The NIU administration’s “unity of obscurity” statue of King is a crime of invisibility committed against the memory of King and the people who made the civil rights movement.

They are wiping the face off of the civil rights movement just as Reagan and Bush have stripped away the gains of that movement.

Bush vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 as he sent disproportionate numbers of blacks, Hispanics and women to fight his war in the Persian Gulf.

The new Civil Rights Act of 1991, which Bush plans to veto, is at best an attempt to regain some of the rights stripped away over the last decade. It does not address the high rate of unemployment among black Americans, which has become a permanent feature of the U.S. economy.

Along with the economic violence black America faces daily is the type of violence displayed against Rodney King in Los Angeles by the racist lynch mob police. This is the measure of American justice.

It is in the context of this retrogressive reality that we can find a perspective for the battle to install a realistic statue of King, a battle that goes back eight years.

Originally, black students demanded that a campus building be named for King. The administration refused. The statue was a compromise to begin with, and now they want to take that away.

I don’t care how many “expert,” “elite” art honchos they bring out to lecture us on aesthetics, or lawyers to dazzle us with legal contract jargon.

In the last three days, more than 300 buttons protesting the “solo cup” statue were snatched up by angry black students and many whites and Latinos at a table I set up in DuSable Hall.

Taking the face off of King and replacing it with abstractions reflects the attempt by the powers that be to wipe out from the American mind the very idea of freedom, and along with it, the real history of black America.

Black America, which at each historic turning point has proven to be the vanguard of social movement, has for hundreds of years put American civilization on trial and found it guilty. And so for NIU.

Tom Rainey

Marxist Humanist Forum

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