Poor Peoples March Still a Good Model for Immigrant Rights Movement
New America Media, Commentary, Earl Ofari Hutchinson Posted: Apr 04, 2006
Editor's Note: Martin Luther King Jr.'s empathy and support for Latino immigrants' fight for civil rights can be revived, the writer says. Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of "The Crisis in Black and Black" (Middle Passage Press). The Hutchinson Report blog is now at www.earlofarihutchinson.com.
LOS ANGELES--During a planning summit in Atlanta for his Poor Peoples March in March 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quizzically turned to one of his aides and asked, "Tijerina who?"
The Tijerina in question was Reies Lopez Tijerina. A year earlier, Tijerina had rocketed to national fame when he and a band of armed men took over a courthouse in New Mexico and demanded land rights for Mexican farm workers. Though King hadn't heard of Tijerina, he eagerly sought him out. He demanded that Tijerina and other Latino leaders play a top role in the march. King wanted Latinos, blacks, American Indians and poor whites to march in lockstep for civil rights and economic justice.
But King was virtually a lone voice calling for such an alliance.
Many in King's inner circle of black ministers and activists grumbled loudly that black leaders must call the shots in the march. Their meaning was clear: Blacks had done the marching, picketing, demonstrating, fighting and dying for civil rights, and racism affected blacks more deeply and profoundly than any other group. To them, the struggle for land and immigrant rights was a sideshow that did not have the glitter, glamour or poignancy of the black struggle. Latinos and other ethnic groups were at best subservient partners that were welcome as long as they knew their place. The most crass and cynical of King's black advisors regarded Latinos as interlopers who benefited from the black struggle, but had contributed nothing to it.
According to King biographer David Garrow, at a planning staff meeting a campaign advisor bluntly said, "I do not think I am at the point where a Mexican can sit in and call strategy on a steering committee." It was paternalistic, offensive and totally denigrated Latinos and the importance of their struggle.
Tijerina and other Latino leaders chaffed at the slight, and some refused to participate. Those who came made it clear that their struggle against racism, for land and farm worker rights, and for cultural identity was just as important as that of blacks. They demanded that they be recognized and respected as leaders.
King's murder, the collapse of the civil rights movement, and the self-destruct of the black power movement brought fragmentation and disillusionment to black organizations. King and a handful of other black activists saw the fight by first- and second-generation Latinos for civil rights and economic justice as a vital one, a struggle as important as the black civil rights battle. But they were gone now. That leadership vacuum marked the start of the retreat to race isolation.
By the 1990s, the steady rise in the number of immigrants, legal and illegal, had radically changed the shape of ethnic politics in America. The number of undocumented immigrants soared from an estimated 3 to 5 million in 1990 to double-digit numbers a decade later. Many now worked jobs in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta that were majority black or where blacks made up a significant percent of the population. In those cities, Latinos made up the largest number of illegal immigrants who worked in lower-skill and low-wage jobs.
By 2004, Latinos had displaced blacks as the largest non-white minority in America. More blacks sounded the alarm bell. They bitterly complained that Latinos were overcrowding what had formerly been exclusively black neighborhoods and were running down achievement standards in schools. But the issue that pricked the sorest spot was jobs. Blacks shouted that illegal immigrants had booted them out of unskilled entry-level jobs in hotels, restaurants, and car washes. Generations of black students and the black unskilled had used these jobs as a stepping-stone up the economic ladder to better paying and more highly skilled jobs and professions.
Immigrant rights groups countered that these were jobs that blacks wouldn't take anyway, and in bashing Latinos, blacks were unfairly scapegoating them for their loss of economic ground.
By now, the memory of black and Latino cooperation that had marked the Poor Peoples March has long since faded. For too many blacks and Latinos, that model no longer seems relevant.
They are wrong. Despite its towering logistical problems, mishaps and ideological rifts, the march still ranks as the best effort black and Latino leaders have made to forge an alliance to fight for civil rights and economic justice. For King and the small band of black visionary activists, injustice was injustice, and it didn't matter whether the victim was an American-born black or a foreign-born Latino.
For that too-brief moment in history, the Poor Peoples March meshed the old civil rights movement for black rights with a broader movement for the civil rights of other minorities. That's still a worthy model to emulate to truly transform the immigrant rights movement into the new civil rights movement.
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