Yolanda Renee King, the 9-year-old granddaughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, told about 800,000 people at the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. that she had a dream – not far from where her grandfather said those same words in 1963.
“My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” she said at the March 24 event. “I have a dream that enough is enough. That this should be a gun-free world. Period.”
The march was estimated to be the largest demonstration in the capital’s history, and hundreds of thousands of students across the country and throughout the world also mobilized in their own cities.
“I just don’t know how to express how that made me feel – his granddaughter speaking out about gun violence,” said Damen Alexander Jr., a St. Louis University High School junior and a core organizer for St. Louis’ march of about 15,000 on Saturday. “It was amazing.”
The call to action from this student-led movement was clear. This generation – which is the as-yet-unnamed generation after Millennials – will be the largest eligible voting bloc in history in 2020. They plan to use that power, Alexander said.
“Once everyone becomes of age, the political landscape is going to shift,” Alexander said. “We want people to know that we will vote you out. We want our opinions heard.”
When Dr. King was assassinated 50 years ago on April 4, 1968, it was the height of the black-empowerment student movement and the anti-war movement, said longtime politician and St. Louis American editorial board member Mike Jones.
Jones was 19 and a freshman in college at the time. The socially active members of his generation were not following Dr. King in that moment, Jones said. King, who was the co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had been leading the Civil Rights Movement since the mid-1950s.
“1968 was off the chain,” Jones said. “We were not really talking about inclusion and civil rights. By 1968, black youth were talking about revolution and had declared the whole America project illegitimate. Dr. King was in the space of trying to morally reclaim America. Stokely Carmichael represented that America was beyond redemption.”
Jones’ generation was more aligned with Carmichael and Malcolm X, he said.
“I would argue what you saw on Saturday was the real impact of Barack Obama being president of the United States for eight years,” Jones said. “All of those kids on stage, no one was older than 18 years old. Their imprint as social beings in society was Barack Obama. I think Trump is the perfect foil for them. He’s actively ignorant, uncool, and morally bankrupt.”
And this generation is “on the verge” of being where students were when King was killed 50 years ago, he said.
“They are about to call the status quo or the generations ahead of them as illegitimate, and they won’t accept it,” Jones said. “And that, to me, could be revolutionary. Real social change happens when the emerging youth generation rejects as illegitimate the preceding generation. There are four million kids who turn 18 every year. This is just the first wave, and all of them witnessing Barack Obama being elected president was the equivalent of a man landing on the moon.”
Which happened in 1969.
Longtime grassroots activist Jamala Rogers, executive director of the Organization for Black Struggle, said Dr. King would have been troubled by this nation’s “backsliding on its alleged democratic principles.”
“Poverty levels are at an all-time high, as are wealth disparity rates,” Rogers said. “Global war-mongering is crowding out peace. We see that militarism has found its place in urban cities when we look at policing. Racism has become more sophisticated since 1968, but no less violent in its impact on the lives and futures of people of color.”
Dr. King would have been proud to see his granddaughter on stage Saturday, Rogers said. And he would have been proud of all the young people over the last several years who have been speaking truth to power in Ferguson and elsewhere.
In terms of Dr. King’s legacy, Jones believes America has white-washed it.
At the time of his murder, King was losing support among the old Civil Rights Movement leadership because he was becoming more active against the war and expanding into economic equity, Jones said.
“He didn’t get murdered in Birmingham,” Jones said. “But he did get murdered organizing the Poor People’s Campaign and against the war on Vietnam. I would argue that he had become an adversary of American imperialism and American capitalism at the time of his death. In 1963, he was neither of those. He was an acceptable Negro protestor in 1963 vis-à-vis the white establishment.”
Those in Jones’ generation weren’t surprised that King was murdered in Memphis while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike, he said.
“If you would have asked us, the reason he was murdered was that he was coming to the conclusion that America was bankrupt,” Jones said. “It was clear in the last year in his life that he was moving closer to where the emerging generation was. It would have been profound.”
Perhaps the young leaders of today’s movements understand more than most why memorializing King’s legacy can be problematic.
“You are taking complex people who are in complicated situations and trying to make a simple message out of it,” Jones said. “There was a lot more to it than that.”
