Faculty Summer Research Grant Recipient of the Center for “race” Lecture Opening Remarks By Jonathan Lightfoot (April 4, 2018)

Good Morning Hofstra! My name is Dr. Jonathan Lightfoot. I am the Director of the Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice. My remarks will be brief as I welcome you all to our second and final public lecture for the spring 2018 semester. Dr. Mustapha Masrour answered our call for faculty summer research grant proposals designed to promote campus inclusion and enhance the scholarship and research profile of the Center. His work explores ways to improve intercultural relationships among domestic and international students and faculty. I look forward to hearing his enlightened perspective on such a timely issue of critical concern at this juncture in American democratic society.

But first, I would like to recognize this day, April 4, 2018, as the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the prime age of 39. His violent death was one of many high profile political murders that occurred during the 1960s, including voting rights advocate Medgar Evers in June 1963, President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X in February 1965 and Senator Robert Kennedy in June 1968. The 1960s was indeed a decade that transformed America for better or for worse. Dr. King was the leader of the modern American Civil Rights Movement and his death effectively interrupted the momentum of the movement just as its message was becoming more radical and left leaning. Please indulge me for a moment to establish a bit of historical context that led to the tragedy of April 4, 1968.

Three pivotal events gave rise to the Modern American Civil Rights Movement. The first one occurred when the Supreme Court overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which ended legal Jim Crow segregation with the 1954 Brown decision, which proclaimed that separate was inherently unequal. Long story short, Black students could not be legally denied access to white schools, which was followed by a struggle to desegregate all areas of public accommodations such as rail transportation, buses, water fountains and housing among many other institutions supported with government tax dollars. The second event was the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Black boy from Chicago who was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi during the last week of his summer vacation in late August 1955. He had graduated from grammar school and was scheduled to start high school in early September. It was the brave courage of his mother, Mamie Till, who used the social media of the 1950s, photography and television, to show the world what white racists from Mississippi did to her son. Against the advice of many, she insisted on an open casket funeral so the world could see her son’s unrecognizable, mutilated body. This brings me to the third catalyzing event that sparked the Modern American Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus a few months later, on December 1, 1955. Ms. Parks was noted as saying she thought of Emmett Till when making her decision not to get up from her seat that fateful day. The Black folks of Montgomery had had enough and launched a bus boycott that lasted over 13 months and ended in victory, a successful desegregation of the city’s transportation system. It was the Montgomery bus boycott organizers who recruited a young 26-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead the effort.   

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life is now honored with a holiday commemorating his birthday, January 15, 1929. However, during the 13 years he led the Movement he had his share of haters (Black, white and in between) who did not like his non-violent challenge to America’s racial hypocrisy. The campaign to honor his legacy with a holiday often required white America to engage in a bit of revisionist history and sanitize his message to make it more palatable. For example, we tend to focus on his 1963 March on Washington’s “I Have a Dream” speech where he famously declared that his dream was deeply rooted in the American Dream and included references to the ideals of freedom, justice and equality. He famously stated:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Again, let me remind you of how violent and volatile the 1960s were. It was largely characterized by a growing protest to the Vietnam War beginning in the mid-1960s. I will argue that if Dr. King had kept his attention on the struggle for American civil rights and its Kum Ba Yah message of “Can we all just get along,” his life would have been spared. However, that was not to be for in his growing frustration with American political and racial hypocrisy, he began to speak a forbidden truth to a vindictive power. His message turned more radical as he began to speak out against the Vietnam War, poverty and American capitalism. In his 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in New York he asked the question, “Where do we go from here?”, as he challenged the American government to fully emancipate its Black people from second class citizenship to first class citizenship. On Thursday April 4, 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot down while on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He had gone there to support the Black sanitation workers who had suffered numerous labor abuses, including a racially differentiated wage scale, and the recent death of two workers who died due to unsafe working conditions. Attacks on American imperial militarism, capitalism and its brand of human rights has life or death consequences, and as such marked Dr. King for death. He paid the ultimate price in his move from domestic civil rights advocacy to global human rights and economic advocacy, his life. The assassins may have killed his body but gave life to the eternal spirit of protest.

As a child I watched the Movement play out on television and even saw it live as the city of Chicago erupted in rioting and burning the night of Dr. Kings death. I often hoped the world would stick around long enough to allow me to grow up to become an adult and live out the fullness of my days. My fear was real as I bore witness to 4 young girls suffer death from the bombing of their church on a Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama. I felt the pain of youth protesters who were attacked and bitten by vicious police dogs. I too, was scarred as I saw other youth protesters endure powerful water hoses knocking them to the ground and searing their skin as they marched for freedom and equality. A popular question often asked during King Day celebrations is, “would Dr. King be pleased with the progress America has made towards freedom, justice and equality in 2018?” How will we explain the persistent gaps in educational achievement between Blacks and whites; how will we explain the re-segregation of schools; the stubborn patterns of housing segregation; mass incarceration of Black and Brown men; racialized employment and wage gaps; and finally, how do we explain the perpetual killing of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of brutal and militaristic police? From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin to Sandra Bland to Tamir Rice to Stephon Clark just last week. The list is too long and painful to read right now. The lynching death of Emmett Till in Money Mississippi sparked the modern American Civil Rights Movement in 1955 and nearly 50 years later in 2014 the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri sparked the Black Lives Matter Movement. I believe Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would NOT be pleased with American progress but he would still encourage us to keep hope alive and continue to love those who may not love you back.        

Before I bring the Xiaofan Liu, a graduate international student from China to the podium to introduce our keynote speaker to you, please allow me one more historical reference. We must give credit to the Modern American Civil Rights Movement for much of the human rights progress America has made over the last 50 years, including women’s rights, disability rights, LGBTQ rights and other progressive initiatives such as interdisciplinary and ethnic studies at all levels of education. One legislative achievement is most relevant ahead of our lecture today and that is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which went into effect in 1968. This law overturned the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which restricted the immigration of people to the United States from many of the “shithole” countries (your president’s word, not mine) in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern and Southern Europe. Also called the Hart-Cellar Act, it marked a major move towards eliminating discrimination based on national origin, “race” and ancestry as a basis for immigration. Notably it did not include protections for refugees seeking asylum from persecution based on sexual orientation or religion. I guess we should leave that to our current presidential administration as it tries to implement its brand of immigration reform in 2018 (think Muslim bans, merciless deportations and border walls). God help us!

April 4, 2018