By Osa Amadi
Today, June 8, is significant in the political history of Nigeria. It is the death date of Nigeria’s worst military dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha.
The times also coincide with an ongoing resurgence of protests and riots against racism in the USA. As we compute it in Nigeria, June 4 (the day Kudirat Abiola was assassinated on Abacha’s instruction for fighting to reclaim her husband’s presidential mandate) + June 8 (the death date of Kudirat’s assassin) = June 12 (the date the freest and fairest election in Nigeria was conducted and won by MKO Abiola, but was annulled by the then military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida in connivance with the Nigerian military.
As this next segment of the history of black man’s struggle for freedom and justice unfolds before our eyes, your ever-proactive Vanguard’s Arts & Reviews takes you through the important milestones, as well as updates, of this struggle. Enjoy every bit of it:
First and foremost, Martin Luther King Jr (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was a preacher of God’s word. Preaching the word of God runs in his family.
His father, grandfather, great-grandfather, his only brother, and his father’s brother were all preachers. But Martin Luther King Jr is a preacher with a difference. On page 18 of his autobiography, he writes:
“It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried. It well has been said: “A religion that ends with the individual ends.”
Throughout the history of blacks’ struggle against segregation, racism, and injustice in the USA, there has been, as it were in the struggle of the Jews against German Nazism, the dilemma of whether to toe the path of violence or non-violence.
This issue also preoccupied the movement which Martin Luther Jr led in the 1960s in the USA.
Suffice it to say he chose the part of peaceful protests against violence, even though to the disappointment of many youths who were involved in the many protest marches organized and led in those days by Luther Jr.
Moreover, he made it clear right from the beginning, that the fight was not against white people per se, recognizing that many white people are unhappy with racism and the injustice against black people.
On page 139, he marshalled out the ultimate aim of the protest when discussed his address to students during the youth march for integrated schools on April 18, 1959, in Washington D.C:
“I urged the students,” Martin Luther writes, “to continue the struggle on the highest level of dignity.
They had rightly chosen to follow the path of nonviolence. Our ultimate aim was not to defeat or humiliate the white man but to win his friendship and understanding.
We had a moral obligation to remind him that segregation is wrong. We protested with the ultimate aim of being reconciled with our white brothers.”
Though peaceful, it was a stubborn nonviolent engagement modelled after and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s in India.
When Luther and other protestors were arrested by the violent police and were considering granting them bail, they chose jail to bail.
Luther King Jr was arrested alongside other 280 students in October 1960 for participating in a nonviolent march to integrate launch counters in Atlanta, Georgia.
Luther did not organize the protest. He was invited by the organizers to be part of it, and “I felt a moral obligation to be in it with them,” he says.
When Martin Luther King Jr was offered bail in court by the judge, he stubbornly rejected it with the following words:
“Sir, I know you have a legal obligation facing you at this hour. This judicial obligation may cause you to hand us over to another court rather than dismiss the charges.
But sir, I must say that I (also) have a moral obligation facing me at this hour. This imperative drives me to say that if you find it necessary to set a bond, I cannot in all good conscience have anyone go buy my bail.
I will choose jail rather than bail, even if it means remaining in jail a year or even ten years.
Maybe it will take this type of self-suffering on the part of numerous Negroes to finally expose the moral defense of our white brothers who happen to be misguided and thusly awaken the dozing conscience of our community.”
After about six-day, when the government saw that the 280 persons arrested were determined to stay in jail without bulging an inch and that the community was rumbling, they dropped the charges and all the 280 persons, including Martin Luther King Jr, were released immediately without bail.
Songs as the soul of the movement
Martin Luther King Jr described the songs sang during the protest marches as “the soul of the movement”:
“An important part of the mass meeting was freedom songs. In a sense, the freedom songs are the soul of the movement. They are more than just incantations of clever phrases designed to invigorate a campaign; they are as old as the history of the Negro in America.
They are adaptations of songs the slaves sang – the sorrow songs, the shouts of joy, the battle hymns, and the anthems of our movement. I have heard people talk of their beat and rhythm, but we in the movement are as inspired by their words.”
Through those protests, the government was forced to enact far-reaching legislation and make reforms, leading Martin Luther King Jr to observe that legislation was first written in the street:
“Demonstrations, experience has shown, are part of the process of stimulating legislation and law enforcement. The federal government reacts to events more quickly when a situation of conflict cries out for its intervention.
Beyond this, demonstrations have a creative effect on the social and psychological climate that is not matched by the legislative process.”
It was those legislations and reforms won by Martin Luther King Jr and others that granted voting rights to black Americans and eventually paved way for what no one could have imagined at that time to be possible – the 44th President of USA, a black man, Barrack Obama, who ruled the United States of America from 2009-2017!
At some point in his vocation as a civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr became both convinced and fearless he was going to pay the supreme price for his struggle to emancipate black Americans from segregation, racial discrimination, injustice, and economic deprivations.
His ground-breaking sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967, was somewhat an epitaph and a funeral oration which Martin Luther King Jr rendered to himself:
“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.
You may be thirty-eight years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause.
And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer.
You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house.
So, you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at thirty-eight as you would be at ninety.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice ….”
On April 3, 1968, Luther delivered his final address on earth at Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple in Memphis.
On April 4, he was assassinated at Loraine Hotel, bringing to completion, one of the most stunning and brave careers of a civil rights leader in the world.
But as we can see, the struggle has continued to this day, even more boldly.
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