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

This year, Americans will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.
Day as researchers report that up to one in four black and Hispanic workers is
under-employed and that approximately 90 percent of black children will use
food stamps at least once before turning twenty. In this context, it is
particularly worthwhile to ask what it means to "commemorate" a legacy like King's
and how we might reclaim its transformative power. Although it is the images of
King speaking to crowds in Washington that remain most tenaciously fixed in our
national imagination, the inclusion in this picture of Detroit in past and
present can serve to bring many aspects of King's legacy into sharper relief.

On January 18^th, 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.

This relevance is particularly evident in the issues that
Detroiters have chosen to emphasize in their celebration this year, the theme
of which is: "Join the Struggle for Jobs, Peace and Economic
Justice." Maureen Taylor, an organizer and speaker at the event, is also
the state chairperson of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and the
co-coordinator of the upcoming United States Social Forum (USSF). To be
held in June 2010, the USSF will bring together activists from across the
United States and globally to share experience, analysis, and alternatives to
current practices under the assertion, "Another World is Possible. Another US
is Necessary." Taylor notes that as a result of the dire economic situation in
Detroit and the involvement of USSF organizers in the planning of the event,
this year's celebration will highlight King's later work and the connections
between his struggles for racial and economic justice.

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."

Following the establishment of MLK Day as a national holiday
and criticisms of the vague, mainstream meaning for which King's memory was
being appropriated, poet Carl Wendell Hines concluded, "It is easier to build
monuments/ than to make a better world." In Detroit, however, many of the same
individuals and organizations already on the front lines of poverty and
discrimination are working to organize both the January 18^th MLK Day
celebration and the June US Social Forum. In this way, we see how Martin Luther
King, Jr. Day can be celebrated in a way that honors a specific aspect of civil
rights movement history and illuminates its continued significance to the
challenges that a community faces and the responses that it can formulate.
There is, then, much to learn from Detroit about collapse and survival as it
prepares for June 2010; in the darkness there, those who bother to look can perhaps
see the stars.