“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
The above quote is a favorite of Al Dahr, a third-year international film student of North African heritage currently attending the University of Southern California. His latest project is a documentary that will expose the similarities of social inequalities of African American youth in South Los Angeles and young second-generation African French immigrants in France who rioted in the 2005 second-generation immigrant riots.
When asked about using the term “second- generation French immigrant” and not African French, he jokingly responds that African French is a language spoken throughout North Africa. He adds that France’s African citizens are referred to as French immigrants of a certain generation as opposed to French citizens.
Dahr considers himself a historian specializing in Dr. King and believes that if France had a Dr. King, life for the people of color could have possibly been improved.
“Although times are rough in the United States for African Americans, you guys did have a successful Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s headed by Dr. King,” said the USC student. “Our 1968 civil rights protest was void of race and involved labor and Communists. You gotta know your history, so you can plan your next plot. If we as African immigrants living in Europe, would have studied Dr. King’s strategy, we could have built on it and utilized his violence-free protests which are the heart of Islam, “harming no one” but getting your message across.
“The one advantage you guys had was not worrying about deportation; you can’t return African Americans to Africa, however, we as North Africans can be removed. That is why France has a policy of not taking population tallies by race; it is illegal.”
Dahr explains, “we have unique areas of life, African Americans have the ghettos, and we Blacks of France have ‘Les Cites.” The ghettos are specially built for excluded and disfranchised migrants and children of migrants born in France. Most migrants come from France’s former North African colonies, according to Dahr, and they are mostly Arabs and Muslims.
Clustered on the peripheries of France’s big cities, Les Cités proved to be laboratories for dissent and resistance against oppression. The children of the African immigrants who built France after World War II are being pushed further outside French society, according to Dahr.
It is important to emphasize that the French youth who are protesting against police violence and the policy of the French political establishment, are French citizens. They were born into first-and second-generation immigrant communities from France’s former colonies. “The second-generation rioters are not motivated by religion, and the protest have nothing to do with Islam and the Western cliché of ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’ Dahr continued. It is a protest against oppression racism. The protests are the only way youth can express their anger and frustration at French political establishment which deny immigrants the right of being integrated into the nations diversity.
Successive French governments failed to come up with a fair and successful integration policy, and this leads to further alienation and creates a pool of candidates willing to join terror groups that create tragedies like the recent Paris attack. Dahr ends with the thought that if Dr. King could have planted seeds, when he visited France, some sort of civil rights movement may have sprouted.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did visit France on several occasions.
Dahr believes that the French exploit Dr. King by publicly using his name, for example Boulevard Martin Luther King, in Nantes, France, to promote an idea of being pro-Africa even though their attitude toward their African-descended citizens is awful.
What is especially poignant about finding this street in Nantes, said Dahr, is that the city was once a key port in the “triangular commerce,” or slavery route from Africa to the New World. While France itself did not allow its own citizens to own slaves, many Nantes merchants played middlemen by supplying the slave ships. Slavery helped make Nantes a rich city during that period. The city has long been ashamed of this fact.
While Nantes honored Martin Luther King by naming a suburban boulevard after him, what might have pleased him more is the monument now being built—downtown next to the port—to honor the victims of the slave trade.
There is also Martin Luther King Park in Paris and Martin Luther King Complex (an amphitheatre), Annemasse, Haute-Savoie.
France is not the only European country enamoured with King. The Germans also have a Martin Luther King Jr. Olympic Park, in Munich.
The civil rights activist actually journeyed to Berlin when the nation was physically divided by its political differences.
“I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city,” King said.
On July 24, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama drew enthusiastic crowds in Berlin for his televised speech at the Siegessäule (Victory Column), just down the street from the Brandenburg Gate.
His address was well-received. Marina Mecl, program director of the Overseas Vote Foundation, a non-partisan organization that assists United States citizens abroad with absentee ballots and remembers September 1964, the year she moved to Germany. In an interview, Mecl described how Martin Luther King Jr. had been invited by Berlin’s mayor, Willy Brandt, to speak at a ceremony in Schoneberg City Hall to commemorate the assassinated John F. Kennedy; the American president had spoken in Berlin in the same place in 1963.
According to Mecl, “It must have been divine intervention,” because after speaking in Schoneberg City Hall King went on to speak to more than 20,000 people in the Waldbuhne Amphitheater and followed up on his intention by speaking in East Berlin. Despite not having a passport–the U.S. State Department confiscated it in order to hinder his visit to East Berlin—King crossed “Checkpoint Charlie” using his American Express credit card as identification to enter East Berlin, where he offered an ecumenical service in the historical Marienkirche, a historic church constructed between the 12th and 14th centuries.”
The refusal of the State Department to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to visit East Germany may have been due to J. Edgar Hoover’s accusation that King was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
Rune Kier, a specialist in European integration and diversity in Copenhagen, Denmark, and has been associated with the Intercultural Cities Programme under World Forum for Democracy. He is a cultural anthropologist specializing in civil rights and race, and has written about Obama’s speeches in leading Danish newspapers. He believes the East Germans embraced King’s visit to their country to embarrass the United States and highlight it’s treatment of African Americans.
Kier goes on to say, “Politics make strange bedfellows. Remember it was the Communists who thought about assassinating King while he was in the United States to start a race riot. To cross over the iron curtain was spectacular. [At that time] execution in East Germany was very common, if individuals were caught crossing the iron curtain.”
In addition to Europe, King traveled to Africa. In March 1957 the civil rights leader traveled by way of the United Kingdom to the West African country of Ghana with his wife, Coretta, to attend its independence ceremony. In Ghana, King saw a parallel between European colonialism in Africa and segregation in the United States. At a reception in Ghana’s capital of Accra, King brushed shoulders with then-U.S. vice president Richard Nixon, telling him, “I want you to come visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom the Gold Coast [Ghana] is celebrating.”
In April 1959, King traveled to India. He had been inspired by the nonviolent activism of India’s independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. On MLK’s final night in the country, he said in a radio interview, “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.”
King went on to write, “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” for Ebony magazine.
Other geographical landmarks named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Mural, Newtown, Australia (an Inner West suburb of Sydney)
Martin Luther King Park, Vienna, Austria
Westminster Abbey, London, England
Martin Luther King Jr. Forest, Israel
Via Martin Luther King, Naples, Italy
Piazza Martin Luther King, Borgo San Lorenzo, Italy
Place Martin Luther King, Anderlecht, Brussels
