The Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration has become an annual ritual where we recite some of King’s most didactic quotes and read some of his most essential speeches, shame those we want to shame into action, talk about how everyone should be on deck because it is the one holiday that seems to bring everyone together under a unifying umbrella.
The day after the King holiday we go back to business as usual, put every other issue that King would have tackled head on in the back burner until the next remembrance.
And in Detroit, where King delivered the first draft of the iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at Cobo Hall, the celebration should take on an even more serious note beyond the often advertising gimmicks that accompany the day-long anniversary.
In honoring King we should look at the state of Detroit, the condition that the city finds itself in and the kind of leadership that we should model and whether that speaks to King’s legacy.
Does Detroit deserve bold, intelligent, creative, courageous and honest leadership, or simply mediocre leadership that lends itself to the past ineptitudes that gave birth to the present conditions the city is facing today?
According to Data Driven Detroit, about 60 percent of children in Detroit live in poverty, amidst roughly 70,000 abandoned homes. The 2010 Census estimated that about 37 percent of residents in Detroit live below the poverty line as of 2011, and 47 percent of the city is functionally illiterate.
Beyond the glamor of moving the city forward, the optimistic lenses we are all quick to wear, and the genuine work of men and women committed to moving the city from the current economic doldrums, this is the state of Detroit that our leaders seldom discuss on the campaign trail or elsewhere.
There is no way to begin to foresee a future for the city if that many children — our future leaders — are living in dire poverty, because of the conditions that were born into.
Our city government has an inescapable responsibility to guarantee the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for these children. They, like other children, deserve the same basic necessities to enable them grow healthy, wealthy and wise.
Unless Detroit’s leaders show some urgency in attacking the vices of poverty, insecurity that holds the future of innocent children in this town hostage, emerging from bankruptcy won’t be a panacea. The city can start with a clean financial sheet but if officials continue to give a deaf ear to grinding poverty emboldened by dismal city services — reflected, for instance, in the work of EMS — that offers no hope to children when they need to be transported to the emergency room, our local government represents nothing more than a political charade.
Dr. King warned all of us when he said, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
And the challenge of rising above our own selfish domains is part of the problem, where often some in the Black intelligentsia — including some Black corporate executives — are quick to extricate themselves from the problems in Detroit because they have “arrived” and the issues facing the city and the number of children in dire poverty is no longer a part of their problem. Yet they benefited from the gains of the movement that King and others led.
For those who think in this light about Detroit and not wanting to lend a hand in this crisis of humanity and conscience, I offer these words from King: “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
King made it clear when he said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
And that is why the foolishness being displayed by Detroit City Council President Pro Tem George Cushingberry matters. It is not a private matter, as some council members quickly said in an attempt to sweep the scandal under the rug. It is a very public matter for someone who took the oath of office to represent thousands of Detroiters, including some of those children living in poverty.
Driving with an empty alcohol bottle in your car, or being summoned after repeated reprimands on questions of serious legal and ethical lapses resulting from allegations of misrepresentation is not the kind of leadership Detroit needs to represent its people in government.
In fact, this is not what Detroit City Council should begin 2014 with or at any other time. Moreover, it is another black eye for a city that has had too many already.
No right-thinking person would ever encourage their children to drive around with an emptied alcohol bottle. That is not what our children should see, let alone emulate, from those who call themselves leaders of Detroit.
For this alone, Cushingberry should be sentenced to the court of conscience where he can take care of his many issues because, as Dr. King said, “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.”
Leadership is about discipline and effective leadership means Cushingberry should have taken care of his issues before mounting the public stage as the second in command of the Detroit City Council. You can’t be in this leadership position yet make caricature of the office by your behavior and seemingly never-ending troubles.
Detroit has gone through a lot. We have serious poverty and other challenges to tackle. It can’t afford tragic leadership that would be comical were it not for the fact that it is so serious.
Consider this: this year’s King celebration also falls on the 50 anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” unveiled five decades ago when he began to discuss the “Great Society” in a 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he addressed spring graduates.
“The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning,” President Johnson said. “And our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders. New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come, not only to live, but to live the good life.”
Making Detroit a place where generations to come can call home would mean that we begin a campaign to address hidden social inequities that hide behind the daily headlines, ones that sometimes render our conscience guilty when we walk away from a Martin Luther King Day celebration, issues we discuss at dinner table but are too afraid to champion in public. Notwithstanding, there are organizations rendering support to address some of the core issues Detroit is facing.
For example Reading Works, an organization determined that, “If we truly want to have any impact in improving adult literacy, we must approach this issue as a community. And that is exactly what Reading Works is doing. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel or create a new educational program. Instead, we are asking, “What will it take to move the community forward?’”
And Carol Goss, former leader of the Skillman Foundation, in a 2012 State of the Detroit Child Report, admonished, “Targeted investment in Detroit kids today is necessary so they can be productive citizens and active participants in the city’s turnaround.”
Since Johnson’s declaration on “unconditional war on poverty in America,” about 46 million today are said to live in abject poverty. We have a long way to go and Detroit leaders must not be missing in action.
Bankole Thompson is the editor of the Michigan Chronicle and author of “Obama and Christian Loyalty,” which deals with the politics of the religious right, black theology and the president’s faith with an epilogue written by former White House spokesman Robert S. Weiner. He is a political analyst at WDET-101.9FM (Detroit NPR Affiliate) and a member of the weekly “Obama Watch” Sunday evening round table on WLIB-1190AM New York and simulcast in New Jersey and Connecticut. Email bthompson@michronicle.com or visit https://www.bankolethompson.com.
