One more river to cross

I was in Grade 6 when U.S. president John F. Kennedy was shot. I remember because I had gotten out of class to go to the dentist and the radio in my mother's VW Beetle came on with the news. It was incomprehensible.

Five years later, when Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis, I understood only that an American civil rights leader had been shot. Riots broke out in 100 cities, but the significance of the events was beyond me at age 16.

On the 40th anniversary of King's death, about 800 people walked through the rain in Alabama in his memory. The New York Times talked to several sanitation workers whose walkout brought King to Memphis in 1968 and who are still on the job. They can't afford to retire, although they now have union representation.

Worker Leslie Moore compared King to Moses. "God gave Moses the assignment to lead the children of Israel across the Red Sea. He sent Dr. King here to lead us to a better way.”

Baxter Leach, another worker there in '68, said because King helped all Americans, "we honour this day. We march. He was for poor folks. He wasn't for just one colour. He was for all colours."

Last Friday, a special day at Acadia University commemorating King made those times clearer. A 1993 documentary, entitled At the River I Stand, portrayed the months leading up to the assassination. Then Dr. Les Oliver, who is a board member of the Black Cultural Society of Nova Scotia, led an interesting discussion.

A Black audience member, who belongs to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, spoke about how colour, gender and poverty issues prevail today. She said jobs are fleeing Canada to the south where labor is dirt-cheap.

In our country, the First Nations suffer from something like a 70 per cent unemployment rate. King believed that economics and civil rights are inseparable, and poor people are not free.

Ann Hennigar spoke up, saying that King was following Ghandi's non-violent form of protest. He stated, "non-violent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating ideal. In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method."

Powerful states demobilize peace protests

Then political science professor Cynthia Alexander added that in the post-9/11 world, powerful states have ways of demobilizing peaceful protests. She cited the fact that 14 Aboriginal leaders in Ontario find themselves in jail today for conducting peaceful protests again mining operations.

According to a United Church press release, Algonquins from the Sharbot Lake area, with support from members of the non-Native "settler" community, have been engaged in peaceful public witness campaigns to express their concerns about both their right to a consultative process on use of their traditional territory as well as the potential ecological impact of an open-pit uranium mine.

In mid-February Chief Bob Lovelace was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of $25,000. Amnesty International and Christian Peacemaker Teams have critiqued Lovelace’s sentencing and the lack of consultation process.

So Canadians have no right to pat themselves on the back. Will the apparent end of our uranium moratorium in Nova Scotia require protest soon?

Globally, all of us need to be in solidarity with the Tibetans in the face of overwhelming and violent dominance. The Dalai Lama, who says, “my religion is kindness,” has equal leadership status with Ghandi and King.

On this King anniversary I think also of Robert Kennedy, gunned down just two months later. His response on the night of April 4 was, "what we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. "Let us dedicate ourselves," Kennedy said, "to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

What greater calling is there? The tame and the gentle, African North Americans, First Nations peoples - all of God's people - must have enough to eat and a sense of peace in this world.