On August 28, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought together nearly 250,000 Americans at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial (and a few million viewers and listeners around the world), a century after the abolition of slavery. in the USA. Martin Luther King demands justice in a historic speech, galvanizing protesters with his anaphora, including the famous “I have a dream”. It was the height of the nonviolent movement for the civil rights of black people: the following year, segregation was abolished and then, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act tried to guarantee their right to vote. Overview of the commemoration of this moment in the French media.
On France Inter and in the company of director, journalist and researcher Rokhaya Diallo, Christophe Barreyre looks back on this moment in history. In “The Dream of Martin Luther King” (2017), they revived a more radical thought than one sometimes imagines, evoked the arrival of Barack Obama in power and police violence, but also the March for equality and against the racism of 1983 in France.
The question of police violence is at the heart of the German documentary La Révolte noire (2021), proposed by Arte, which briefly traces the creation and impact of Black Lives Matter (BLM), whose three founders claim to be part of the heritage and part of the methods of the civil rights movement, as well as the message of the Reverend King. Like him, BLM links the anti-racist fight to that for social and economic justice, critical of capitalism and imperialism.
Claims that are too subversive
In 2020, France Culture returned, in “Le Cours de l’histoire”, by Xavier Mauduit, to this political legacy, after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, on May 25, 2020. The historian and Americanist Sylvie Laurent, author of the remarkable Martin Luther King. An intellectual and political biography (Seuil, 2015), deploys the economic claims, on housing, education or police brutality that the pastor formulated, contrary to the image of the charitable reverend mummified in an ethic, not always well understood , non-violence and reconciliation.
Because after obtaining civil rights and the right to vote, the entire political spectrum believes that Martin Luther King asks too much, that he is ungrateful, and marginalizes him. These emancipatory social and economic demands, the basis of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and present in his speech that day, are deemed too subversive.
In fact, this aspect of his commitment is still rarely mentioned today. This is the case of the excellent documentary The Other Dream of Martin Luther King (2022), which scrutinizes for France.tv the last four years of his life, and how the dream of the American pastor turned out, according to his own words. , “to the nightmare”.
