Alongside a reproduction of a photo of King’s funeral that ran in “Life,” Jaar graphically lays bare the nation’s racial divisions at the time of the civil rights leader’s death. In one frame, Jaar represents all of the African Americans at the funeral march with black dots. In a second frame, he shows the white people present as red dots. There are thousands of black dots and only a few dozen red ones....
How could Americans of all racial backgrounds not have mourned the death of the great civil rights leader?...
When King died, he was advocating for “radical economic change” and had taken a stance against the Vietnam War, [the civil rights historian David Garrow said]. Both of those issues alienated him from some former supporters. “People in the Democratic Party thought King had self-marginalized. His murder alters his historical status hugely. What people now remember is his post-assassination enshrinement.”
January 19, 2015
"Two years ago, the Smithsonian Institution acquired a conceptual work by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar that reflects on the funeral of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr."
"The piece — titled 'Life Magazine, April 19, 1968' — is one of Jaar’s lesser-known works, produced when he was culling through the archives of the iconic magazine."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
33 comments:
Blacks and whites vote differently too.
This isn't a failure of whites.
"How could Americans of all racial backgrounds not have mourned the death of the great civil rights leader?..."
Martin Luther King's murder victim status thrusted him into the pantheon of American "saints" along with JFK. RFK would join King and his brother soon after.
Having lived then, paying close attention to current events, I can tell you none of them were the beloved icons they've become.
Death, particularly a violent one, can give a body martyr status and "greatness" they wouldn't neccessarily have achieved if they lived and died of old age. Dying, at the top of your game, helps in weaving a legend.
Lots of legends have grown up around these three fellows. Those who write the history our children study in school, create the myths and varnish over the warts and feet of clay all human beings have.
Sometimes that can be a good thing. It can also be bad.
The movie "Selma" is a case in point. It diminishes LBJ's role in the historic civil rights movement.
And concerning whites who were in attendance at the King funeral, besides the liberal saint, Bobby Kennedy, another fellow who would be elected president in that contencious year was there too. He's not remembered too well in the history books, although he was a patriot. His name was Richard Nixon.
There are thousands of black dots and only a few dozen red ones.
There are always too many white people or too few white people because white people are bad.
Remkember that photo was not taken in a hostile place such as Alabama. It was taken in Martin's hometown Atlanta where the serious mourning had been total for several days starting early on the morning of his death.
The day of the funeral cortege to Ebeneezer Baptist Church most whites cried openly. They never should have shot that man!
The blacks seemed stunned into a resolve. The column of marchers became mostly black because whites stood aside in solemn respect for the black community as they mourned their magnificent leader in a final march. Southerners are that way.
The whites marching in front were mostly northern politicians who came to Atlanta looking for a photo op.
I was around at the time and don't recall any great affection for MLK or anybody else except JFK except on TV.
The JFK affection was by mailgirls.
It was all stupid comedy at best.
Americans of all races did mourn King and were deeply affected by his murder. It's not surprising that the most emotional reaction came from blacks. Part of that emotional reaction was violence and threat of violence, which might have had some effect on the racial mix of the crowd at the Atlanta funeral pictured. There had been violent riots in over 100 cities.
The horrid Lester Maddox, Governor of Georgia at the time, refused to close any state offices and (wisely) declined to attend the service or otherwise recognize the event. Maddox had declared King to be an enemy of the country.
The white mayor of Atlanta, Ivan Allen, took an opposite tack. He met Mrs. King at the airport, walked the streets in black neighborhoods and worked with the police and black and white establishments to facilitate the funeral. (Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola had personally offered to bear all expense related to the funeral, and made good on the promise.)
The funeral was tragic and magnificent. It was a funeral organized by the black community for a black hero. It started at Ebenezer Baptist Church and ended at Morehouse College, probably the two most prominent black institutions in Atlanta. It became an event of the people of Atlanta, and especially the black people, and was not appropriated by national or state politicians. By request of Mrs. King, no mention was made at the service of any of Dr. King's awards. It was a service for a man who had tried to serve God and his fellow man as best he could.
The artwork is either a piece of propaganda or a misreading of the event. The photo tells little of whether whites mourned King. I know I did, as did the white people I knew. (I was living in Charlottesville at the time.) So did millions upon millions of others.
Walking down a sidewalk a few years ago I saw a box of Life magazines circa 1968 next to a trash barrel. On top was this issue. Since there were the magazines that literally introduced me to the world, I grabbed the box, carried them home and put them in my basement.
Anyway, the picture in question is the two-page centerfold of the magazine. If you look up along the column of people following the procession, there is a point in the distance where the image naturally blurs and procession goes from dark and colorful to pale and gray.
Along that point of separating that is a horizontal line of darkly clad men without the familiar v of a dress shirt and jacket. Quite visible even at the WP link, they appear to be a cordon of police with white gloves (about even with the bottom of the 25mph school zone flashing sign on the right).
Two thoughts:
1.) Might it be that those in the front section of the procession were invited guests separated from the rest of the procession by police? An invitation only group at the front of a procession would not be "a powerful image that perfectly captures how divided America was when MLK died," unless your point was about black separatism.
2.) There is no way you can tell the race of the people behind that line, yet the "Chilean Artist" does so with abandon.
MLK made Americans more American. That is, he brought America closer to the American ideal. This despite his personal and political failures. He was, after all, just a man, though a great one.
If I learned one thing from reading the Crack Emcee on this blog, it's that black assimilation does not lead to liberation. Only tokenization in service of the existing power structure. This liberation theology has been borrowed by queer and trans activists incidentally.
Born in Chile, Jaar moved to New York in 1982. “In the early ’80s, I thought the issues of civil rights had been resolved,” he said.
Why should I give a rat's what this guy thinks about something that happened 14 years before he even came here?
On April 7, 1968, former Vice President Richard Nixon visited Mrs. King and recalled his first meeting with her husband in 1955. Nixon also went to Mrs. King's husband's funeral on April 9, 1968, but did not walk in the procession. Nixon believed participating in the procession would be "grandstanding."
It was the SCLC that provided security for the procession. And after the assassination it would only make sense for the SCLC security to limit access to at the front to guests and dignitaries.
The procession down the three-and-a-half miles from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College was observed by over 100,000 people; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference commissioned a security detail to manage the crowd, while the Atlanta Police Department limited their participation to management of automobile traffic and to accompany dignitaries attending the events...
Among the persons leading the procession, besides the immediate family of the civil rights leader, were Jesse Jackson, who held the flag of the United Nations, now Congressman John Lewis, and Andrew Young who was at one time the Mayor of Atlanta and also Ambassador to the United Nations.
Posterity ain't what it used to be, but it lasts a long time. Jefferson has had a drastic downward revision, but no man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and completed the Louisiana Purchase may be said to have lived in vain. MLK's reputation has steadily increased since his death, as it should. He was a flawed man and wrong about a lot of things, but he got the big thing right, both in rhetoric and in execution.
I agree with Fandor - Kimg's popularity like the Kennedy's brothers is largely because he died a violent death. Does anyone doubt that if he were alive today, he'd end up like another Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton?
What people now remember is his post-assassination enshrinement.
"Great career move" said the publicist upon hearing of Elvis Presley's demise.
How could Americans of all racial backgrounds not have mourned the death of the great civil rights leader?...
Whatever is the German philosophical term for "projecting current-day attitudes onto yesteryear's events and persons" applies here. A bug, not a feature, of the bien-pensant imagination.
Does anyone doubt that if he were alive today, he'd end up like another Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton?
Nelson Mandela died in old age, and his reputation hasn't suffered.
Maybe I'm naive, but as much as I enjoy King's speeches and nobility in advocating his cause - and he truly did advance the nation - I am duly hung up on his failures as a man, husband, and reverend for his seemingly prolific and wanton adultery and apparent invitation to such.
@ treeJoe...You are stuck in legalistic hell. What should be the penalty for King? Death maybe?
Nelson Mandela died in old age, and his reputation hasn't suffered.
I think the relevant comparison is to his fellow travelers who were generally respected at that time for their role in the "civil rights" movement but because they continued on long after have generally become seen as a toxic joke.
Traditionalguy - huh?
My point was: With any icon you need to balance the entire person. King advanced the cause of african americans in many ways. But is it also causing problems that today's strongest African American icon, and a preacher at that, was so wantonly unfaithful to his wife?
What are the ramifications of such a dichotomy?
I see plenty of analysis on hiphop/rap's message and impact on young black men in America. I find it concerning that some of the biggest icons (as named by most AA associations) - King, Sharpton, Jackson - are all pastors who have had affairs. Albeit King did not share their other negatives.
My point is simply this: if you are going to Honor the man, respect the strengths and the weaknesses.
Thorley Winston said...Does anyone doubt that if he were alive today, he'd end up like another Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton?
I very much doubt that MLK would be another Al Shartpon and I'm optimistic enough to hope that Jesse Jackson wouldn't be the Jesse Jackson we know now had MLK survived. I take your point that MLK's secular beatification would likely not have happened absent his death, but given what we know of the man (as a thinker and leader) I don't think it's fair to conclude he would have been a Sharpton or Jackson had he lived.
When King died, he was advocating for “radical economic change” and had taken a stance against the Vietnam War, [the civil rights historian David Garrow said]. Both of those issues alienated him from some former supporters.
Gee, it's almost as though people might have non-racist reasons for opposing a black leader or a movement of black people. I'm sure that's news to everyone on the Left, but luckily they'll learn that and moderate their denunciations of "racist!" appropriately.
The thing that gives me the most pause about King was not his affairs but his plagiarism of a theology thesis. If you commit plagiarism to advance your study of God, it seems to me that your study of God is very, very wrongheaded......At any event, no matter what zigs and zags his reputation will undergo in the future, he will remain one of the great men of his era.
Mandela was a better man. Maybe if King had spent 20 years in a South African prison, he might have been a better man as well. Also he would have lived longer too.
I think that it's fair to say that, in the end, the rhetoric of Jefferson was more powerful than his hypocrisies. The same can be said of King. Sometimes the words are better than the man. King's speech has now joined the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address as part of our holy writ. That perhaps trumps all his debilities.
Just off the top of my head, I can only name Truman, Churchill, and Teddy Roosevelt as men who matched their drive and achievements with marital fidelity.
Judgement of sexual predators (a/k/a black men) must comfort the religious among us. It fascinated J. Edgar Hoover. And as an added attraction it is the easiest slander to make since those first slave ships arrived full of naked men and women that had no superior morality as their owners who worked them to death under a whip claimed to have.
This is in my opinion an offensive and preposterous piece of propaganda. However, it fits well with the current recasting of King and his impact, as evidenced also in the film "Selma." Ron Radish has the best piece on this film I have seen so far.
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2015/01/19/the-uses-and-abuses-of-martin-luther-king-day/
Compare the photo that Ron's article starts with to both the film and this piece of "art." Both of the later have this in common, though from very different points of view: They wash out of the picture the incredible, almost universal inclusiveness of King's movement and message. Yes, he differed with LBJ over Vietnam and poverty, and perhaps that drove some whites away around the time of his death. However, the attendance at this point in his funeral tells us nothing. Many blacks also were driven away at that point. In particular, I mean the Black Power movement, Stokley and SNCC, Malcom X, etc., all of whom by then reviled King. King had opposed the Black Power and other black nationalists in return. Out of that clash and the big urban riots, a racial divide did also open up. But this photo is not evidence for it, or anything. The photo's appearance now is, however, consistent with the essentially black nationalist worldview of the post-King civil rights leadership, which touts blacks against whites at every turn. In this, it also pretends that blacks were the only ones there for King even in Selma, as well as at his funeral. The film distorts and trivializes the role of LBJ and, as Ron Radosh well shows, it leaves other whites and the Jews in particular out entirely. It is tragic
MLK's actions, speeches and writings are for the ages now. He must somehow fit into a spin for each area's bias of what the reality was in the South of 1958 to 1968. But he was a stand up man of courage with a capital C, whatever his skin and hair colors were.
Nice work Martin.
Post a Comment