TheLoop21.com

By: Susan Anderson (follow this member)
Wed, 08/27/2008 - 00:00

I’m recommending that the Democrats take a half hour out of canned events at their convention this week to screen for the world a new documentary, The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306. The short film is about the final hours of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, before the civil rights leader was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. 

In this 40th anniversary year of the King assassination, the Democratic Party has the opportunity, not just to nominate Barack Obama, but to tell the truth about its own racist past as defenders of slavery and segregation, and open the way for authentic reconciliation. 

Yet to be released, The Witness was produced in conjunction with the Hyde Family Foundations and the National Civil Rights Museum, which restored the Lorraine Motel from a neglected eyesore to a memorial of the movement’s dream.

The key figure in The Witness is Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles, pastor of Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis for 48 years, and the last survivor to spend time with King in his hotel room. In the film, as in an April 2008 PBS interview with Tavis Smiley commemorating the King assassination, Rev. Kyles reveals much that we don’t know about Rev. King’s final hours. 

The film also contains the powerful testimony of Mrs. Maxine Smith, executive secretary of the NAACP Memphis branch at the time, and Taylor Rogers. Rogers is one of the sanitation workers whose strike for a living wage and better working conditions was the catalyst for King’s arrival in Memphis. When they marched in the streets, the sanitation workers’ placards reading “I Am a Man,” symbolized the new turn anticipated by the movement-- to link the issues of the poor and working class to the demands for racial equality. But this development was effectively halted by King’s death.

Just 40 years later, it’s too easy to forget that the Democratic Party originated in the 18th century defense of slavery, opposed the newly-formed abolitionist Republican Party in the 19th century, and evolved into the 20th century enforcer of Jim Crow, as outlined in books such as Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Dr. Eric Foner and Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past by Bruce Bartlett. 

As recently as 1964, the opposing legacies of the Democratic Party and the Civil Rights movement clashed. That’s the year the Mississippi Freedom Party, protesting the all-white state delegation, sent a separate delegation to the Democratic Convention; party leaders gave them two token seats, which the Freedom Party refused. That’s also the year when one of the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights movement, the Civil Rights Act, faced filibusters by its chief opponents in the United States Senate-- Democrats Sam Ervin, Albert Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd-- before being passed. 

Unfortunately, in the Democratic Party there are still echoes of the sorry past, in Virginia Senator James Webb’s 1990 defense of The Confederate Memorial, “The Confederate Memorial has had a special place in my life for many years...There were many, many times that I found myself drawn to this deeply inspiring memorial, to contemplate the sacrifices of others, several of whom were my ancestors….” And in the statement by Sen. Joseph Biden, Obama’s vice presidential running mate, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African American [Barack Obama] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy." Though Biden has apologized for his remark, and Obama has clearly ignored it, the unprecedented candidacy of the first American of African descent to run for president won’t itself overcome the Democratic Party’s troublesome legacy, not without an open dialogue, not without accountability.

For generations in the United States, we have buried the past, believing that we are somehow safe from its implications, until a new outbreak of race hatred and injustice, or protest and indignation by those on the receiving end, takes us by surprise.

How refreshing it would be for Democratic Party speakers addressing the country this week to put aside the happy homilies for one moment, admit their own party’s wrongs, and elucidate a way to redeeming the future. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in Letters from Birmingham Jail, five Aprils before he came to Memphis to support the garbage workers and was killed by an assassin: “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

Until the film The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306 is available for public distribution, a visit to an online archive created in collaboration between Memphis station WHBQ TV and the National Civil Rights Museum offers evocative local coverage of the dramatic events leading up to the King assassination. The circumstances surrounding King’s death themselves are still questioned by some; there were investigations by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979, and in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Justice. Both issued reports negating suspicions of a conspiracy beyond convicted killer, James Earl Ray.