One Way To Commemorate This Day

Today, on Martin Luther King Day, I thought it would make sense to share something I learned just recently:  He actually gave his "I Have A Dream" speech--albeit in a slightly different form-- for the first time in Detroit, some two months before the whole world heard him deliver it from Washington.

It's interesting that such a fact has been all but lost to history, especially when one considers how much sense it makes.  After all, he made his speech in Detroit right around the time it became a majority-black city.  Also, King had, by that time, realized that the struggles of the labor movement were part of an overall struggle for justice, and no city has ever been more emblematic of the American labor movement than Detroit.

It's thus fitting that there's a "Tour  de Troit" taking place today. If today's weather in the Motor City is anything like what it normally has at this time of year, I give "props" to whoever rides it.  

The name of the ride is kind of funny.  The name of the city itself means "strait" in French; Francophone settlers who came by way of Quebec named the then-settlement for "le detroit du lac Erie", which separates it from what is now Windsor, Ontario.

(If you are under-age, or of delicate sensibilities, please skip over everything else in this parenthetical element.  The second syllable--"troit"--means "narrow" and is pronounced the way Anglophones pronounce a vulgar term for a part of the female anatomy.  In fact, it's believed that British soldiers in World War I introduced the term in to the English-speaking world.)

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who is riding today. And thank you for everything, Dr. King!

A Year In Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life

I know it's Spring.  And it's time to ride and be joyful. But I think there's something else that bears mentioning.

On this date in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assasinated in Memphis.  I was a child at the time and, until that day, knew nothing about him. However, I think I understood, for the first time, what the word "tragedy" means and that it isn't the same as mere sadness or grief.

He was cut down one year to the day after making what might have been the most important speech of his life--and one of the most important in American history.

Before an audience of 3000 in New York's Riverside Memorial Church, the greatest leader this country has ever had declared, "My conscience leaves me no other choice."  Then he described the terrible effects of the Vietnam War on this country's poor as well as Vietnamese peasants.  Thus, he concluded, he could not continue to fight for civil rights and address the myriad injustices--all of which had to do with race, class and gender--that existed (and still exist) in the United States without opposing the war his country was waging in the former French Indochina.

Here is a video of that speech:

The Next Frontier, Then And Now

Today, Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is being commemorated.  I am thinking now about how he spent the last days of his life working to help the sanitation workers of Memphis to gain better pay and working conditions.  I am also thinking about the speech he gave on 4 April 1967—exactly one year before he was gunned down.  In it, he denounced the Vietnam War and the ways in which the United States was turning into the kind of repressive colonial power against which it fought to gain its independence.

Nearly half a century later, his words and actions remain relevant, if for different reasons than they were when they were new or, say, twenty or thirty years ago.  I concur with those people who see them as evidence that he was turning his attention toward economic inequalities and how power—whether military, political, capitalist or corporate—is used to initiate and reinforce such inequities.  Interestingly, Malcolm X was turning his interests toward those very issues before he was shot to death in the Audubon Ballroom.  Some have posited that it’s a reason why the widows of the two men became allies in the struggle for social and economic justice as well as close personal friends.  Having met Sister Betty Shabazz, however briefly, a couple of years before she died, I would accept such an explanation.

Whatever their motivations, I think she and Coretta Scott King offer valuable lessons for transgender people.  I am not the first person to say that our state is about what that of gays and lesbians was in the 1970’s or nearly all African-Americans until the 1950’s.  The gains made by the Civil Rights movement did not improve the lot of all people of color; that is not a fault of the work Matin, Coretta, Malcolm or Betty did.  While it’s great that my hometown—New York City—and some other jurisdictions have human-rights laws that include language to specifically include transgender and other gender-variant people, such laws—as Martin and Malcolm discovered—will not, by themselves, bring about social justice.  That is because they cannot bring about economic justice.  They might say that a would-be employer cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender or other qualities, but they do not address the conditions that put us at a disadvantage when we apply for those jobs—or that relegate us to inferior jobs at lower pay and longer periods without jobs and, in some cases, housing. 

99 Steps

The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) has just issued a new Blueprint for Equality. It outlines 99 steps that could be taken to improve the lives of transgender  Americans.   The steps are classified among such areas as Housing and Homelessness, Safe and Supportive Schools and Health Care Access.  Also, there are sections about Immigration, Travel, Documents and Privacy as well as Military Service and Honoring Our Veterans, all of which are issues that are all but completely missed by the mainstream media.

It's particularly gratifying to note that even in areas like Safe and Supportive Schools that have recently been part of the national conversation, the report makes useful suggestions that go well beyond what even policy-makers, let alone the mainstream media, have discussed.  For example, the report recommends that the Department of Education should mandate that all high schools provide comprehensive suicide prevention education--which includes discussion of LGBT youth and why they are at increased risk--to all high-school students.  

Another thing I like about the report is that it points out the importance of the efforts parents and youth educators have made in bringing about safer schools.  It also mentions the work done by individuals as well as small local organization in helping to get trans elders the care they need, among other things.  As I have maintained, in this blog and in my other communications, the real change will happen at the local level and will start with individual people, working alone or in small groups and families.  More than one Civil Rights activist said, in essence, that anti-discrimination laws will mean only so much if the people whose rights are protected by those laws aren't seen as their friends, neighbors, co-workers, brothers, sisters and members of their community rather than as merely Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Gays, Transgenders or members of any other "minority" group you care to name.