he said. “Parents, particularly mothers, don’t know if their sons are going to return home.”
And, Fant said, “police officers killed blacks less in the Civil Rights area than they do now and we’re 50 years after King’s death – scary.”
“One of the biggest things that scares me as an African-American male is that African American men are only six percent of the American population but are 40 percent of the men that are unarmed and killed by law enforcement. That’s not an accident,” Fant said. “It’s just covert racism now, so you have to be a little smarter and continue to work harder.”
Fant said his biggest disappointment about Greenville is the onslaught of gentrification in the city, where the division is not so much by race as much as it is by social economic status.
"You see traditional African American neighborhoods in the city limits, where people have lived for generations, being disbanded and the poor and the voiceless are being pushed out into the county, primarily the White Horse Road District 25 area," Fant said.
He said that's happening to almost 20 percent of the African American community every seven to eight years, "which is staggering."
"You're seeing tons of blacks being pushed in that direction with no infrastructure, no housing, no jobs, no transportation, and nobody says anything about it," Fant said.
King was assassinated in 1968. His last mission was to defend the poor and deliver to the needy, said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of Rainbow PUSH.
Prior to attending the King Legacy Gala, Jackson talked about ways his organization is working to continue that mission.
He said a lawsuit is being prepared challenging the state of South Carolina to honor the federal mandate for affordable healthcare.
He said there are a million poor people in South Carolina and 250,000 are without health insurance.
“We are Medicaid eligible, yet we turned down $13 billion (in federal Medicaid funds) and 60,000 jobs,” he said.
“We need federal intervention. It is utterly irrational for people who have insurance themselves to fight against other people’s right to have health insurance to extend lives and expand the economy,” he said.
There also is "unfinished business" in racial reconciliation, voter registration, and when it comes to the proportion of African Americans in prison compared to the percent of African-Americans who make up the population in the state.
Sustaining the legacy
Sustaining King's legacy requires involving the youth to help push it forward, Greenville leaders said.
Children have to be taught history and especially African American history, because it it unique in this country, Mathis said.
"We have to talk about it at our dinner tables, read to them, buy books that will be instructive to them and insist that they learn something about our history," she said. "The other part is, as our children get older, we need to insist that they do something for the public good, not just for themselves but for others."
Most cultures have a different perspective of what King was about, Johnson said.
Some think it was all about races coming together. Some think it was concern for the poor.
But King had so many multiple passions about the betterment of humanity that everybody could grab a piece of what he was talking about, Johnson said.
He would like for any and everybody to find ways to connect to King's legacy in ways that are unique to them.
Much of King's legacy will never die, Johnson said. He left the world with some things that will never change, he said.
"We'll never go back to being separated at the water fountain and blacks can only do this or whites can only do that," Johnson said.
"Hopefully, we'll never go back to blacks fighting for the right to vote, even though we have, in this day and time, issues that we have to overcome in terms of voting opportunities and that type of thing," he said.
Johnson believes there are some things about King's legacy that can be lost "if we allow the extreme voices to be the only ones heard right now."