FORTY YEARS ON
Powell predicts blood
Martin Luther King and
Robert Kennedy slain
What direction we want to move in
Closer to being ready for President Obama
“I seem to see The River (Tiber) flowing with much blood”.
“And I’ve seen the Promised Land”.
“We have to make an effort .... to get beyond these rather difficult times”.
Whatever the fears, the hope and the exhortation of the three prominent politicians who made those predictions in April 1968, they realised fully that forty years ago the world had reached a crossroads in race relations. Today, four decades later, seeing a black candidate, Senator Obama, with his foot (at least) well set on the pathway leading to the White House, we are better-placed to see how these fears and expectations have worked out.
Few political speeches in the United Kingdom have had such immediate repercussions as that delivered by Enoch Powell to the Conservative Political Centre at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham on 20th April 1968 – the date, incidentally (and maybe appropriately) was the birthday of Adolf Hitler. Hitherto racism and immigration were the under-current of British politics: the issues were usually “swept under the carpet”. No politician of comparable prominence had raised these subjects until Powell made his proclamation. The Conservative Party, then, was at its own crossroads. It had been trounced at the General Election two years earlier and Powell, whose few pronouncements about ethnic minorities until then had been favourable, had been humiliated in his challenge for the party leadership. The politician and the party needed a different sense of direction. Was this the way to go?
In a speech that was both lurid and graphic – the text reads today even more chilling then it appeared to be at the time – Enoch enunciated his vision of the future with a reference to ancient Roman which gave it is “rivers of blood” name. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century”.
The Conservative Party moved swiftly to distance themselves from the maverick. Liberal-leaning Iain Macleod, Edward Boyle and Robert Carr threatened to resign from the Shadow Cabinet, from which party leader Edward Heath then sacked Powell. Heath told Panorama television interviewer Robin Day: “I dismissed Mr. Powell because I believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations. I am determined to do everything I can to prevent racial problems developing into civil strife... I don't believe the great majority of the British people share Mr. Powell's way of putting his views in his speech."
Nevertheless the Geni had been let out of the bottle. Large sections of the working-class – galvanised by a march on the Houses of Parliament by the London dockers – rallied to Powell’s cause. He had made expressions of racism to be almost “acceptable”, and the National Front’s advance over the next decade was stemmed only by Margaret Thatcher – Heath’s successor as leader of the Conservative Party – observing that “people fear rather being swamped by an alien culture” on the eve of the 1979 General Election which she won decisively.
Powell’s intervention was especially relevant – some would say “irresponsible” – because much blood had started already to foam in the U.S.A. Just over a fortnight before he uttered his foreboding, Dr Martin Luther King, the advocate of understanding and justice, was gunned down on the verandah of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. He, too, had a vision of the future – made poignant by the delay in his arrival in the city due to the threat that a bomb had been placed on the aircraft. On 3rd April 1968 Dr King addressed a rally at the Mason Temple, in which he stated:
“And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain-top. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”.
The following evening Dr King stepped out of room 306 in the Lorraine Hotel onto the verandah, where a few seconds after 6 p.m. the assassin’s bullet found its mark. Civil unrest swept through the cities of the U.S.A. In that instant the harmony and progress associated with the “60s” was swept away. Cynicism flourished where the dream had died. Black and white friends who had marched hand in hand on Freedoms Right found themselves – usually unwillingly (and often the worse for that) – on the other side of the “divide”. Inter-racial enterprises foundered – their impetus gone – the edge now antagonistic.
Indianapolis, at least, was spared the violence, though not the sorrow. Bobby Kennedy, then campaigning for the Democrat nomination in the year’s presidential election, was due to address a rally when he was given the news. He ignored advice that in the heightened tension the meeting should be cancelled, and spoke from his heart:
“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black – considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarisation – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times .......
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black”.
Two months later – almost to the day – Bobby Kennedy, too, was shot dead.
His question regarding the kind of nation that the U.S.A. is and the direction in which it should move have remained pertinent – and largely unanswered – for forty years. It is said to be darkest always before the dawn. In the immediate aftermath of the hardly “enlightened” years of the George W. Bush administration the American people seem to be moving more towards the answer which Dr Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy saw for their country than to that which Enoch Powell saw for his.
Barack Obama, another candidate for the Democrat nomination, has united his compatriots in a way in which they have not been united since the halcyon days of Dr King’s campaigning mission, and the Kennedy clan have bestowed on him the mantle of their “inheritance” – of John and Teddy, as well as of Bobby. It is a heady combination. The world of forty years ago was not ready for either Dr Martin Luther King nor Robert Kennedy, but forty years on from then – while memory of Enoch Powell has been washed up on the tide of history (there may be some violence, unease and injustice, but the river has not flowed with much blood) – the world, both in the U.S.A. and outside, is much closer to being ready for President Obama.
