Bernie Sanders in the Deep South

April 11, 2018
3:09 pm

By
Briahna Joy Gray

Excerpts:

Last week, I joined Bernie Sanders in Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Sanders was overwhelmingly well received by both passersby and the local audiences who came to hear him speak. But so far, the media coverage of his trip has revolved around a brief aside, in which Sanders faulted the Democratic Party for its recent legislative failures.

In fact, if Beale Street could talk, it would tell a very different story about Bernie Sanders than the now-familiar critique that he is insufficiently sensitive to racial issues. As I walked with Sanders down Memphis’s famous thoroughfare, his popularity, including among the predominantly black crowd attending the commemorative festivities, was self-evident. The senator was stopped every few feet by selfie-seekers and admirers. Yes: Perhaps this is to be expected of any politician with a national profile, but given his poor showing in Mississippi during the 2016 Democratic primary, in which he secured less than 17 percent of the black vote, I had thought the senator and his small cohort might go unnoticed. I was wrong.

Wednesday evening’s summit in Jackson with the, dare I say, “charismatic” 35-year-old black progressive Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, was designed to further cement the “class and race” theme by reminding the audience of Dr. King’s emphasis on economic matters toward the end of his life. King’s economic message — “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring” — hung over the discussion both literally and figuratively, and the panel opened with a chorus of young black students demanding, “What does economic justice look like on southern soil?”

During the discussion, it was difficult to ignore the parallels between late-period King’s focus on economic equality and Sanders’s own priorities: “You have to appreciate that while [King] was [challenging President Johnson on the Vietnam War], suddenly the money for his organization starts drying up,” Sanders said. “And then in the midst of this … he said, we gotta attack racism in all its forms, but we have to deal with economic justice. I’m gonna organize, he says, a poor people’s march – a poor people’s campaign. We’re gonna march on Washington. We’re gonna have low-income African-Americans, low-income whites, low-income Latinos, low-income Native Americans, we’re gonna stand together to demand that the United States change its national priorities — man, what courage that was.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/what-really-happened-when-bernie-sanders-went-to-mississippi.html


Senator Bernie Sanders joins with others during an event to mark the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 2018, in Memphis, Tennessee. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images