“It was the four corners of
the civil rights universe,” said one observer of the large, predominantly
African-American audience at Friday night’s annual April 4th
Foundation dinner at the Convention Center. And, from such iconic figures as
Harry Belafonte, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, actor Danny Glover,
and U.S. Representatives John Lewis and John Conyers, came an
abundance of rhetoric aimed at the residual guardians of privilege.
Here’s what Belafonte, who was
here in 1968 in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and who
returned here some years later to receive a Freedom Award, said about his latest
visit to Memphis: “It was hard to look on Memphis as a place to be, or for a
man to want to visit again. Through the years this community has struggled to
find its moral center and to begin to engage in work to heal the pain of this
place and to put that in focus for our journey toward d liberation.”
Both the pain of the place –
specifically, the assassination here of Dr. King 40 years ago – and that
struggle for a redeeming moral center were aspects, too, of visits to Memphis
last week from two presidential candidates, Democratic senator Hillary
Clinton and Republican senator John McCain.
Speaking on Friday at Mason
Temple, site of King’s immortal “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, the last
one he ever gave, Clinton took note of “the young people standing in the back of
the room” and said, “Because of him, after 219 years and 43 presidents who have
been white men, this next generation will grow up taking for granted that a
woman or an African American can be president of the United States.”
That grace note and
acknowledgement of her opponent for the Democratic nomination, fellow senator
Barack Obama, had a parallel in simultaneous remarks being delivered by
McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, at the National Civil Rights Museum (where
Clinton, too, would come after her remarks at Mason Temple).
“I was wrong,” confessed
McCain about his vote in 1983 against the creation of Martin Luther King
national holiday. The admission was greeted with boos by some members of the crowd
gathered in the Museum parking lot, and it would earn McCain derision from some
political opponents, who wondered, as 9th District congressman
Steve Cohen did at a Town Hall meeting the next day, why McCain, as he
acknowledged, had failed back then to grasp the “issue.”
Clinton, too, had owned up to
feelings of shortcomings in the past. After lamenting the imitations of her
background in an all-white suburb of Chicago, she spoke to the challenged she
felt as a student at Wellesley upon hearing of King’s assassination: “I felt
everything had just shattered….You know I joined a protest march in Boston and
wore a black armband…But I felt like it wasn’t enough.”
The third member of the
current trial of presidential hopefuls, Obama, did not come to Memphis, though
he spoke to the occasion of Dr. King’s death and the meaning of his life
elsewhere. But, even if he was not present in the city, Obama’s presence here
was felt in things said about him by others. He was endorsed by both Lowery and
Belafonte, the latter of whom, speaking on Sunday at a Cohen-sponsored “Town
Hall” at Rhodes College, called him “our beloved Barack Obama.”
Both, however, were also
critical of Obama for backing down from his support of his controversial pastor,
Jeremiah Wright, to accommodate the media.
As Lowery put it, “They’re not
concerned about Jeremiah Wright….They’ve got their nerve…the gall of
their suggestion that the man ought to leave his church. By what moral
authority!..I heard him say that that’s where he found Jesus….You’re gonna tell
me to leave the place where I first saw the light?”
Cohen, who figured prominently
at the April 4th Foundation dinner as well as at his Rhodes conclave
the next day, had a good week – picking up endorsements of various kinds from
most of the dignitaries present at the two occasions. Conyers, chairman of the
Judiciary Committee, praised Cohen, a committee member, for his work and made an
outright endorsement of Cohen. Rep. Lewis followed suit.
Belafonte (whose sister, Shirley Cooks, is Cohen’s Washington chief of staff) was a bit more
oblique, though his remarks, both at the Convention Center and at Rhodes, were
highly favorable to the incumbent congressman. At Rhodes, he included an implied
swipe at Cohen’s main Democratic primary opponent, Nikki Tinker: “I’m not
here to tell you how to vote, but I have this to say to you. Justice knows no
race….Commitment has no race. We might be getting another Condoleeza Rice.
You might be getting another cunning liar. Be careful what you do in the name of
race.Just
take a look at how our [sic] congressman has voted, at his record.” He
concluded, “I’ll be back to celebrate the victory.”
Jake Ford,
who ran for Congress in the 9th District two years ago as an independent and filed to
do so again last week, had a harder time of it. He and brother Isaac Ford
made remarks at the Election Commission on Thursday that seemed to be insisting
that, since the 9th District contained a black majority, it should be
represented by a black. Candidate Ford was also quoted as saying that Cohen, who
is Jewish, was “for Jews” but not for blacks.
These were odd assertions
during a week when Memphis and the world were honoring a man who dreamed of a
time when people were judged not by race, “but by the content of their
character.”
Both Jake Ford’s father,
former congressman Harold Ford Sr.,and his brother, former congressman
and current head of the Democratic Leadership Council Harold Ford Jr.,
were in town for a bachelor party preceding the latter’s forthcoming wedding,
and both promptly disavowed these comments, Harold Ford Jr. calling them an
“insult” and going on record as having advised his brother against running.
Arguably the last word on MLK
week came this Tuesday from the Rev. James Lawson of Nashville, a former
King associate, who told Memphis Rotarians that Memphis, as the site of King’s
assassination, might ironically become the site for “the beginnings of change.”
