MLK and Gun Violence: Reflections on racial justice and what can we learn from Medgar Evers' widow

This year as Martin Luther King Day approached, I relished the many recent opportunities in my personal and professional to reflect on what the legacy of Reverend MLK Jr's vision for racial justice means for white Americans today. In particular, 2 weeks ago I co-facilitated a training on racial justice for a multi-racial group of colleagues, a segment of whom, a group of mostly white males embedded in the public safety and military worlds, were deeply resentful of the challenge that recognizing the persistence of structural racism and white privilege meant for them. By the end of the training, most of the small group of nay-sayers was willing, perhaps if only to please us, to admit that some element of structural racism does still exist--that, in their words, "personal responsibility isn't always enough," though reluctant to utter this sentence without appending that "it should be [enough]."

While the experience of hostility in the training was deeply draining and certainly took an emotional toll on both the facilitators and the others in the group, it felt like a rare opportunity to present a new framework to folks who weren't already at least on the precipice of adopting it on their own anyway. In other words, in our polarized society, this seemed like the unusual experience of not preaching the choir, and opportunity that I cherish.

While the training strives to move people through several parts of a pathway to understand the multiple realities of race that exist and have historically existed in America, what we hope to ultimately drive participants to, is the essence of MLK's later work, in which low income and struggling people of all races could come together and recognize their common humanity, and common needs which are not already prioritized by the prevailing economic and political systems in the US, clearly still true today. 

This year's MLK day represents something of a nexxus in which the re-election of our first black president will be feted on the national observation of our most celebrated racial justice leader; so President Obama's choice of Myrlie Evers-Williams to give the invocation at his 2nd and final public inauguration. Evers-Williams is most famous as the widow of Medgar Evers, who was NAACP secretary for the state of Mississippi, when he was murdered in 1963 by Byron De Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Council, who lived freely for nearly three decades until he was finally convicted of the crime in 1994. Notably, prior to surviving her husband's murder and lack of any kind of prompt justice, she had survived their home being firebombed in 1962, multiple death threats from the KKK, and went on to be a leading national civil rights advocate to this day, including continuing the fight to bring De Beckwith to justice and later becoming the national NAACP chair.

What the rationale is behind the President's choice of Evers-Williams is an interesting question- he could be playing into the popular American narrative in which we celebrate and mourn those heroes who gave their time and in some cases their lives to the cause of becoming a "more perfect nation," accepting the parallel narrative in which we have supposedly reached or come close to achieving a post-racial society. However, given what Obama chose to say in his first campaign's one famous "race" speech (oh, what some of us would give for the version of him that uttered that speech to resurface), I would postulate that he is making a different claim, which perhaps we will hear reference to in her invocation.

In this claim, the questions of race and racism embedded deep within our systems and psyches are still very real and present, all the more important that we hear from someone like Evers-Williams on a national stage before it is too late. Someone who experienced a judicial system which did not convict the person who was well known to have killed her husband into the mid 90's, a time by which the prevailing narrative insists racism had ceased to hold any power. Whereas the latent racism has sprung up in the form of personal attacks on President Obama, very thinly veiled in coded language (sometimes) free of explicit reference to race, the real narrative understands that the root causes and solutions, the "real" racism, does not begin or end with one man, but with the structures and systems that shape our lives, white, black, and all shades of brown.

 During the eulogy at Medgar Evers' funeral, Roy Wilkins declared:

"The lurking assassin at midnight June 11 and 12 pulled the trigger, but in all wars the men who do the shooting are trained and indoctrinated and keyed to action by men and by forces which which prod them to act. And I say to you that the southern political system put that man behind the rifle. The lily white southern governments, local and state, the senators, the governors, the state legislators, the mayors, the judges, the sheriffs, the chiefs of police, the commissioners and all the rest. And not content with mere disenfranchisement, the office holders have used unbridled political power to fabricate a maze of laws and customs and economic practices which have imprisoned the negro...In far away Washington, the Southern system has its outpost in the congress of the U.S. and by their deals and maneuvers, they helped to put the man behind that deadly rifle this week. The killer must have felt that he had, if not an immunity, than certainly a protection for whatever he chose to do, no matter how dastardly." 

For those of us working towards a vision of racial justice in our communities and nationally, this quote sends shivers down our spines. It's nearly impossible to look at the facts, the interactions of laws, media and racially disparate outcomes, and say that this is no longer a reality. And what is so compelling about Wilkins' eulogy is that is speaks directly to the work that remains to be done, the work that the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr was working towards when he was similarly gunned down by a white man. Like the reality of the men who sat in my training challenging basic facts, our current debate about gun control and gun ownership rights, populated primarily by white men, exists in a vacuum that separates it from these structures and systems, making it nearly impossible to engage in a conversation where the dual realities experienced by whites and blacks are equally represented.

If you look at the song Only a Pawn in their Game, written by Bob Dylan in response to Evers' murder, we see the white shooter as protagonist, similarly to the premise of Wilkins's eulogy. While one might that think that this song is considering Evers' death "from the less obvious point of view," that of the shooter, this is where we must begin in picking up from where MLK (and many others) left off when he was murdered, examining the role of poverty, fear and intentionally divisive promotion of ignorance that put the gun in the shooter's hand in the first place. Dylan's song teaches us who the real enemy is- not the shooter, but the "the politicians, the police and the other branches of government, who's life blood is sustained by the status quo, a status quo that thrives on hatred and violence between the races" (Prial D,  The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music)

Though the national narrative has drastically changed since 1963 when a 22 year old Dylan, wrote the song, perhaps it's possible to transform the current white distrust for large institutions and systems into one in which the less enfranchised and less powerful of all races can critique the ignorance we are spoonfed by moneyed elites 365 days a year and move from a world in which we talk about the shooter himself as the protagonist, and peal back the layers of how this scene is being set in the first place. Because it's a scene that we see set every time there is a shooter, whether that shooter is an isolated young white male in suburban Connecticut,  a traumatized, invisible young black male in urban Connecticut or rural Mississippi.

In service of racial justice, we must move from picking up the pieces of life and calling it a travesty and a shame when men like Medgar or Treyvon are murdered, and think about in whose name the shooters are acting. If the narrative tells them to act in the name of protecting the safety and rights of whites everywhere, or somewhere, maybe we need to think about the names of those whites. Maybe we need to think about what they have been taught to think when they see a woman like Myrlie Evers-Williams on TV and when they see her next to them on an airplane or in a courthouse.

If there's one message I hope my colleagues received in our training, it's that we are all responsible, regardless of the ways in which we've benefitted or been harmed, because as the Newtown massacre showed us, when we promote a world when shooting anyone is okay, we promote a world in which shooting anyone is okay.