Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Need for Educational Justice Now
In April of 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave speeches in front of the United Nations and at the Riverside Church about the need to end the Vietnam War, merging both the civil rights movements and the peace movements of the time. Critics on many fronts casted doubt on MLK’s theories. At the time, the Vietnam War was still popular across the country while people’s perceptions of MLK grew rancorous, even among people we might consider allies. Yet, there was Dr. King, marching down the streets of the empire city with a loose coalition of leaders including Benjamin Spock and Stokely Carmichael (a.k.a. Kwame Ture). He knew that “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”
His time in New York City served as a bellwether for the militancy of the burgeoning Black Power movement thereafter and the limits of American imperialism via USA’s eventual loss against Vietnam’s forces.
As I sat in Riverside Church today, I had a few opportunities to reflect on the need for a social education justice movement. The massive teacher protests across the country laid waste to the idea of the apolitical educator. Given the right conditions (and the right politicians), people can muster up the rage to converge on any public square for educational change. Educators took time from planning lessons and grading papers to write letters to public officials, knock on doors, and, for a few hundred, run for public office. At the moment, we still have burgeoning educator uprisings in Los Angeles, Denver, and the state of Virginia.
This comes a few years after Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama led the country through a suite of neoliberal reforms called “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top,” respectively. Many Black folks saw NCLB / RTTT as a necessary step towards accountability and transparency in schools. For too long, many Black parents had complained about a lack of communication and expectation for their children, and these initiatives at least provided a theory of practice that felt tangible (ostensibly) to non-educators. Now, “choices” would come with “data” by these means.
That was the narrative that was sold. What came true was the overemphasis on high-stakes standardized testing, over-reporting for disciplinary action, and mass privatization of public institutions. People may have thought they were getting justice; we got something altogether injurious.
King saw the intersection of war, civil rights, and education when he said in the aforementioned Vietnam speech:
“And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.”
We would take heed to create and build upon an education movement that understands the association between what happens inside our classrooms and outside our classroom. It bears repeating that students’ learning conditions are our teachers’ working conditions. We also know that out-of-school factors have long, generational effects on students’ educational attainment. Everything from environmental racism and economic stratification to shrinking school district budgets and redlining continue to strip our children of opportunities for self-fulfillment.
In other words, we need to keep building an education movement that, at its heart, is responsive and adjacent to the anti-racism movements, the pro-immigration movements, the economic movements, and the anti-capitalism movements. Black Lives Matter at our schools and elsewhere. Our students have led us to DREAM better. We need to assure that corporations pay their workers decent wages, which often includes so many of our students. Teachers shouldn’t have to spend thousands of dollars to create affirming learning environments for our students to make up for society’s lack of will.
If there’s enough money to spend for the United States’ war on terrorism, there’s enough money to make sure our students can close the generational education gap.
The dream doesn’t end with Black children and white children holding hands, either. From an educator standpoint, it starts with building capacity for the nexus of policy and practice, developing more cooperative leadership models, and changing pedagogy to initiate and engage our students into their own power. If the current educational protests are any indication, we have the opportunity to put the spotlight on the educational experiences of our students.
We may lose some popularity along the way, but what’s just is not always popular at the moment of heightened strife. But justice can roll down like waters, at the confluence where these movements stream.
