King & Kamala

The Moral Beauty of Protest and Organizing

Jonathan Eig’s book, KING: A Life, 2024 winner of The Pulitzer Prize for biography, is a fresh, invigorating telling of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. story, and it has me hooked in a way that is usually reserved for fiction. To be reading/listening as we take part in another historic movement 69 years later in the form of VP Kamala Harris’ rise, adds a layer of pride and joy that hordes of us are more than happy to give way to.

On MSNBC Morning Joe today, Anand Giridharadas of Substack newsletter, The.Ink, picked up on how VP Harris is “a player in the culture”, citing her understanding and use of call and response. He’s right—she knows how to code switch and exude joy, as we just saw yesterday in Atlanta at the podium with her message aimed at Trump’s avoidance of a debate with her: “If you have something to say…” and, as Anand pointed out, notice how the crowd erupted, and folks behind her finished the sentence in her skillfully placed pause. For many of you, I don’t even have to finish the sentence here because it’s already echoing in your head, even if you didn’t see the speech.

I was immersed in this same type of oratorical power all through my growing up at 2nd Mt. Olive Baptist Church in East Albany, GA. Experienced southern Black preachers know how do what is at the heart of effective storytelling: make folks feel something. Story IS emotion. Even when dealing with tough issues, Harris makes you laugh and cry because both are necessary to revolution. Nobody knows how to do this better than Black Americans. We’ve had plenty practice— from enslavement, to civil rights, to “Kamalot.” (have you seen that New Yorker cover yet!? Love it!)

I’m on chapter 14 of King, titled, “My Soul is Free,” where Eig beautifully recounts the 26-year old MLK recasting himself as civil rights leader, stepping into position for Montgomery’s bus boycott as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The level of emotion then, matches what Harris is bringing now. King was a force that lined up with a moment when the leader and the people were ready. Harris shows us what King called “the moral beauty of protest.” As Anand put it, “She has found this alignment of person, moment, message, what is happening in people’s hearts.” When you tap into people’s hearts, you see how unstoppable a force they become. If we could measure the emotional kilowatts of 1955 Black Montgomerians, I wonder what the 2024 equivalent would be for us rallying around Harris?!

Back then, they didn’t have social media, but they made excellent use of mass meetings, mimeographed flyers and word-of-mouth to mount one of the most effective mass boycotts in history, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, then secretary of the Alabama State Conference of NAACP. We all think we know her story because we’ve heard so many iterations of it. But check with Eig’s King, you’re guaranteed to learn something you didn’t know. Parks’ actions had nothing to do with the tired feet of a seamstress. This was calculated civil unrest growing out of decades of revolt and organizing, brought to a head by the brutal torture and killing of Emmett Till four months earlier; and it also sprouted from the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of Black professionals founded in 1946, who had already turned their attention to Jim Crow practices on the Montgomery city buses.

Eig’s King helps us see and remember that American civil rights is a long and complex story that did not start with any one person or one incident. There are stacks and stacks of shoulders on which we all stand. King is a story for the ages; and now is the time to read it. Because we are fortunate enough to be eyewitnesses to another once in a lifetime movement taking its place among the precious few like it in history.