Can anything good come from Nazareth: the Street Philosophy of MLK

This speech was given as the keynote address for the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Prayer Breakfast at the Jackson County-FL chapter of the NAACP, hosted by the Black Student Union of Chipola College in Marianna, Florida.

Many of you may not know this, but Jackson County was named after former President Andrew Jackson, the first military Governor of the state of Florida.

Jackson was commissioned by the United States government to violently deter Black slaves, primarily from southern Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas from escaping to Florida and joining ranks with Native American communities on the peninsula. At the time, our beloved Sunshine state was only a loosely controlled territory of the Spanish empire.

From this political turmoil, Jackson County emerged as one of the crown jewels of this settler colonial environment. So comfortable was this area with Black oppression, the Governor of Florida during the Civil War, John Milton, owned one of the largest slave plantations in the state. Rumor has it he would make the 80-mile journey from the state capitol in Tallahassee to his Dixie mansion, where he was, for all intents and purposes, judge, jury, and executioner for over 180 Black folk — notice that I did not say slaves.

Perhaps, the most startlingly realization about our county’s racial history is that, far after the abolition of slavery, the expectation that Black people were pre-ordained to labor under the Gaze of white society remained firmly rooted in the attitudes of the political Establishment. It should also be noted that the psychological basis of what historians now call the “Jim Crow era” was motivated by several waves of terrorism and guerrilla warfare by ex-confederate soldiers and their sympathizers — a history that isn’t talked about in Jackson County public schools nearly as much as it should be.

But we don’t need books to understand the character of this era. This history still walks amongst us.

One good example of this kind of oral bookkeeping is my grandmother, Rosa Pollock.

She was born into a sharecropping family in Jackson County, Florida. My grandma’s first job as a seven year old was picking cotton for a white family who lived a few miles up the road. It was 1953 — nearly a hundred years after President Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation.

During this time, throughout much of the rural South, most things remained as simple as Black and white.

Technically, this part of the county was un-incorporated. But everyone born and raised there simply called it “Jerusalem.”

This is not the Jerusalem that you’re probably familiar with from the bible. This Jerusalem had more in common with present-day Palestine. This Jerusalem, what I like call the New Jerusalem, was a space where Black folk in Jackson country drew inspiration from the predicament of the biblical Israelites.

What does it mean to preserve meaning through bondage? How do you assemble a hedge of protection and resistance when confronted with a power structure that is instructed to annihilate you? And most importantly, what does it mean to rise above genocide?

It pays to keep in mind the true meaning of the term genocide. When most of you hear this word, you probably form images of mass murder in foreign countries. While the mass killing of a cultural group is definitely a part what it means to face genocidal conditions, this is not essentially what attorney Raphael Lemkin had in mind when he first campaigned for the term to be recognized by the United Nations. According to this legal definition, genocide is simply “the intentional action to destroy a people in whole or in part.”

My main reason for emphasizing this point is because, in a very serious way, Black people like my grandmother who lived during the Jim Crow era didn’t just pass through some politically distasteful period of legal segregation; they survived an institutionally designed racial genocide.

Like any oppressive situation, to be able to emerge out of such a condition requires not only a survivor’s will but also a survivor’s tool kit. The two most important tools of this kit are not available for purchase on any market — these tools being nothing other than love and family.

These are the elements that enabled my grandmother, the turpentine child, to migrate with my late grandfather, Nathaniel Pollock, to Newark, New Jersey and raise a family in the heart of the Black community. They didn’t just raise their family, either. If you flip through any of our family photo albums, you’ll see just as many pictures of distant relatives, close friends, and neighborhood kids smiling and laughing as there is of my grandparents own children. I think that these photos represent a valuable lesson that my grandparents, especially my grandmother, understood from the start: that when you’re blessed enough to have something as precious as love and family, you have to share this kind of divine grace with the broader community, especially in a community that has been constructed by the powers that be to ensure that its members are divided.

My grandparents continued this ethic of love, family, and community as small business owners in the Westend community, following their return to Jackson County in the early 80s. Pollock’s Groceries, or simply Pollock’s, became a staple for the Black community in Marianna. I often talk to my grandma about how, back in those days, it seemed like we had our own little world across those railroad tracks. Block parties, fish fries, fried pork chop sandwiches, hot sausages, pickled eggs, the list goes on and on. There was a certain kind of unexplainable comfort about that space my grandparents created. This was our paradise. That was our Wakanda.

By watching my grandparents, I first developed a sense of the role that leaders have in revealing to others the strength that is already planted deep inside them. These experiences ultimately led my twin brother and me to apply to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ll never forget our first campus visit. We had an interview with one of the top admissions officers so that we could weigh our chances of being accepted. I kid you not, the very first statement that spilled out of this officer’s mouth was:

“I see that you guys are from north Florida.

We don’t usually recruit from that area. There’s not enough talent.”

The irony of it all is that, after finishing summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, a Finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, and a recent admit into several doctoral programs at Ivy League schools, I ran into the same admissions officer on graduation day. It seems he didn’t remember me because he asked me where I was from and I told him again that I was from north Florida. He then proceeded to shower me with compliments and tell me how proud he was. Before he could finish, I cut him off in the middle of his sentence, looked down and said:

“Thanks, man. Too bad you don’t recruit from there.”

Over the years, the chip on my shoulder has softened. However, during my first year of graduate school at Harvard, I did wonder what it was about where I was from that allowed that admissions officer to firmly doubt that I was capable of succeeding at a place like Morehouse College. One of the spiritual resources that I have relied on to make sense of this bias is the life of Jesus Christ.

If you take a look at the first chapter of John, there are several passages that make it clear how many of Jesus’s loyal followers initially doubted that he was the true Son of God — a prophecy that was first proclaimed by John the Baptist. What’s most interesting about this chapter is not the fact that these eventual disciplines doubted Jesus’ messianic claim. My intrigue with these passages is motivated by the reason they doubted his authority as the divine leader. The reasoning is made most explicit during an exchange between Nathanael and Philip from Bethsaida. Eager to share the news of Jesus, Philip says to Nathanael,

“We have found him, of who Moses in the law, and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

Nathanael responds:

“Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”

I want to pause for second and encourage everyone to think about this question that Nathanael posed to Philip. What good can come out of Nazareth?

The funny thing about this kind of question is that the subject can be easily substituted. What I mean by this is that someone asking what good can come out of Nazareth is no different, in principle, from someone asking what good can come out of Jim Crow Jerusalem, or what good can come out of Westend Marianna.

So what do these three questions have in common?

Now, many of you may be aware (through social media) that much of my academic work is about developing an intellectual framework that I call Street Philosophy. I think that, if interpreted correctly, the passages above not only highlight Jesus Christ as a charismatic leader (similar to King) but also as a person who many of us today would agree is from “the streets,” — meaning, in this context, any space whose value is overlooked due to biased perceptions held by mainstream society. For me, what this reveals is that what the three questions I posed have in common is that, no matter if you’re asking about Jesus from Nazareth or any other person from humble beginnings, what you’re really raising is a fundamentally philosophical question:

Can anything good come from the streets?

Can anything good come from a place where the majority of society forgets to look? Can anything good come from a place where the resources are limited but the hope and creativity is not? Can anything good come from a place where the fire for justice is burning but the light of society has dared not to creep in?

I think that this is the kind of street philosophical questions that a political visionary like King held close to his heart. Although he is remembered mostly for his activism during the Civil Rights movement of the early and mid 1960s, at the end of his life, King began turning away from a mainstream value-system completely. This turn, a turn toward advocating for the plight of poor, working class Black people, or the American streets, and his emphasis on the illegitimacy of the War in Vietnam, the Global streets, caused King to fall out of favor not only with white society but, more painfully for him, the Black middle class — many of whom were leaders within the Black church. As a matter of fact, in 1966, two years before his assassination, a Gallup poll found that 67% of Americans had an unfavorable rating of King. He was not only called a socialist (at a time where this accusation alone could get one killed or exiled), he was also called a traitor to the American public.

Now, if we were to take on our present-day, hyper-capitalist standpoint, where social activism has seemed to just become another get-rich-quick-scheme, a young person (maybe even myself) might wonder why would King, in the midst of unlimited fame and potential fortune, choose to walk away from all of this and advocate for the streets, or as Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon puts it in one of his works, the wretched of the earth?

I think this curiosity can be answered by drawing three core pillars from King’s street philosophy:

1. Never be for sale

2. Never overlook injustice

3. Always acknowledge hidden scripts

This first pillar is probably the most difficult for us to live by, given the hyper-financial ambitions that are thrown in our face constantly through mass media. In today’s world, it seems like the very things for sale the most are justice and integrity. So why fight the cultural current? It doesn’t seem, at least not from here, that the rich are going to just sit around and let the meek inherit the earth.

I would never deny that these are the temptations that we are facing as young revolutionaries. While I’m in no position to discourage any of you from becoming a billionaire, I will say that, for our generation to recognize that principles, such as justice, hold a value that could never be assessed on any financial market is for us to take a moral step in a direction that even King would find remarkable.

We demonstrate our commitment to justice, however, when we follow the second pillar. It’s so easy to pull up the ladder of justice; once we, as individuals or as members of some group, feel that the wrongs that we’ve experienced have been righted. You might have heard the old King cliché “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Far too many people, in my experience, hear this locution without listening to what it is expressing. On my reading, what this aphorism represents is King’s deep-seated understanding that fighting for justice is not like a sports game where there are winners and losers. It’s more like the duty a superior officer in the military has to not abandon the battlefield until all of his soldiers have been accounted for. We don’t just stop fighting when justice finds us. We continue on fighting until no injustice can find anyone.

This brings me to the final pillar. You might immediately wonder what I mean by “hidden scripts.” I see this phrase as a metaphor that captures the essence of the street domain that I mentioned earlier. Many of us are empowered in ways of which we are not at all conscious. One negative consequence of this empowerment is that we are often not aware of the great number of people we step on everyday to maintain it. So when I talk about “always acknowledging hidden scripts,” I’m asking you to keep in mind those perspectives and communities that mainstream society has chosen to overlook for reasons that are seated in an absurd attitude of superiority — what I sometimes call white-mindedness.

Jesus came from the streets and was tried and convicted by the State partly because he defied political authority from such a lowly position. While King’s origins were not as humble, throughout his life, he developed an understanding that any fight for justice will begin and end on the streets. So what is the lesson we should draw from these life examples? I’m sure there are many. But for now, the main lesson that I want everyone to remember is this:

Before you look up at kings, first look closely at the streets.

Darien Pollock

Marianna, Florida

January 20, 2020