'Easier to Build Monuments than to Make a Better World': Detroit, MLK Day, and the US Social Forum

Common Dreams - On January 18th, Detroit will hold its seventh annual Martin Luther King Day celebration at the Central United Methodist Church, where between 3,000 and 4,000 people will attend a ceremony followed by a march to Cobo Hall along the same route that King and more than 100,000 others took in June 1963. This tribute to the "Detroit Freedom Walk," a march that preceded the better-known March on Washington by two months, expands the commemorative focus of the holiday and brings to the forefront vital but overshadowed aspects of the civil rights movement: its broad geographic base, its historic connections to the labor movement, its concern with racialized poverty and economic injustice as well as legal discrimination. These concerns have always intersected dramatically in Detroit, and the Freedom Walk reminds that beyond the powerful but abstract language of King's "dream" most often appropriated and deployed for national rituals of remembrance, events in the civil rights movement had and have a direct relevance to specific communities.

King's final campaign took place in Memphis, Tennessee, where he launched a program of support for striking sanitation workers in preparation for a Poor Peoples' March on Washington. In his last speech before his murder, King proclaimed that there was a hopefulness to be found in the desolate conditions of the day because there was a greater imperative to act on pervasive social problems when survival demanded it. "I know, somehow," he spoke to the crowd, "that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars."

These words are particularly apt this year in Detroit, a city that Taylor describes as "ground zero in the national economy," as it prepares to host an expected 20,000 activists in June 2010. Taylor describes the US Social Forum as "a national event with local implications," emphasizing the importance of giving the forum a grounding in the experience of Detroiters. "Every kind of mountainous collapse is going on here, yet the people are holding on. It's important that the folks come to Detroit, learn, understand what's happening, because this is a rolling storm. It's coming to a neighborhood near you." Read more.