"POWERFUL ESSAY ON MLK"

“POWERFUL ESSAY  ON MLK”

            I don’t usually do this, but for this week’s blog on the 50^th anniversary week of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I want to share excerpts from the best essay that I have ever read on Dr. King.  It is by June Jordan from an essay in 1987entitled “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” from her book “Technical Difficulties:  African-American Notes on the State of the Union,” published in 1993, just after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President.  It was also reprinted in “Some of Us Did Not Die,” published after her death in 2002. If you want to know my own thoughts on the MLK assassination, see my online article for The Atlantic at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/doubting-mlk-during-a-strike-in-memphis/550118/.  Here is the excerpt from June Jordan’s extraordinary essay on MLK:

            “And I remember listening to WBAI-FM radio in 1963…..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……. I remember the positively stunned sensation that engulfed me:  I knew that we were winning;  I knew that we would win.

            And before those demonstrators 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?”

            June Jordan then writes of her inability to follow Dr. King’s mantra of nonviolence, whereby black blood should flow but not the blood of white folks, and then she adds:

            “Nevertheless, and five years later, when I heard the news of Dr. King’s assassination I knew that I had lost my leader:  he could not take me where I did not wish to go but he had taken himself into the valley of death for my sake, and he had earned his way to the uncontested mountaintop as the moral spokesman for all of the powerless and despised and impoverished…….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 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 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.

            He was not a god.  But was he not a prophet and a revolutionary calling for class war against an economic system consecrated to material wealth, a system responding only to grim promptings of brute greed and profit? 

            When that devil’s bullet lodged itself inside the body of Dr. Martin Luther King, he had already begun an astonishing mobilization of poor, Black, white, Latino Americans who had nothing to lose.  They would challenge our government to eliminate exploitative, merciless, and war-mongering policies nationwide, or else “tie up the country” through “means of civil disobedience.”  Dr. King intended to organize those legions into “coercive direct actions” that would make of Babylon a dysfunctional behemoth begging for relief. 

            Is it any wonder he was killed?  He was not a god.  And so, when the news came April 4, 1968, that Dr. King was dead, I thought, I felt, along with millions and millions of other Black Americans, that so was love and so was all goodwill and so was the soul of these United States…..

            And where does all of this place me in respect to the man who was not God?  I am thankful that he lived and that he loved us and that he tried so hard to be and to do good.  I have come to understand and to dedicate myself to the community of his dream, the righteous revolution implied by his ardent reaching for economic and social justice.”

            Thank you, June Jordan, thank you Dr. King – if you have not read this entire essay, please find it and do so.  And let all of us dedicate ourselves to the Beloved Community for which Dr. King lived and died.