Issue 2

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Contents

Cover artwork by Serafina Harris

Editorial

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is a wound in the soul of the American people, that since 1968 has cried out for healing. 

In 2024, we are urgently striving to recover the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. It is this journey, bravely led by the Black proletariat half a century ago that contains the key to our salvation today, and answers the cry for peace that sounds across the world in our moment of genocide and war. To know ourselves as a people, and to give ourselves faithfully to the world—we must know King, and have the clarity and courage to live by this knowledge. 

Martin was an ordinary man whose moral collision with the forces of time and history led him to become a martyr and a hero. He articulated the basis on which the true America could be located, and then achieved. The Movement was a mature expression of political strategy that is the blueprint for any serious transformation of American life today, for it placed the imperative of the love ethic at its center. 

Love was the Movement’s witness, and it is love which produces the greatest evidence of a new America. In a cracked society where poverty, war, and racism abound, love is the weapon which carries us as far as we need to go, to make us a free people. Love—its complexity, selflessness, and loyalty to the human—becomes revolutionary in the American context. It is the fiercest challenge to the deepest contradiction in American life: that we are a “democratic country,” even while we degrade and destroy the lives of generations. Our immaturity has borne the greatest cost upon humanity the world has seen. 

Here, a people need redemption most profoundly. We are people who are still encountering one another and grappling with our place in time and history. We have everything to learn from one another, and the world. 

The Civil Rights Movement forged human beings made of “the hard kind of courage,” as James Baldwin described it. The men, women, students, and children of the Movement are of the same quality as the martyrs whose unbreakable light shines above an ashen land in Gaza today. The Palestinian people, who have demanded the highest moral qualities from themselves, are our mirrors today; they show us who we must become. The words of Refaat Alareer are imprinted on us, “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.” 

King died so we could live, so that we could act. We are bound to him, and he lives because he is inseparable from the essence of who we are, the American people. 

Martin Luther King Jr. is indispensably the father of the new America which yearns to be made real. In Philadelphia, he beats in the hearts, the values; is heard in the language and songs of all people—if one knows how to see, and to listen—and especially Black folk. We dedicate the second issue of Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. In Philadelphia, we have declared 2024 The Year of James Baldwin. This year of organized activity and a citywide literacy campaign, a year of ideas and love in action—is our striving to create a modern extension of the Civil Rights Movement. James, the movement’s prophetic witness and God’s Revolutionary Voice, heeded Martin’s call for revolutionary times, which we may soon find ourselves in again. From our nation’s greatest freedom movement, we take sustenance for the great journey ahead.

Avant-Garde, Issue 2
April 2024

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