The Dream Not Yet Fulfilled

This week Democrats will seek to record the votes of every US Senator on the matter of voting rights, despite the increasingly troubled path to passage and its looming danger for democracy

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, lead a Black voting rights march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery. (Photo by William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The arrogance on display from Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema Thursday—embarrassing President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and pleasing Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—could be reason enough to be consumed by anger and resigned to the defeat of voting rights legislation and perhaps even democracy itself.

This first-time Senator chose to tell her Democratic colleagues that she knows the real issue facing democracy—the “disease of division,” not an antiquated, Jim Crow era rule that stymies Senate debate and blocks the capacity of the majority party with its slimmest of margins to vote on legislation to secure equal access to the ballot box.

“The honest-to-God answer is I don’t know whether we can get this done,” Biden said after the contempt-filled takedown by Sinema on the Senate floor and the closed-door meeting with fellow Democrats. As for the self-dealing and ruthless McConnell, he called Sinema’s speech “an act of political courage” that could “save the Senate as an institution.” He could barely contain his delight.

This week Sen. Schumer said he will bring a vote to the Senate floor on voting rights to get every senator on the record. It’s a far cry from his wanted outcome; he had planned on today’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as the deadline to pass voting legislation or consider revising the filibuster.

Martin Luther King III, in Arizona for a march on voting rights Saturday, had this to say about the Arizona senator’s role: “History will remember Sen. Sinema, I believe unkindly, for her position on the filibuster,” adding later, “Our [13-year-old] daughter has less rights around voting than she had when she was born.”

As for Sinema’s obsession with bipartisanship as the ultimate value? Note the words of Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator, on Thursday. “It can’t be the only important thing. Slavery was bipartisan. Jim Crow segregation was bipartisan. The denial of women’s suffrage was bipartisan.”

I will save for another time a more thorough consideration of the self-serving, none-too-seemly motivations of Sinema. On this MLK Jr. Day, rather than linger in resignation, despair or anger, I think we’re better served by inspiration and the practical realities that history offers in the struggle to bend the arc of justice. As an obviously disappointed Biden said, “Like every other major civil rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we come back and try it a second time.”

In March 25, 1965, speaking to some 30,000 civil rights activists in Montgomery, Alabama, King said that the just-concluded Selma to Montgomery “mighty walk” was focused on the right to vote. He told the crowd that he sought to expose “the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland.” He explained that “racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War.”

Rather, toward the end of Reconstruction, segregationist Jim Crow laws cracked down on the growing awareness of formerly enslaved Blacks and “poor white masses working for near-starvation wages” of their shared interests and increasingly united voting bloc. This was a political strategy of the conservative white Bourbons—the landowners, the planters and the merchants—“to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.”

How did it work? “Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less,” King said. “Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.”

Speaking near the state Capitol window of Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, King detailed the response to the rising Populist Movement, which has remarkable resonance to our own times:

“To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society…this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level.”

The reverend offered one other note: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”

Well over a century later, in the last year since the former White House occupant sought to overthrow the government based on the lie of election fraud, 19 states have passed over 34 laws intended to disenfranchise Blacks and other people of color from the ballot box. President Biden is among those who have referred to this moment as Jim Crow 2.0.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is not just about grabbing power, but also benefitting from economic inequality and the concentration of wealth. Once again, today’s Republicans are seeking to achieve this end by “clouding the minds” of their voters, employing white supremacist and anti-democratic ideas to incite the worst instincts and distract them from their shared economic interests with minority voters.

In 1961, two years before his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, King spoke to a constitutional convention of labor’s AFL-CIO. In that speech, he described the shared interests of organized labor and Black Americans, a unity that was divided by what King called the twin-headed “labor-hater” who also spewed “anti-Negro epithets.” But the visionary leader saw beyond this narrow-mindedness.

“I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one, with no thought of their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we shall bring into full realization the dream of American democracy, a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed. A dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

As we know all too well, that dream has not yet been fulfilled. But on this day, let’s hold firm to the notion that that day can still come. How we get there not only requires a change in thinking, but also voting in elected leaders at the national level who recognize what King called “the urgency of now” and pursuing the hard work of change town by town and state by state.

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