Note: I have
posted this in one form or another on or around the Martin Luther King Day
Federal Holiday for eight or so years. Long
time readers may be sick of it. Some of
those who were offended in earlier rounds have left the building in a huff—or come
to see that maybe it was not so far off the mark after all. The thing is, year by year, it becomes more
relevant. This year as Rep. John Lewis, target of a Trump
Twitterspew, reminds us with every value Dr. King held close to his heart under
siege and every hard fought victory of the Civil Rights movement under full
scale siege, we are all called to get in trouble “Good trouble. Necessary trouble.”
Today is the Federal Holiday celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was born on January 15, 1929
and was assasinated on April 4, 1968
in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a long, hard fought effort to create a federal
holiday, following proclamations in
several states. President
Ronald Reagan signed the legislation
creating the holiday in 1983 and it was first celebrated nationally in 1986.
The senior George Bush moved
the date to the third Monday in January.
Despite
the national observance, several
states refused to enact state proclamations. After a national
economic boycott threatened the Super
Bowl in Arizona, the holiday was
officially observed in all 50 states for the first time in 2000.
Depending
on your state, schools may or may
not be open. It they are you can count
on some kind of touchy-feely programming
that will assure children that once,
long, long ago things weren’t so nice for Black
people, but thanks to Dr. King everything
is just fine now. A tremendous amount of time will be spent
emphasizing his non-violence and
schools now routinely use the occasion as a center piece in their violence
prevention programs. They will also
emphasize tolerance of those who are
different—which it turns out may be the red-headed
kid or the girl with a lisp.
As
laudable as these things are,
children are not apt to be told that
their grandparents may just have
been the ones doing the oppression
of Black folk. Nor are they given any real sense of Dr. King
as a truly revolutionary figure
willfully defying the power of the state,
demanding true systematic change, addressing class
inequality, and in time of war leading
an opposition to that war.
In
cities, towns, and villages
across much of the country, there will be obligatory
civic observations. These most often take the form of prayer breakfasts, dutifully attended by local dignitaries of all races.
While some local Black preacher
may take the occasion to lay out some
harsh truths or even demand attention to continuing injustices, everybody will applaud politely. Politicians
will parade to the podium with bromides. Someone—preferably the precocious son of a Black preacher—will intone words from the I Have a Dream Speech, and at the
end maybe everyone will join hands
and sing We Shall Over Come. I
bet you have been to just this kind of event.
Hell, I’ve even helped plan
and put them on.
There
will be nostalgic clips of the March on Washington on the news, maybe a documentary or two on Public
Television.
 |
| Dr. King was not meek, polite, or law abiding. |
Many
of the people who hated Dr. King
when he was alive or who are their spiritual descendants will blandly join in
the celebrations. And then they will turn his words against him. When you hear a plump politico with a honeyed
accent quote, as they all love to do, the one phrase from the I Have a Dream speech where he spoke
about the little children being
judged not on the color of their skins
but on the strength of their characters,
watch out. That hack is about to use Dr. Kings words to attack that dream. He will
say that now that we have erased statutory
discrimination, any lingering
program that gives disadvantaged
minorities the slightest leg-up
is itself discriminatory. He will claim that Dr. King would want a perfectly color blind society. Unspoken
is his deep conviction that in such
a color blind society, white men
will rise like cream and be restored to their rightful place on top
of the ladder—as if they had ever really
lost it.
Dr.
King will also be lauded for his non-violence, which will be translated into passivity. Law
breaking—including the kind the Civil
Rights Movement routinely used—will
be denounced. No word will be uttered that Dr. King’s
non-violence actually expected to
provoke violent opposition and use that response to tweak the conscience of a democratic
nation.
Since
Dr. King’s time, police departments
have been provided with new arms and
tactics. New crowd
control methods and security provisions make the kind of marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations led
by King either difficult or kept far away from threatening the safety of those being protested, as was seen
repeatedly in attacks on the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter protests, and now at Standing Rock. New restrictions
on the press—and when that doesn’t work outright attacks, arrests, and physical intimidation—keeps reporters
from fully reporting on acts of civil disobedience so that the public consciousness may be safely left un-tweaked.
A
few of years ago, rising to a new level
of audacious gall, a senior Pentagon
official, in a program marking Dr. King’s birth at the Department of Defense, actually argued that the Nobel Peace Prize winner would understand and approve of the work of our
soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We
are told that because Dr. King was a faithful
Baptist, he would not today support Gay,
lesbian, and transgendered people and that it is a mockery to compare their
struggle to the Civil Rights Movement.
The Black church is divided
on this—even Dr. King’s children are—but it is hard to imagine his rejection
of justice for them.
Likewise
some Black leaders will claim,
especially in their own communities,
that Dr. King fought just for them,
that gains he fought for should not be
extended to the growing Latino minorities
that threaten to displace them
as the most oppressed.
All
of this is possible because nearly 49 years after his death Martin Luther King
has been sanitized. He has been scrubbed clean of the any
semblance of actual humanity,
any personal foibles or flaws, and midnight doubts or struggles
of the soul. He has become an empty vessel into which can be poured a safe and bland pudding which
can placate pesky Blacks with a
pat-on-the-head while protecting the
status-quo.
Enough!
The real, flesh and blood Dr.
King would have none of it.
Let’s
remember him today for who he was,
not who the charlatans want to make
him out to be. And let’s remember that
as great as he was, he was one man. Let’s not denigrate the truly historic
sacrifices of thousands and thousands of ordinary people who repeatedly literally
put their lives on the line—and continue
to do so today. Let’s celebrate him
and them by rededicating ourselves
to standing up as they did, by putting our
bodies, when necessary, on the line to
achieve his true dream of an equitable and
just society.
And
let’s embrace the new generation of committed and imaginative
young Black leaders who are making sure America learns that Black
Lives Matter!
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