More than 80 Island residents gathered at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center on Friday night to observe Shabbat services in honor of the lives of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a civil rights activist, and King friend and advisor, and to discuss the current condition of equality in our country.
Following the Shabbat observance, Hebrew Center Rabbi Caryn B. Broitman hosted a panel and audience discussion on the Black Lives Matter movement. Panelists included Erik Blake, Oak Bluffs police chief and president of the Martha’s Vineyard chapter of the NAACP; William Gamson, professor of sociology at Boston College and co-director of the Media Research and Action Project; and Ewell Hopkins, member of the Oak Bluffs planning board and a candidate for a seat in the state House of Representatives from the Cape and Islands.
Since Dr. King’s murder on April 5, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., after leading two protest marches in that city, it has become an American custom during his birthday (Jan. 15) week to remember the man and his work, and to take stock of our country’s progress toward achieving racial equality.
The perspective of the Friday-night discussion included the role of Black Lives Matter, a 28-chapter national activist group speaking and acting against police violence in ways reminiscent of civil rights activism 50 years ago.
Rabbi Broitman put those times in focus for the audience with a collage of quotes from Dr. King, Rabbi Henschel, and Bobby Hampton of the Black Panther Party. She included a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his 15-year-old son published in the July 4, 2015, issue of the Atlantic magazine, a letter that echoed the racial violence of two generations past.
Several themes on the state of racial equality in the U.S. emerged from the two-hour service and discussion, uncannily presaged by congregant and Island resident Elaine Eugster before the program. “This [event] is a reminder to me of people like Martin Luther King and Rabbi Henschel and their work, that despite their accomplishments, we have accomplished so little, we are still working to achieve their equality goals,” she said.
In summary, panelists and audience commenters described a national tableau in which racism continues but has gone underground, that racial harmony is best observed among our young people, and that the advice found in all holy books — that faith without good works is dead — still holds true, regardless of the banner under which they are taken.
Herb Foster, 87, Island author and a retired college professor, suggested a simple personal test to gauge our racial beliefs and attitudes. “When you were growing up, what did you hear at home, how often were people of a different color invited to your home as social equals? And how does that compare with your home today? Do you socialize with people of different color, people who are different from you?”
Rabbi Broitman’s cache of quotes from 1960s activists recreated, for those who witnessed it, the stunning horror of racial violence and unrest of the 1960s, so comments by Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Blake offered a sharp and positive contrast to that time.
“Our kids are colorblind,” Mr. Blake said. “Many of them don’t understand how the problem existed,” he said, describing Dr. King observances he has attended at Island schools. Mr. Hopkins said the King observances reminded him that we all have responsibility for public discussion of issues which are too often only discussed at home.
For Mr. Gamson, the outrage that he and the nation feel about violence chronicled against young black people by law enforcement only has value “when it is channeled into action.” He noted also that the Black Lives Matter movement is largely based on college campuses, and that young people are the source of action-taking.
To Island resident Barbara Linton, the strident recent focus on racial equality exemplified by the Black Lives Matter movement follows a generation of relative calm. Ms. Linton describes herself as a social justice advocate for 40 years. “We skipped a generation,” she said, following the forum. “We were busy integrating the economic and cultural gains of the 1960s and 1970s from the civil rights movement, building creating lives, families, and careers.
“There has been some cultural homogeneity in the generation we’ve raised, but hatred is still seething, it’s more difficult to see, more covert today than open hatred in the days of Bull Connor [Birmingham, Ala. commissioner of public safety who became a symbol for racism after his police force used clubs, dogs, and fire hoses to stop civil rights marchers in 1963]. It’s just gone into the backroom,” she said.
“People see violence against blacks by police departments and think that that violence represents just pockets of violence, but that is not the case. Synagogues are being bombed, churches burned. It is a process of dehumanization which injures both the victims and the dehumanizers. I worry that succeeding generations will be ruined unless we stop,” she said.