My Way on the Highway

No one likes traffic. So folks in the Greater Boston area were understandably upset when 29 protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matters movement sat down in the middle of I-93 and stopped traffic for a few hours on January 15.

Denunciations were swift and severe. Massachusetts State Police Colonel Timothy Alben gave a relatively irate press conference, and two state legislators proposed bills to stiffen penalties for blocking highways.

The protesters, of course, had their own view. They pointed out that disrupting traffic is a time-honored protest tactic, and that the inconvenience of a longer morning commute is less permanent than losing a family member to police violence. In response to the news that the protests had caused an ambulance to be diverted, protest organizers noted that ambulances are often impeded by traffic.

But most of all, the protesters argued that only a disruption like the one they caused on I-93 could make people realize the plight of communities that the criminal justice system has failed. In making this argument, they cited a March 1968 speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., shortly before his assassination. The portion quoted by the organizers read as follows:

“Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.”

King gave this sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. as he prepared to launch the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement that aimed, in King’s words, “to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty.” King died before the Campaign’s planned march on Washington, but his role in its inception was the key, late stage in his life during which he fought against more intractable economic injustices in the urban North as well as the South.

The germs of the Poor People’s Campaign are visible in some of King’s earlier writings on riots in predominantly black areas of American cities. In 1967, he wrote a pamphlet called “The Crisis in America’s Cities,” in which he argued for a comprehensive national policy to provide good jobs and education in urban communities, and for non-violent civil disobedience as the best way to achieve that goal.

But in both his speech at the National Cathedral and his earlier work, King suggested that civil disobedience had to be calculated, organized, and massive. In 1968, he described the Poor People’s Campaign not as a “histrionic gesture,” but as a way of confronting the American people with the self-evident injustices wrought by their history.

More relevantly, he wrote in 1967 that civil disobedience was “too often…employed incorrectly. It was resorted to only when there was an absence of mass support and its purpose was headline-hunting.” In other words, effective “direct action” for King involved an organized community with a long-term strategy, with tactics meant to effect change, not merely garner attention of any variety.

Seen in this light, the I-93 protests fell far too close to a “headline-hunting,” “histrionic gesture.” While undoubtedly well intentioned, they had the immediate effect of generating negative publicity for the cause, and not much in the way of engagement with the issue of institutionalized racism.

That result is a shame, because the Black Lives Movement has generated crucial momentum towards reforming the way low-income communities and communities of color interact with the government. One website for the movement has a page of broad policy suggestions for criminal justice reform, and protest actions that increase the visibility of those ideas are crucial to their eventual implementation.

Unfortunately, the main policy discussions that arose from the I-93 protest were the draconian proposals of two state legislators to make the penalties for protesting on the highway more severe. This response was absurd, but it certainly reflected the public mood. Instead of feeling confronted with the injustices of society, commuters felt annoyed, angry, and worst of all, confused.

This confusion represents the real failure of this protest. The title of the Martin Luther King, Jr., sermon quoted by the protestors is “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” and King’s main thesis was that Americans had to engage with the human rights revolutions occurring in the mid 20th century, not ignore or resist it. The sermon is more than an admonishment; it is the call of an evangelist to a people that has yet to see the light.

The protesters on I-93 were too admonishing, too small, and too disconnected from the affected communities to have the desired effect, and indeed may have alienated potential supporters. The idea of King’s Poor People’s Campaign on the other hand, was that organized mass disruption, spearheaded by the communities themselves, and with a clear relation to their goals, would force the wider public to address society’s most pressing injustices.

As King wrote in 1967, that kind of organizing is difficult. But as he knew so well, it is the best way to bring about real change.

Nelson L. Barrette '17, a Crimson editorial writer, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House.