The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King made a rare appearance this week at Portland State University to deliver a speech he dubbed “A Forgotten Conscious: Portland & The Road to Perish,” where he tackled some of the city and nation’s biggest issues including police, homelessness and affordability.
Upon reaching the stage, the renowned organizer was greeted with a hero’s welcome, receiving a nearly 5-minute standing ovation from the thousands who had gathered to hear his remarks.
King, 94, significantly slowed down public appearances over the past decade but said with a national election on the horizon, racial tensions at a fever pitch and the world still struggling to recover from the pandemic, he felt compelled to deliver a message from Portland, a city he called “a microcosmic viewshed into our nation’s most urgent ills that have us gripped at the cliff of perish.”
Justice eludes Portland
Thousands gathered to hear the Civil Rights icon deliver his remarks, with thousands more tuning in via livestream. The address marked his first time back to the Rose City since visiting in 1961, when he delivered a sermon at Vancouver Avenue Baptist Church in then-racially segregated North Portland.
King wasted little time in his opening remarks, challenging the city’s actions following the racial justice protests of 2020 that helped propel Portland into the headlines after more than 100 days of protest.
“A four short years ago, Portland rose to become a beacon in the collective consciousness in the call for the long overdue justice for Black people of this country,” he said. “And four years later, it seems, this city shines profoundly loud, not in its uniqueness, but in its race into the long sung songs of familiarity that call on Black people to forget all they have ever witnessed with their own eyes, in favor of closing them to fall into a Dream never realized, despite the obvious nightmare that continues to unfold before their very paths and lie snug in a baren bed of hope.”
Portland, of course, was a city widely known for its spirit of protest long before 2020, earning itself the nickname “Little Beirut” from President George H.W. Bush in 1991 after he was greeted by protesters in town confronting him for both his domestic and foreign policy.
From the Albina Riots of 1967 to the nationwide Occupy movement in 2011and 2012, Portland has been a hotbed for organized and at times, even disorganized resistance movements. Along racial lines, the city also has a long tradition of demonstrations against racial segregation, police brutality, economic injustice and racist education policies, as have most large U.S. cities, though often to the tune of less sustained national coverage and interracial solidarity. However, the scale of its uprisings surrounding the death of George Floyd, earned the city the eyes and ears of the world unlike any other place at the time.
“It welled my heart with joy to see so many White brothers and sisters linking arms with their African American siblings in the demand for true freedom for Blacks in Portland and across the globe,” King said. “But sadly, the inevitable backlash that has always followed any footsteps towards social and economic progress for the Black race has not escaped Portland, no more than it has escaped any other municipality in this young country.”
A staunch advocate for nonviolence, King decried the characterization of the city’s protests as mere ‘riots’ as a scapegoating tool by people in power and the media designed to ignore the greater ills of Black communities and the disenfranchised that persist beyond the rebellion.
In his April 1967 speech at Stanford University entitled "The Other America," King said, "In a real sense, our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.” The political activist, whose civil disobedience arrests reached double- digits, said he believes militant nonviolent direct action is the best way to advance equality. He made clear while he continues to reject riots as a winning strategy that he continues to believe “riots are the language of the unheard” and will continue to occur while systemic inequality is maintained.
King, a primary architect of the Poor People’s Campaign, which continues to champion ideas like universal basic income, employment for all, quality low-income housing and other programs that eradicate poverty, railed against local leadership for policies and programs he said have given rise to mass suffering and disparate outcomes. Citing data showing a growing wealth gap between Black and White Oregonians, housing unaffordability making it so the average person of color can’t afford the Portland city limits and a fractional distribution of government contracts to minority-owned businesses, he called these examples of a “systemic fidelity to inequity.”
“Six decades ago, I named racism, poverty and war as the Triple Evils of society,” King said. “Sadly, it remains that these three find fertile veins on which to feast in our communities at this new dawn of 2024. Skin color still yields reasonable suspicion in a system that, if truly just, would be suspicious of the criminally insidious mirrors it holds to the spoils of Jim Crow and the plantation alike. Fountains of revenue continue to flow into police departments, with millions of dollars worth of tactical gear, guns, surveillance tools, tear gas and other combat-ready equipment stockpiled to protect ‘us’ from who but the homeless, the downtrodden, and the poor.
“Meanwhile, these very departments cry foul with claims that their wells have run dry, as the working masses continue to find that the promise of great seas of opportunity is but a mirage, left stranded in the desert of inequity, with little more than their own saliva to drink.”
Since 2020, local leadership steadily increased the Portland Police Bureau’s budget from $237 million to $261 million, marking its largest budget in the city's history. General affordability throughout the nation nosedived since the pandemic, records show, despite massive concurrent corporate gains; meanwhile, law enforcement budgets ballooned often beyond that of public funding for schools and early education.
At the time of King’s last visit, almost half of the Portland Police Bureau’s arrests were of Black people, despite them only making up about 5% of the population. Despite appointing four Black police chiefs since then, Portland still maintains the fifth-worst racial disparities in arrests in the country and Oregon as a whole holds some of the worst incarceration rates to boot.
King weighs in on presidential election
Presidential elections always draw the largest scores of voters, but recent polls show with a likely Donald Trump and Joe Biden rematch heading into November, many across all political persuasions feel particularly apathetic about turning out to rehire either of the men. King had ammo for both candidates, taking aim first at the reality-star-turned-Commander-in-Chief, Trump, calling him a “danger to democracy.”
“It is, of course, today, no revelatory statement to call him a danger to democracy,” King said. “He was in 2017 when he was handed the keys of the presidency. And now as he stands, even more guilty of stirring some of the worst inclinations of this society than he is of the mountain of charges against him for, among other things, attempting to overthrow the very government he aims to preside over, close to breezing into halls of the White House again.”
“He must be stopped, and we must vote!” he added to thunderous applause from the crowd.
King, who in the past has been quoted as saying he is “not inextricably bound to either party” also took aim at the Republican party as a whole for what he called, decades of stoking and abetting “a particularly heinous brand of White nationalism, corporate greed, and fear trafficking that produced the inevitability of Trump, or a Trump-like figure in the 21st century from rising to the top of the parties’ ranks.”
For Biden, King gave a measure of praise to the incumbent while offering a string of critiques — albeit less fiery — for the veteran Democratic lawmaker. First, uplifting the President’s appointment of Justice Kentanji Brown to the Supreme Court, upholding a promise he made on the 2020 campaign trail to appoint a Black woman to the highest court, King also listed other actions the Biden-Harris administration has taken to improve outcomes in the Department of Justice for communities of color.
“It must be said, however, that this president has also shown a lack of conscience on some of the greatest moral issues of our time,” King said of the administration’s lack of pressure on Congress to advance House Resolution 40, which calls for study into reparations for Black Americans, a piece of legislation that has been introduced every year since 1989 but has never received a vote on the House floor. It is worth noting the city of Portland committed to lobby for reparations as part of its federal legislative strategy in 2021. Similarly, state Sen. Lew Frederick has introduced reparations proposals into the Oregon legislature since 2020, though like HR 40, have never advanced past committee.
“It is not enough to rest on the laurels of piecemeal economic policy targeted to reach the poor as a means of lifting all boats,” King, a longtime proponent of reparations, said, adding the pandemic showed the structures in America are designed to constrict around Black communities the hardest. “To repair something, one must truly believe that something is broken. And the rush to return to things as they were, shows that for far too many, the shards of dreams surrounding them are, in fact, the imperfect formings
of a system save for some slight tweaks is perfectly fine.
“But it is, in fact, only through radical redistribution of finance and other social resources that we will begin to make the gains we need to truly move our way towards whole. This truth rings from all levels of governance: federal, state, county, city, neighborhood, and yes, individuals. What are you willing to give up in the name of justice?”
King also levied critiques toward the administration for its handling of the Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for his friend, fellow organizer and late congressman, John Lewis. The bill would strengthen and restore parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which King helped champion, and make it harder for discriminatory practices to occur throughout the voting process. While all Senate Republicans have voted against the legislation, King urged Biden to use more of his authority from the nation’s highest office to advance the bill since the preceding president, he said, attempted to overturn the last election, in part by targeting the results in cities with sizable Black populations.
The heralded Nobel Peace Prize winner went on to critique both moderates and liberals alike for accepting incremental change and the passage of time as sufficient evidence of sweeping advancement instead of data that proves otherwise.
“It can be tempting to reduce issues of morality into boxes of ‘bad’ or ‘good,’ and therein ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive,’”
King said. “However, much progress has been slowed in the name of moderate and liberal pragmatism, particularly in White communities. Those who are disgusted by Klan regalia and the so-called far-right of today but content to cradle in the pragmatic middle, where agitation to the unjust is confined to the convenience of their social status and pocketbooks. These indeed are some of our greatest keepers of the doom of the status quo.”
King has long been critical of incrementalism writing “that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,“ in his 1963 landmark “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he penned while jailed in Alabama following a direct action.
Stopping short of issuing any endorsements, the Georgia-born organizer also acknowledged Cornel West, another presidential hopeful, currently running as an independent candidate. Referring to West as his “dear brother,” he lauded the former Harvard professor for delivering a message against what he called “deepening American imperialism” throughout his campaign.
“It is a deadly and unfortunate truth that the U.S. continues to send blank checks to fund global destruction from Ukraine to Israel in the name of a ‘liberty’ that remains faceless to scores of its very own citizens, and those abroad that it claims to defend through bullets, bombs and bloodshed,” said King who has called the United States the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” in the past. “The scars of these wars predicated on a false promise of peace we may never earn, for we are a nation whose wounds of war have never known the leisure of relief even to begin the process of healing ourselves.”
A measured message of hope
This was all a dream, of course. King didn’t visit my city. He’s gone. But I sometimes wonder what he would say of it if he were here today — post-pandemic, post-uprising, post-racial; okay, that last one was a joke.
People often lean into King’s message of hope — and for good reason. He was a hopeful man. Perhaps it was his faith that allowed him to remain so steadfast in it. But, his hope also came with an unrelenting skepticism of our country’s future amidst the growing inequity he witnessed in the form of racism, poverty and militarism. The year before he was assassinated, King said the pervasiveness of injustice and lack of opportunity for the underclass gave him fear that he was “integrating (his) people into a burning house.” That’s profound. I often feel the heat.
There’s an old saying in the church that I have always appreciated: “Faith without works is dead.”
I’m not one to say, ‘nothing has changed’ very often. It’s mostly a disservice to the truth and the many changemakers of the past and the baton-carriers of the future, including myself. Despite this, the creep of that feeling can be hard to shake at times when you see the frightening similarities between the past and today, and you look towards tomorrow and wonder if the urgency you feel will ever materialize for our people and our planet en masse. And then you remember the only time you felt even materially close to that answer being a resounding ‘yes’ was during a global pandemic, and a man’s violent murder by the state had to be caught on camera and go viral. And then it fizzled. And we all said we would “remember.” And you don’t feel “we” did.
Unlike King, I am not religious, despite the many sermons at Mt. Olivet I accompanied my mom to in my childhood. My hope is measured. I continue to appreciate many aspects of religion as I grow to define what a right-fit spiritual practice looks like for me and my family.
There’s an old saying in the church that I have always appreciated: “Faith without works is dead.”
What that means is I can keep hoping I get that six-pack I’ve been wanting, but unless I finally pick my weights back up, pay closer attention to what and when I eat again, and pivot around all my excuses and self-talk around why it’s so hard to get back into my workout plan — all the hope in the world won’t matter. That said, more than 24 hours in the day would help, too, capitalism.
My point is you gotta put some action behind the hope.
When I see Albina Vision, an effort to reclaim land in Portland’s historically Black Albina district, I feel hope. When I see Don’t Shoot Portland, a police accountability group founded during the Ferguson-propelled Black Lives Matter Movement, I feel hope. When I see Imagine Black, an abolitionist political organizing group, grow its ranks,
I see hope. When I see my friend LaQuida Landford push her idea for a Black-centered homeless advocacy space forward from an idea to reality in the form of AfroVillage PDX, I feel hope. When I see Portland Street Response implemented as a citywide emergency-response program that doesn’t rely on armed cops, I feel hope. Shoutout
to the Black women who have founded and helmed all of these various organizations, by the way.
The organization I co-founded and direct to transform a park in the heart of the St. Johns neighborhood, The Kidz Outside, is finally on the brink of manifesting the change we’ve envisioned with community. I’ve supported the county jails getting more material oversight. I can look back at my two years in leadership at my city’s branch of the NAACP and know that I took stands that mattered. That reparations endorsement from the City of Portland mentioned earlier; I was a key reason that materialized — and therein, also lies for me another flash of hope. I imagine King’s fidelity to hope probably shared some of my same practicality — you see, change that would not have happened without you willing it to be. So you gotta have some hope. Otherwise, what am I even doing all this for, right?
Most of us get a little bit of a pass when it comes to King. King was sold to the majority of us who’ve gone through the American education system and weren’t alive to witness him in the flesh, mostly as a guy who just wanted us to all get along and get over this racism stuff. That usually happens with radical figures, if they’re even taught at all — this sort of disremembering.
But when we know better, we gotta do better.
King may not be here, but his message very well lives on, as do the issues he spoke to across this country.
My hope is King didn’t die in vain, nor did George Floyd. But when I see the largest cop budgets in our history, mass evictions, constant corporate scheming, billionaires having a space race, while most people I know trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents and the planet still on fire in the wake of 2020, I feel that feeling I spoke of start to creep up my neck again. And when I do, I do my best to shake it off — go forward and do what I have always known to do in the face of these issues: work.
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