"MLK DAY"

“MLK DAY”

            For my blog this week, I am going to share part of an essay on Dr. King by the poet and essayist June Jordan – it is the best essay that I have ever read on King.  If you don’t know her work, please look her up – many of her poems transformed into songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  She died of breast cancer in 2002.  This sharing is from her essay on Dr. King “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” given as an address at Stanford on the second King Day in 1987.  It is from her book of essays “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.”

            “He made big mistakes.  He was not a wonderful administrator.  He did not abstain from whiskey, tobacco, or sex.  He was not a fabulous husband, or father.  He committed adultery.  His apparent attitude towards women was conventional, at best, or strikingly narrow, or mean.  He loved to party: dancing, horsing around, heavyweight southern cuisine, and pretty women.  He did like him a little sugar in his bowl,  He was not a god.

            And I remember listening to WBAI-FM radio in 1963 the way my parents long ago used to listen to AM radio broadcasts of the Joe Louis fights, only I was following the evolution of the Civil Rights Revolution.  I was following the liberation of my life according to the Very Reverend Dr. King.  And when, one afternoon, that fast-talking, panic-stricken newscaster in Birmingham reported the lunging killer police dogs and the atrocious hose water and I could hear my people screaming while the newscaster shouted out the story of my people, there, in Birmingham, who would not quit the streets – when he described how none of that horror of nightsticks or torrential water pressure or mad dogs on the attack could stop the children of Birmingham from coming out again and again to suffer whatever they must from freedom, I remember the positively stunned sensation that engulfed me:  I knew that we winning;  I knew that we would win.

            And before those demonstrations and underneath the melee and after the bleeding and the lockups and the singing and the prayers, there was this magical calm voice leading us, unarmed, into the violence of White America.  And that voice was not the voice of God.  But did it not seem to be the very voice of righteousness?  That voice was not the voice of God.  But does it not, even now, amazingly penetrate/reverberate/illuminate:  a sound, a summoning, somehow divine? That was the voice of a Black man who had himself been clubbed and stabbed and shoved and shot at and jailed and spat upon, and who, repeatedly and repeatedly, dared the utmost power of racist violence to silence him.  That was the voice of a leader who did not tell others to do what he would or could not do:  bodily he gave witness to his faith that the righteous cause of his activity would constitute his safety………

            Almost twenty years ago, Dr. King, standing alone, publicly demanded that England and the United states both act to isolate South Africa through unequivocal severing of financial or any other connection with that heinous regime.  In that same year, Dr. King stood forth, opposed to the war in Vietnam, and thereby suffered the calumny and castigation of his erstwhile peers as well as the hysterical censure of his outright foes. 

             Evaluating America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in our time,” in 1967 Dr. King, with a breadth of determination and rectitude unimaginable even now, undertook the launching of a revolution aimed against that violence, a revolution pitted against America’s inequities, a revolution riveted against an American poverty of the spirit that allowed us to uproot , and decimate, a host of strangers while denying basic necessities to the homeless here at home.”