Lighting the way

"The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion is all around. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars."

Those words, spoken decades ago, could have been uttered yesterday.

They came from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and were delivered April 3, 1968, one day before he was gunned down while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn., where he had come to support striking sanitation workers.

On the 43rd anniversary of King's assassination, several hundred union members and progressive activists gathered at Detroit's Central United Methodist Church, a place where King preached a number of times, the last just two weeks before his death.

The Monday gathering served as prelude to a larger rally at Hart Plaza's Labor Legacy Monument, where clergy ranging from Baptists and Catholics to Muslims and Jews presented a united front as a crowd of 1,000 people or more flexed some organized labor muscle. It was one of more than 1,200 events — teach-ins, vigils, faith services, etc. — organized by the AFL-CIO and its "We Are One" movement, according to the union website.

At Central, a slide show accompanied a recording of King's Memphis speech. The slain civil right leader's deeply moving words filled the church.

What struck News Hits was how far we still have to go to achieve the social justice King championed.

As then, minorities are still being hit hardest by economic disparities. Marc Moriel, president of the National Urban League, made that point clear when the league released its annual "State of Black America" report last month at Howard University:

"[T]he Great Recession has battered, bruised, and pummeled the nation — even more so when it comes to our nation's African American and urban communities. While some economists have declared that the recession is technically over, we say there is no complete recovery while the unemployment rate in black America stands at more than 15 percent. We also say there is no complete recovery when the homeownership rate for African Americans has declined by 3 percentage points, representing thousands upon thousands of African American homeowners who have lost their homes."

Minorities may be hurting worse, but this nation's poor and working class all feel the pain these days. Here in Michigan, the rush to the right has been placed on a fast track since Republican Rick Snyder became governor and the GOP grabbed both houses in the Legislature.

The emergency financial manager legislation that gained speedy approval opens the door for unelected officials to impose a kind of "financial martial law."

As Ed Brayton observed in the online publication The Michigan Messenger, under the new law, emergency managers appointed by the state treasurer "are given near-dictatorial powers to dissolve contracts, sell off assets and even disband elected boards."

> Email News Hits staff