-Essay-
PARIS — Walking the same streets that Martin Luther King Jr. walked 57 years earlier — chanting “Black Lives Matter” like MLK sang “We Shall Overcome” — American history felt like it was moving both fast and slow.
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It was 2021, and we were still reeling from the January 6th insurrection just a couple of weeks earlier at the Capitol in Washington. Along with hundreds of other people of all ages and races, I had shown up for the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in the city of St. Augustine, Florida, where I went to both high school and college.
My hometown is the oldest European settlement in the United States, having been settled in 1565 by the Spanish (55 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock). But it’s also entered American history as the site of a 1964 march led by MLK, who singled it out as the most racist city in America.
At the 2021 MLK march, I was asked to speak, as a local African-American university student, who like many of my peers was part of the Black Lives Movement. Some have tried to mark a distinction between MLK and BLM, believing that the movement isn’t peaceful, and that the Civil Rights leader and Gandhian proponent of non-violence would not have approved.
But, I asked, does the opposing side care for peace, or are they mildly inconvenienced when protestors take up space? MLK, in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, declared that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”
Change of scenery
We mark MLK Day because the Civil Rights movement was a great step forward in progress — and BLM is simply the next step in the evolution of progress, demanding the United States face its systemic racial discrimination and racial inequality. We should also remember that at the time, the Civil Rights Movement held a 63% disapproval rating in 1966, even lower than Black Lives Matter. Progress sometimes looks like progress only in retrospect.
Were he still alive today, I have little doubt that MLK would have stood with the Black Lives Matter movement today. It is a movement rooted in love and dignity.
This year I’m not celebrating MLK Day in St. Augustine since I’m now in Paris for graduate school. Still, I brought my activist bone along for the ride. It took me a little while to find “my people,” first because I didn’t know where protests happened or what legal action could be taken against me since I’m on a visa. Eventually, I had heard through the digital grapevine that Place de la République on Saturdays is a hotbed of progressive-minded (and other) protests.
My first protest this fall was with the General Confederation of Labor against police brutality, systemic racism, and support for public freedom. Compared to my small city in Florida, the Parisian “manif” surpassed any demonstration I’d ever encountered. Even though I’m not fluent in French, I still felt comradery as we marched down the street chanting against the police and waving flags. These were my people.
Universal police tactics
Eventually, world events were bound to raise the stakes even higher. On Oct. 29, I joined an unauthorized protest in solidarity with the civilians in Gaza. It was risky with my visa, as France had banned pro-Palestine demonstrations earlier that month. Still, I couldn’t stand by idly and watch injustice unfold on the scale we were seeing in Gaza.
When I first arrived, there was a large group of demonstrators walking down the street with a flare, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “From the River to the Sea.” It reminded me of many ways of past protests I'd attended. Until suddenly, I heard a loud noise and saw tear gas coming down from the sky as the police yelled and ran toward people further down the street.
Throughout the day, there was a heavy police presence, with large vehicles coming in swarms toward Place du Châtelet and blocking off roads ensuring protesters couldn’t coalesce. Apparently wherever you are in the world, some police tactics remain the same: to intimidate and make people fear for their safety so they don’t return or speak up. But what is also universal is the feeling of empowerment and solidarity when you are surrounded by others who feel like you, and won’t be deterred by those very tactics.
Apartheid today
Martin Luther King Jr. never directly addressed the Israel-Palestine conflict. But I know how he would feel today.
"None of us are free,” he once said, “until we are all free." Just as he opposed the discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa, so would he have stood against the apartheid policies of Israel and the genocide underway in Gaza.
And as for me, after these past years of being lifted up in Florida by chants of Black lives matter, I join with the calls here in Paris that Palestinian lives matter too. “Injustice anywhere,” as MLK taught us, “is a threat to justice everywhere.”