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TOBA MLK Breakfast Speaker Tells Audience There Is A Cost For Freedom
BY KENYA WOODARD Sentinel Feature Writer
TOBA celebrated its 40th Anniversary of the Breakfast
If you want freedom, something must die.
In his speech at the 40th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Leadership Break- fast, Princeton University African American Studies chair, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., cautioned the audience that “a world is dying” but we’ve been slow to put it away.
And the cost is mount- ing, Glaude said.
“True freedom requires we confront the ghost di- rectly,” he said. “Tell the ghost, ‘go on, rest now. We’ve got it.’”
Glaude, the James S.
McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, was the keynote speaker at the breakfast hosted by the Tampa Organ- ization Of Black Affairs. More than 800 attendees gathered pre-dawn at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Tampa to hear Glaude as well as see local businesses lauded for their service to the community.
Glaude, who is writing a new book about writer James Baldwin, began his address detailing the rela- tionship between King and writer James Baldwin.
In March of 1968, the two friends were at a Holly- wood fundraiser trying to shore up support for King’s Poor People’s Campaign. In his introduction of King,
Baldwin talked about America’s betrayal of African Americans. King continued on this thread in his speech, the two playing a sort of tag team.
King and Baldwin shared exasperation with white people’s lack of ur- gency and commitment to uplift the poor, Glaude said.
By this time, King’s op- position to the Vietnam War had caused his star to fall and some supporters had turned against him.
Baldwin had noticed that the events of the time – riots, war, the rise of the Black Panther Party and Black militancy – had taken a toll on King. But he con- tinued.
King’s death in April 1968 deeply changed Bald- win and he struggled to
come to terms with its mean- ing and understand why he was witness to it, Glaude said.
“They killed someone who espoused love,” he said. Baldwin responded by
attempting to “pick up the pieces of America’s broken promises,” Glaude said.
Baldwin wrote “the bat- tle to achieve (freedom) has not ended; it has scarcely begun. The real question is how long and expensive the funeral will be.”
Baldwin was telling us that identifying racism was the easy part, Glaude said.
“The dangerous road be- fore us was if the...country could confront its demons,” he said. “Could America tell the truth about its past? Did it have the moral stamina? What would be the cost?”
For generations, Black Americans have sacrificed so much in the fight for freedom – a fight that is still ongoing, Glaude said.
“And here we are, going into the 21st century...still fighting for an understand- ing of ourselves that will fi- nally set white folks free,” he said.
In his last book, King argued that white supremacy stood in the way of democ- racy and that for most white Americans, equality was philanthropic effort, “some- thing given to us,” Glaude said.
“Who are you to give me equality?” he said. “Who are you to believe that you can give people equality?”
King’s challenge to the country was a transforma- tion of its soul, Glaude said.
“The old America has to die so a new country could be born,” he said.
And yet, much of the sentiments from 1968 still hold true today in “the lengthy shadows of Trump- ism,” Glaude said.
Many are “holding on to a vision of a different Amer- ica,” he said. “But the divi- sion feels old and worn, like we’ve been here before. If only (Baldwin) knew we’re still in that funeral proces- sion.”
Too many remain com- plicit in their silence as chil- dren struggle in schools that fail them and people lan- guish in prisons, Glaude said.
Banishing racism and in- justice –as both King and Baldwin fought all of their lives to do – requires killing old fears, he said.
“Something is dying,” he said. “The question is what will it be?”
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