Speaking at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Friday night, Angela Davis strayed far from the official topic to zero in on her take-home message.
The speaker for the second annual Martin Luther King Keynote Address packed Swinney Recreation Center to near capacity, but Davis, a former Black Panther and professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, made the reverend a relatively minor character in her commentary. Instead, she spoke of Haitian revolutionaries, forgotten activists and the real motive behind the movement that made her an icon.
"We have a skewed historical memory," Davis said.
Yes, the Montgomery Bus Boycott elevated King to national prominence, but it was women like Jo Ann Robinson who created the movement, Davis said. When Rosa Parks was arrested, Robinson penned a flier calling for a boycott and stayed up all night mimeographing 35,000 handbills for distribution. "It was people whose names we don't know who organized that movement," Davis said of the civil rights era.
Not only do we overlook the true players, Davis suggested. We've also lost sight of Dr. King's real goal.
Davis is often heralded as one of the most recognizable figures of the civil rights era. Listed briefly on the FBI's "Most Wanted" list, she was tried and acquitted of involvement in a botched prisoner rescue that killed a California judge in 1970. She was a Black Panther, an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and, for a time, an avowed communist. But defining that era as a push for black equality is selling the work short, Davis explained.
"Full citizenship does not accomplish everything a person needs to be free," she said. "It's a precondition for freedom, not freedom writ large." And for those in the movement, Davis suggested, it wasn't about civil rights alone. It was a freedom movement.
"There are many ways in which we've narrowed Dr. King's legacy," she said. "When he was assassinated he was working with sanitation workers. His work was about economic freedom, as well."
If Dr. King were alive today, Davis suggested, his struggle wouldn't be confined to the African-American community. He would advocate for the rights of prisoners and immigrants. He would fight for marriage equality for the gay and lesbian community. "If we say we're working for justice and freedom we have to open our minds," Davis said. "What freedom movements do it enlarge the terrain of freedom."
In his most famous speech, King never explained what he saw on the top of the mountain, Davis pointed out. He never defined the view. "Because it grows and changes," she explained.
Davis acknowledged that it never occurred to her that a black man would be elected president in her lifetime. Still, that's just the first hill of the political mountain range. "Freedom involves the right to be healthy, the right to education," Davis said. "Health should not be allowed to be turned into a commodity."
And the legacy of King can be a guide even in these modern struggles, she proposed. "When we think about Dr. King, we should think about what collective masses of people can accomplish," she said.
"It does matter a great deal that George Bush is no longer president, but it would matter even more that Barack Obama is president if we organized, created a movement to put pressure on him to do the right thing," she added. "We do a great deal of damage to our movements if we assume we've got to do one thing or another."
In that regard, she challenged the audience to live up to the take-charge activism of Jo Ann Robinson and the wide vision of Martin Luther King Jr.
"A lot of times we want it to be real simple," she said. "But this time of year [we] have to push the envelope. We need to learn to be more complicated in our ways of thinking."
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