We begin today with Columbia University historian Eric Foner, writing for The Nation about the provenance of some of themes featured in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s August 28, 1963, speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
It is easy to forget how thoroughly American King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was. He wrapped himself, and the movement he had come to personify, in the mantle of core American values discernible in the most cherished documents of the national experience. In a little over 1,500 words, he managed to invoke the Emancipation Proclamation, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the patriotic song “America,” interspersed with the language and cadences of the Bible. When he first used the words “I have a dream,” he immediately added that it was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” It would be difficult to make the civil rights movement less threatening to white fellow citizens. King managed to make his call for a radical restructuring of American life familiar, indeed almost conservative.
King’s speech built on a tradition dating back to the American Revolution, when Black critics of the racial order chastised the country for not living up to its professed ideals, while at the same time claiming those ideals as their own. During the struggle for independence, Black petitioners cited the ideology of liberty to demand their own freedom. In pamphlets, sermons, and manifestos they insisted that, as one petition put it, “every principle from which America has acted” demanded the abolition of slavery. In the pre–Civil War decades, Black abolitionists and their white allies seized on Jefferson’s timeless pronouncement that “all men are created equal” as a weapon for abolition. Gatherings of free African Americans called themselves “conventions of colored citizens,” claiming a status enjoyed by white Americans but which the federal government denied to them. If white Americans could claim citizenship by birthright, the same principle should extend to African Americans born in the United States.
CBC News interviews Lana Talbot of Windsor, Ontario, who attended 1963’s March on Washington at age 18.
She attended in defiance of her mother, who said she'd let her daughter visit a friend on the promise that she would not attend the March on Washington.
"My mother said ...'You promise you will not go to that march because it's a powder keg.'
"Well, I put my hands behind my back and crossed my fingers and promised. I promised them I wouldn't go. But I went. I went."
[...]
Talbot watched from halfway down the reflecting pool in front of the monument, recalling that King appeared to be just a speck in the distance, though she could hear his famous delivery — and feel the mood in the crowd.
Earlier that same summer, King spoke in Detroit where he gave a version of the famous speech. And years before that, King gave an address in Windsor's Jackson Park for Emancipation Day.
King gave a speech in Windsor in the 1950s?! Down the rabbit hole I went.
I found The Windsor Star’s Trevor Wilhelm’s January 2022 account of a special relationship between Windsor and King that predates the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Elise Harding-Davis, a local historian and African-Canadian heritage consultant, said King made his first visit to Windsor three years earlier.
“When Martin Luther King first came here in 1953, he was not the Martin Luther King we all revere,” she said. “He was a young Black preacher looking for help. The Emancipation celebration wasn’t just a big fun ride. It was a networking process of freedom fighters. All the way from slavery to the emancipation celebrations of the mid-1900s, were a group of men and women who were very involved in politics, civil rights issues. We even sent money to support some of the activities in Birmingham.”
[...]
Following in the footsteps of mentors including Benjamin Mays, Archibald Carey, and Rev. William Borders, who all repeatedly visited Windsor, King was the festival’s 1956 keynote speaker.
Harding-Davis, then about eight years old, was in the crowd.
“He was gracious enough to stop and speak to me,” she said. “I was awestruck. I wasn’t wholly familiar with who he was. But I did know who he was. He was Martin Luther King Jr. and he was in Windsor talking about civil rights.”
Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times reminds us that the March on Washington was about so much more than King’s dream.
Less well remembered, in our collective memory at least, is the fact that both the march and King’s speech were organized around much more than opposition to anti-Black discrimination. It was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with a far more expansive vision for society than formal equality under the law. The march wasn’t a demand for a more inclusive arrangement under the umbrella of postwar American liberalism, as it might seem today. It was a demand for something more — for a social democracy of equals, grounded in the long Black American struggle to realize the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the potential of Reconstruction.
Consider the 10-point list of demands issued by the organizers of the march. They wanted “Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation” to guarantee all Americans “access to all public accommodations, decent housing, adequate and integrated education” and “the right to vote.” They wanted “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.” They wanted “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living.” They wanted federal legislation to protect workers from exploitation and a federal government that brought its full power to bear on discrimination and disenfranchisement.
Or, better yet, consider the labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s opening speech to the assembled marchers. “We want a free, democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines,” said Randolph, for whom the 1963 March on Washington was the fulfillment of a call made more than two decades earlier, in the midst of World War II, to “Let the Negro masses speak with ten thousand Negroes strong, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Capital of the nation.”
Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine reports on post-Republican debate polling that Number 45 may—or may not—be losing support in the polls.
We now have five national public polls with post-debate findings by which to judge its effect on the GOP race, and they can be neatly divided into two groups.
Three of them showed no loss of support for Trump. Morning Consult’s tracking poll had Trump at 58 percent before and after the debate. Reuters-Ipsos showed Trump actually gaining ground (from 47 percent to 52 percent) between early August and the day after the debate. And New York Post–Leger in its first poll of the race put Trump’s post-debate support level at a sky-high 61 percent.
Two national surveys, however, showed Trump losing support, albeit from a high level. A mid-August Emerson poll gave Trump 56 percent; in its post-debate poll, the former president dropped to 50 percent. And Insider Advantage polls just prior to and just after the debate showed Trump’s support dropping from 51 percent to 45 percent.
Of course, Trump has been losing steam, little by little, since the second indictment in the classified documents case.
Jack Shafer of POLITICO says that Number 45 may have returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, but that the platform is not the same.
Trump’s post, which garnered a healthy 1.3 million likes and 305,000 retweets, essentially concedes that his plan to build his own social media empire under the Truth Social banner is a bust. Aside from Trump’s regular posts there, Truth Social is a wasteland of brimstone and salt whose finances and corporate structure make a Rube Goldberg machine look like a Swiss watch. Except for when journalists repeat his Truth Social outbursts or report on them, that Trump account goes unnoticed. By returning to the social media outlet that helped make him “great,” Trump’s post may presage an attempt to restart the media fire of his 2016 campaign and his presidency.
But no man ever steps in the same river twice — it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man, as the sage said. Twitter is not the same and neither is Trump, and the media watershed that allowed Trump to politically prosper doesn’t drain the way it once did. Thanks to inertia, changing technology, fickle tastes and Musk’s determination to wreck it, the site has lost its cachet. What does that mean for Trump?
Grace Segers of The New Republic has her eye on the critical importance of the off-year elections in Virginia for abortion rights.
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Virginia remains the only state in the South that allows abortion procedures through the beginning of the third trimester. Republicans have largely shied away from the issue on the campaign trail, preferring to focus on issues such as education, the economy, and crime. Virginia has a large budget surplus, and Youngkin and GOP legislators have proposed dedicating that money to new tax cuts. Many Republican candidates do not even refer to abortion on their campaign websites.
“[Republicans] have a lot of political positives they can be playing, but they get off their strength if they talk about the hot-button social and cultural issues, where most Virginia voters are not in alignment with the Republican positions, especially abortion,” said Mark Rozell, the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times looks at the conspiratorial thinking of some of America’s wealthier “tech bros.”
If you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong correlation among the three Cs: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.
I’ve written about some of these things before, in the context of Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But in the light of Hotez’s puzzlement — and also the rise of Vivek Ramaswamy, another crank, who won’t get the G.O.P. nomination but could conceivably become Donald Trump’s running mate — I want to say more about what these various forms of crankdom have in common and why they appeal to so many wealthy men.
The link between climate and vaccine denial is clear. In both cases you have a scientific consensus based on models and statistical analysis. But the evidence supporting that consensus isn’t staring people in the face every day. You say the planet is warming? Hah! It snowed this morning! You say that vaccination protects against Covid? Well, I know unvaccinated people who are doing fine, and I’ve heard (misleading) stories about people who had cardiac arrests after their shots.
To value the scientific consensus, in other words, you have to have some respect for the whole enterprise of research and understand how scientists reach the conclusions they do. This doesn’t mean that the experts are always right and never change their minds. They aren’t, and they do. For example, in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic top health officials opposed widespread masking, but they reversed course in the face of persuasive evidence, because that’s what serious scientists do.
Joe Pompeo of Vanity Fair interviews Columbia University School of Journalism dean Jelani Cobb, who recently celebrated his first anniversary as the head of one of America’s most preeminent journalism schools.
Cobb recently marked his first year in the job, for which he was selected in May 2022 by Lee Bollinger, Columbia University's longtime president until this past spring. On August 16, which happened to be the first day of classes for the 2023–2024 school year, I schlepped up to Morningside Heights to spend an hour chatting in Cobb’s office at Pulitzer Hall. Wearing a sharp beige suit neatly fitted to his bearish frame, he looked the part of someone who now requires a chief of staff and an executive assistant to help manage his demanding schedule. On the day of our sit-down, his calendar included the usual meetings, a Zoom panel, orientation for 260 incoming students, and a program by David Isay from StoryCorps, the nonprofit organization that facilitates archival recordings between loved ones. (Cobb participated with his mother, Mary Cobb, before she died in 2011.)
“The metaphor that comes closest for me to describing what being a dean has been like is that it’s like being an orchestra conductor,” Cobb told me. “There are all of these things happening, and you literally want them to happen in concert to make a kind of harmony.”
Cobb’s orchestra includes curriculum development, faculty recruitment, tenure reviews, research, budgeting, and, of course, the actual rearing of journalists. But he’s laser focused on one of the more challenging movements of the J-school symphony: tuition reform.
Paola Tamma of POLITICO Europe looks at the willingness of the European Union to seek deals with Tunisia in spite of Tunisia’s brutal crackdown on sub-Saharan migrants.
Until recently, Tunisia was broadly welcoming to migrants, offering a safe haven for people from sub-Saharan countries escaping violence, drought or simply looking for better opportunities, either in the country or in Italy, just a short but dangerous boat trip away.
That changed under Saied, who since seizing absolute power in 2021 has launched a campaign of demonization aimed at sub-Saharan Africans. In an incendiary speech in late February, he accused “mercenaries, foreign agents, traitors and shady parties” of a plot “to change the demographic of Tunisia” and commanded the country’s security forces to expel all illegal immigrants.
The result was a wave of evictions and racist violence against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers — and a spike in departures to Europe. Migrant arrivals in Italy have more than doubled over the past seven months compared with the same period in 2022, according to the Italian interior ministry, reaching peaks of over 1,000 per day.
The Tunisian government’s treatment of migrants did not diminish EU officials’ desire to strike a deal with the country.
Somesh Jha of Al Jazeera wonders if global food crises are the new normal.
A searing heat wave in 2022 crushed India’s wheat production: New Delhi imposed a ban on exports that the world’s second-largest wheat producer still has not lifted more than a year later. This is also the second year in a row that India has restricted rice exports.
Argentina, the planet’s biggest soy exporter and a top corn producer, has been suffering from its worst drought in 60 years, leading to sharp cuts in yields.
Indonesia, the world’s largest exporter of palm oil, banned its exports briefly last year amid rising prices, triggering a global scramble for edible oils, especially with Ukraine’s supplies of sunflower oil also disrupted because of the war.
Brazil, a major producer of soy oil, has also suffered from droughts in recent years, while 2021 brought Canada’s lowest yield of canola oil in 14 years.
So, is a perpetual food crisis the new normal? And what can the world do about it?
Finally today, Marco Carnelos of Middle East Eye looks at several of the complex foreign policy challenges the Biden Administration is faced with.
As for the Middle East, over the last 20 years America has been exposed to a sequence of shocks. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq achieved nothing. Years of sanctions and maximum pressure against Iran have only deteriorated the strategic equation to the US's and Israel's disadvantage.
By signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, Iran had committed to a 3.67 percent uranium enrichment process intrusively monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Today, the US is looking for interim deals with Iran where the latter would not exceed a 60 percent limit, i.e. a few steps away from the military ceiling, with an exponentially increased uranium stock.
Washington is now trying to de-escalate the dangerous situation with Iran through ad hoc arrangements, including the exchange of prisoners and some modest sanctions relief. At the same time, it is trying to lure Saudi Arabia into joining the Abraham Accords, which are becoming more and more unpopular in the Arab world due to Israel's brutal policies against the Palestinians and its relentless settlement activity.
Have the best possible day everyone!