Making President’s Day Relevant to Black History Month
This presidents’ day I’d like to take the time to reflect on Black presidential candidates in American history. Only recently has it been possible to see a Black man in the oval office, prior to Barack Obama the face of the president has always been white, but even today a Black person running for president is a radical act. This was especially true for Presidential Candidate Clennon Washington King Jr. who was the first African American to run for president. King ran with the Independent Afro-American Party in 1960, receiving just under 1500 votes. He’d come in eleventh place out of the twelve candidates, just before the Constitution Party’s Merritt Curtis and B. N. Miller. Although King didn’t break the race, it was still a record accomplishment at the time to be proud of. A Black man running for office at the time was an unthinkable act, but King wasn’t at all afraid of the unfamiliar.
There were main events throughout King’s life that primed him for presidential candidacy. He’d made several attempts at integration for himself and his family. In 1958 his wife and family left after he’d tried to have one of his children integrate into an all white elementary school in Mississippi. Later that year he applied to Oxford, an all white university, just for the point of being the first Black man to attend. While in line for registration he was escorted off of the campus by officers, arrested, and sent to asylum. His brother, a prestigious lawyer, C.B. King along with Martin Luther King were among many civil rights activists who pressured doctors in order to receive his release from the mental health hospital.
King, the oldest of seven sons, was a born leader on July 18, 1920. He wasn’t afraid to go against the grain, seeing obstacles as his personal challenge for him to face. For him the policies of segregation were personal invitations, a call for him to join into the privileges of whites who blocked Blacks movement upward academically and socially. He’d moved all over the country making attempts to desegregate several different types of institutions. After moving to Albany to pastor Divine Mission Church he’d devoted himself to desegregating the all-white Plains Baptist Church that was located nearby. He’d done this while running against President Gerald Ford in 1976. The desegregation attempt got him a lot of attention after he along with three other Blacks applied for membership to Plains Baptist church which rejected them based on the church’s policy established in 1965 restricting “Negros and civil rights agitators”. King was criticized for the ‘politically inspired’ attempt at desegregation and did not win the presidency.
King later moved to Miami where he established another church, All Faith Church of Divine, out of an apartment building that he owned. There he’d also started his own political party, the Party of God, under which he ran for Date county mayor in 1996. Although he didn’t win the run for mayor King wasn’t afraid of attention, even if it was negative he’d known that his intentions where reliable and genuine and hoped regardless of how people came to find him, that they would grow to agree with his political stances and support his campaign. In 1993 while in pursuit of a seat on the Date County Commission King walked the streets to appeal to voters, handing out a small slip that read, “YOU’VE BEEN FUCKED BY ALL THE SMART-ASSES. SO, NOW, ON TUES., MARCH 16, 1993, VOTE FOR A CRAZY NIGGER.”
King was an unafraid and uninhibited natural born leader, living in a time when people weren’t at all comfortable with Black male leadership. Although members of his family supported him, even his wife fled from his multiple attempts at integration for fear of their and their children’s lives. Was King’s relentless pursuit of leadership in the era of racial segregation a form of insanity? I’d argue that it is in the same way that revolutionaries are of today; prison abolitionists are the desegregationists of our time, seeing the ‘normal’ societal systems of today as inhumane. Without presidential candidate King, there have never been a President Obama. If seeing a better way to live for our community is insane just because of societal standards then the definition of insanity is going to get a whole lot bigger.
Happy President’s day.
