Editor’s Introduction: Multi-Ethnic Poetry, Song, and Music

I write this introduction in the midst of protests around the United States against the deaths of African American men and boys at the hands of police officers, including a large demonstration in Washington, DC, on 13 December 2014. The protests have generated slogans such as “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe,” the latter referring to the death of Eric Garner when a police officer restrained him with a chokehold. US Representative John Lewis, commenting on these recent protests and their historical precedents, observes that during periods such as the Civil Rights Movement, when the United States “could have been torn from its very foundation,” the nation was able to move forward because of “a creative response to … turmoil.” Nonviolent protest, according to Lewis, is “designed to wake up a sleeping nation, to educate and sensitize those who become awakened, and to ignite a sense of righteous indignation in people of goodwill to press for transformation.” Noting the “growing discontent” in the United States, Lewis expresses concern for the country’s future “if the fires of frustration and discontent continue to grow without redress” (“Michael”). Lewis’s fear is similar to that expressed by Martha J. Cutter who, reflecting on the Trayvon Martin case, notes her “fear for the future we all must live in, as well as the present we all must try to endure—together” (“White”). Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis insists that “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” “There will not be peace in America” (“Michael”), Lewis warns, without this justice.

Lewis’s article invokes previous responses to racial injustice. When introducing King’s remarks on the relationship between peace and justice, Lewis emphasizes that he does not condone rioting or violence, yet this juxtaposition of peace and justice reminds us of protestors’ chants of “No justice, no peace” during the violent aftermath following the acquittal of four LA police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King. This refrain is powerfully represented in Anna Deavere Smith’s portrayal of Paul Parker, chairperson of the Free the LA Four Plus Defense Committee, in her documentary theater work, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, first performed in 1993 and in which Smith portrays the perspectives of a wide variety of characters on the LA verdicts. In Smith’s play, Parker claims that he plans to set up a “No Justice No Peace room” in his home containing clippings of articles about his work in support of black civil rights so that his children will “see what it takes to be a strong black man” (Smith 177). Emphasizing the revolutionary nature of the slogan, Parker notes that “It basically just means if there’s no justice here then we not gonna give them any peace” (178).

Lewis’s reference to the current “fires of frustration” (“Michael”) resulting from the high number of black deaths at the hands of police officers also reminds us of James Baldwin’s eloquent writing about the racial divide in the United States:

A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. “The problem of the twentieth century,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, “is the problem of the color line.” A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reexamined. … For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion—and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion.

(117-18)

Baldwin also notes his awareness, as a very young man, of the beauty of black people and his concern about what would happen to that beauty when “God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance … was achieved” (119):

I could … see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world...