Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  Those of us who were around then remember that 1967 speech Martin Luther King gave here in New York at the Riverside Church, a year before his assassination. He said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. ... It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” I mean, that’s pretty fundamental, right? Change the system?

  King had a much more fundamental critique of our economic system, certainly more fundamental than Obama has because a fundamental critique of our economic system would not simply give hundreds of billions of dollars to the bankers and a little bit to the people below. A fundamental change in our system would really create a greater equalization of wealth, including free medical care, not the kind of half-baked health reforms that are debated in Congress.

  This is one reason you are seen as a threat to people at the top, because your message, like King’s message, goes to a fundamental rearrangement of power in America.

  Yes, that is very troublesome for people at the top. They’re willing to let people think about mild reforms, and little changes, and incremental changes, but they don’t want people to think that we could actually transform this country into a peaceful country, that we no longer have to be a super military power. They don’t want to think that way because it’s profitable for certain interests in this country to carry on war, to have the military in a hundred countries, to have a $600 billion military budget. That makes a lot of money for certain people, but it leaves the rest of the country behind.

  Let’s hear the words of a labor person, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW—the Wobblies.

  IWW MEMBER (PLAYED BY VIGGO MORTENSEN): If you were a bum without a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids when you went west for a job, and had never located them since; if your job had never kept you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down; ... if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in the hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a businessman’s war, and we don’t see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs which we now enjoy.

  They refused to go along with World War I, and he’s explaining why they won’t. Basically, he’s speaking to poor people in all wars. He’s saying, “It’s a businessman’s war.” War is a businessman’s war. It always is. The ordinary guys have nothing to gain from this war.

  How do you explain the absence of protest in the streets today? The passivity in response to the fact that Obama has now doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan over the number George W. Bush had there.

  I don’t think people are apathetic about it. I believe most people in this country do not want us to be in Afghanistan. But they’re not doing anything about it, you’re right. We’re not seeing protests in the street. And I think one of the reasons is that the major media, television, and newspapers have not played their role in educating the public about what is going on.

  There was a poll showing that a bare majority of Americans support sending more troops to Afghanistan.

  You have to remember this—it is not easy for people to oppose sending troops to Afghanistan, especially once they have been sent and once the decision has been made. It’s not easy for people to oppose what the president is saying, and what the media are saying, what both major parties are working for. So the very fact that even close to a majority of the people are opposed to sending troops to Afghanistan tells me that many more people are opposed. I have a fundamental faith in the basic decency and even, yes, the wisdom of people, once they make their way through the deceptions that are thrown at them. And we’ve seen this historically. People learn.

  I was struck in your television special by what the labor leader Cesar Chavez had to say about organizing his fellow farmworkers.

  CESAR CHAVEZ (PLAYED BY MARTÍN ESPADA): I’m not very different from anyone else who has ever tried to accomplish something with his life. My motivation comes ... from watching what my mother and father went through when I was growing up; from what we experienced as migrant farmworkers in California....

  It grew from anger and rage—emotions I felt forty years ago when people of my color were denied the right to see a movie or eat at a restaurant in many parts of California. It grew from the frustration and humiliation I felt as a boy who couldn’t understand how the growers could abuse and exploit farmworkers when there were so many of us and so few of them....

  I began to realize what other minority people had discovered: that the only answer—the only hope—was in organizing....

  Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade. But it will come, someday!

  Do you believe it will come?

  I do. I can’t give you a date, but I have confidence in the future. You know why? You have to be patient. Farmworkers were at one point in as helpless a position as the labor movement is today. But as Cesar Chavez said, we learned that you have to organize. And it takes time, it takes patience, it takes persistence. I mean, think of how long black people in the South waited.

  More than two centuries, and then another century after the Civil War.

  I don’t think we’ll have to wait a hundred years.

  So populism and people power aren’t really a left or right issue. It’s more “us versus them”—bottom versus top?

  It’s democracy. You know, democracy doesn’t come from the top. It comes from the bottom. Democracy is not what governments do. It’s what people do. Too often, we go to junior high school and they sort of teach us that democracy is three branches of government. You know, it’s not the three branches of government.

  I’d like to end with a woman in your film who showed us the power of a single voice, speaking for democracy. Born into slavery, largely uneducated, she spoke out for the rights of people who didn’t have any. She was an unforgettable truth-teller.

  SOJOURNER TRUTH (PLAYED BY KERRY WASHINGTON): That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! ... I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’tIa woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? ...

  Then that little man in the back there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

  If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

  Why did you include that excerpt?

  Because it’s so empowering. Because here is this woman who was a slave, oppressed on all sides, and she’s defiant. She represents the voice of people who have been overlooked. She represents a voice that is rebellious and, yes, troublesome to the powers that be.

  MICHELLE ALEXANDER

  In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was exhausted and depressed. Under fire from politicians, the medi
a, and even fellow leaders in the civil rights movement for his stand against the Vietnam War, he came to Memphis, Tennessee, three times in support of striking garbagemen. More than a thousand African American sanitation workers had walked off the job after two coworkers had been crushed to death by a garbage truck’s compactor. They were fed up at being treated with contempt—white supervisors called them “boy”—as they performed a filthy and unrewarding job, so poorly paid that 40 percent of them were on welfare. Their picket signs read simply: “I AM A MAN.”

  Opposition and violence met the strike; King led one march that ended in tear gas and gunfire. He came back one more time to try to put things right and made the famous speech that would prove prophetic:

  I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.

  The next night, April 4, he was assassinated. In the wake of his death, mil- lions mourned as riots burned across the country. Twelve days later, the strike was settled, the garbagemen’s union was recognized, and the city of Memphis begrudgingly agreed to increase their pay, at first by ten cents an hour and later by an extra nickel.

  That paltry sum would also be prophetic. After all these years, unemployment among African Americans is nearly double that of whites, according to the National Urban League. Black men and women make 62 cents for every dollar earned by whites. Less than half of black and Hispanic families own homes, and they are three times more likely to live below the poverty line. The nonpartisan organization United for a Fair Economy reports, “The Great Recession has pulled the plug on communities of color, draining jobs and homes at alarming rates while exacerbating persistent inequalities of wealth and income.”

  On the forty-second anniversary of King’s murder I asked two leading advocates of justice to discuss the state of his vision for economic justice. Bryan Stevenson lives in Alabama, where he founded the Equal Justice Initiative to advocate for the poor and people of color. He also teaches clinical law at New York University and is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for his efforts to end the death penalty. Michelle Alexander once directed the civil rights clinics at Stanford Law School and now teaches law at Ohio State University. When we spoke, she had just published a widely acclaimed book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Both are immersed in Martin Luther King’s legacy.

  —Bill Moyers

  Let’s begin with some speculation. Martin Luther King would be eighty-one. How do you think he would react to the state of America today?

  STEVENSON: I think he would be heartbroken. In 1966, Dr. King went to Wilcox County, Alabama, one of the counties in the Black Belt. Dr. King became very close to the poor there, and really organized and inspired people to confront poverty. And they participated in marches and demonstrations. They had all largely been evicted from lands where they’d been sharecroppers and tenant farmers. If you go to Wilcox County today, virtually nothing has changed. Nothing. Today, 27 percent unemployment. Half of all black families have household incomes under $10,000 a year. Dr. King would be heartbroken that in 2010 there would be forty million people in this country who live below the federal poverty level.

  Blacks and whites?

  STEVENSON: Blacks and whites.

  And Hispanics and others.

  STEVENSON: And others. I think he would be devastated by that, because we’ve also had this explosion of great wealth. It’s this proximity of poverty next to wealth. I think it would be sad to him to see how wealth has caused many people, people of color and others, to abandon the poor, to give up on this dream of economic justice. It would, I think, force him to confront these larger psychological dynamics. What was so powerful to me about his work in Memphis was not only that he was pushing for economic justice, but he was also pushing for the kind of liberation that every person who’s been excluded and marginalized and subordinated by poverty has to want.

  The kind of recognition that you’re as good as the people who have more than you. That sign that those sanitation workers were wearing—“I AM A MAN”—was almost more provocative than the fact that they were seeking higher wages, because if these are men, we have to deal with them as men. That challenges everything. I continue to believe that in this country the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice. I think there are structures and systems that have created poverty and made poverty so permanent that until we think in a more just way about how to deal with it, we’re never going to make the progress that Dr. King envisioned.

  But surely he would have been thrilled on Election Night 2008, with the election of the first African American president in our history.

  ALEXANDER: Yes. But individual black achievement today masks a disturbing, underlying racial reality. To a significant extent, affirmative action—seeing African Americans go to Harvard and Yale, become CEOs and corporate lawyers—causes us all to marvel what a long way we have come.

  But as Bryan just indicated, much of the data indicates that African Americans today, as a group, are not much better off than they were back in 1968 when Martin Luther King delivered the “Other America” speech, talking about how there are two Americas in the United States. One where people have great opportunities and can dream big dreams, and another where people are mired in poverty and stuck in a permanent second-class status. Those two Americas still exist today. The existence of Barack Obama and people of color scattered in positions of power and high places creates an illusion of much more progress than has actually been made in recent years.

  You describe in your book how thrilled you were on Election Night as the returns came in. And then you walked out of the Election Night party, and ...?

  ALEXANDER: On Election Night, I was filled with hope and enthusiasm. Like much of America. And as I left the Election Night party, along with hundreds of others folks, there in the gutter was an African American man handcuffed behind his back, on his knees in the gutter, and he was surrounded by police officers who were talking and joking, completely oblivious to him, to his human existence.

  And as people poured out of the party, people glanced over briefly, took a look at him, and then went on their way with their celebrations, and I thought to myself, “What does the election of Barack Obama mean for him? In what way are those folks who are truly at the bottom of the well in America, in what way have they benefited?” The difficult reality that we have to come to terms with is that not much has changed or will change for the folks at the bottom of the well until we as a nation awaken, awaken to their humanity.

  STEVENSON: One of the great problems for the communities where I work is that people actually still feel pained by the absence of any truth about the real cost of Jim Crow, about the real cost of segregation, about the real cost of decades of racial subordination.

  Jim Crow was that long and awful period when African Americans were forced into segregation and second- and third-class citizenship.

  STEVENSON: And humiliated every day. You could not drink the same water. You could not go to the same bathrooms. You had to get off the sidewalk when a person who was white came by. You were absolutely branded as inferior. That went on for decades. And we’ve never been told the truth about what that did to these communities.

  Other countries that have confronted historic problems of racism and gross ethnic conflict have recognized that to overcome that, there has to be a period of truth and reconciliation. In South Africa, they had to go through truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, there had to be truth and reconciliation. In this country, we’ve never had truth and we’ve never had reconciliation. And so the day-to-day reality for the people I work with is one that’s still hurt, angry, broken.

  After 9/11—the terrorist attacks—older people come up to me, and they say, “Mr. St
evenson, I grew up with terrorism. We had to worry about being bombed. We had to worry about being lynched. We had to live in communities close to each other because the threat of violence was constant. My uncle was nearly lynched. My aunt had to leave Alabama and go to Kentucky or Ohio or the North because they were afraid she was going to be lynched after speaking out and taking a stand.” That reality still lingers with them. So that they experience the things that we talk about on TV very differently. There is a quite powerful psychic injury that comes with being told day in and day out, “You’re not as good. You’re not as worthy. You’re less than. You’re subordinate.”

  When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, he thought a woman would be president before an African American. Here, just forty years later, an African American is president. Does that pull some of the sting out of the hurt?

  STEVENSON: It does. But I don’t think it changes the fundamental dynamics. Let’s not be confused about the election of Barack Obama. In my state of Alabama, Barack Obama got 10 percent of the white vote. He got 13 percent of the white vote under the age of thirty. Those are very discouraging statistics. John Kerry got twice that in ’04 when he lost.

  What do those statistics tell you?

  STEVENSON: They say to me that we still live in a society where there is incredible race consciousness. My state of Alabama is a state where in 2004 we tried to get rid of segregation language in the state constitution, and a majority of people in Alabama voted to keep that language, and we’re supposed to just carry on, as if somehow that doesn’t matter. These very stark racial divisions and realities are very dominant. There’s a very strong reaction among whites against the Obama election in the Deep South. In many places, the number of incidents of hate crimes, and of complaints by black teachers and others, has increased. So I don’t want us to think that the election stands alone. For every action there’s a reaction, and the reaction is quite worrisome to many people of color in the Deep South.