“THE MEANING OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR”
I don’t remember when I first encountered Martin Luther King. My earliest memories come from my captivity to white supremacy – I understood MLK to be a communist, maybe a con artist duping Black people and some white people, hoping to get big bucks from them. But, the SCLC actions in Birmingham in 1963 made something stir just a bit in my heart. Seeing the fire hoses, the police dogs attacking the children – those things made me begin to wonder in my junior year in high school – did I know the whole story? Or was there more to it than I had been taught?
It was in this context that I decided to watch MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington in the last week of August in 1963, just before I began my senior year in high school. I was astonished – there were 250,000 people there of all colors and walks of life – could all of them be fools, be communists? And then there was Dr. King and his stunning eloquence and powerful ideas and calls to action. I knew then that I did not know the entire story, that my captivity to white supremacy had severely limited my imagination. I was not converted yet, but I knew that I had a lot to learn. Whenever I think of Martin Luther King, Jr, I think of that sweltering day in August, 1963 when he opened a small window in my heart and my imagination.
Yet, it was not just white folk like me who were moved by Martin Luther King, Jr. Black folk too were astonished at his courage and his audacity, and I want to return to part of an essay by poet June Jordan to share the perspective of Black people in response to Dr. King.
This excerpt is from 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 were 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 King Day in 1987. It is from her 1993 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 for 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.”
So, as we celebrate MLK Day and seek ways to honor his witness and life, let us find ways in our time to step into the fray as he did – check out the criminal injustice system; speak out and act out about the continuing power of white supremacy and racism; stand against and march against the slaughter in Gaza; fight against the tide of patriarchy seeking to roll back the gain in women’s rights. As Dr. King put it in the sermon played at his funeral, let us be known as drum majors for justice. Let’s honor his life and witness in those ways.
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