The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King is a revered public figure in this world. He has a lot of family in this
world; both public and private family. He has an enduring world legacy. For
me, though, he holds a special, private, quiet place at the heart of the formative
years of my social consciousness. Until I learned who he was, I had no idea such
things as I had begun to hear about could happen. Between 1961, and 1965,
I learned most of what I admired most about Dr. King from Ebony and Jet magazines. I turned eighteen in 1965.
I felt a great deal of disappointment none of my teachers at school
had breathed a word about it. I guess to them the movement was militant.
Our school was tiny. Our graduating class was one of the largest the school had
had in years. There were 100 of us! I found out people who were the fabric of
my very existence were suffering, likely dying, for the sin of wanting equal
justice under the law - equal treatment by law.
I wanted to hear Dr. King speak in Detroit. For all my anticipatory pride
and identification with the event, all I got was news in the hometown paper
that Dr. King was breaking the law to come to our arena because our mayor
hadn't issued the permit for the public gathering. Reading that gave me a
first commitment to the promise I intended to make to myself the day of the
speech; a promise of civil disobedience. I prepared myself for a big fight at home,
a big fight at school, a big ballooning struggle with police and courts.
I didn't need to be that prepared. Everyone and anyone came downtown to
hear that speech. I mean, except anyone from school. My parents had quickly
informed me early on they wouldn't miss it for 'all the tea in China'.
Everyone in the world knows that speech now. But by the time I heard it, I
was thinking Dr. King was just too kind, too accepting, too forgiving. I had
learned about Emitt Till. I knew he had gone unavenged. I had learned about
SNCC and CORE. Those were bitter legacies. I found myself arriving late at the
table of the SCLC. I harbored still, an immense respect and hero-worship for
the man who risked his life and limb every day, so that his people could be
'free at last'. When I got back to school the following Monday, I wasn't angry
no one seemed to have gone. This wasn't their fight. It couldn't be until we
had made it a lasting enigma. I don't even remember if the other black students
went. People at my school didn't seem to want to be known so much as black
but rather as 'black but just like everybody else'. I never did relish that idea.
I found early in life I loved being black. Not everyone agreed I knew what it
meant to be black. But I felt it deep down inside whenever I was home or
around extended family. At school, I felt...other. I didn't mind. But when I
got back to school after that speech, I knew it was up to me to spread the
word, and contribute to the work. Dr. King gave my the gift of turning me into
an activist-mini. I couldn't do much - but I did appeal to my classmates to
be the Catholics we had been reading about. We got reluctant permission
from the principal (probably because the captain and co-captain of the football
team were on my side) to organize canned food drives for the marchers
in the south who couldn't stop along their routes for a bite to eat. She let us
organize for a week or so. I thought the effort should have been ongoing; but
I had learned from Dr. King. I took what was authorized, yet I collected beyond
the end date she gave me until she began to intimidate the givers.
I will always be grateful to my mother for helping me provide collection
tools and containers. I will always be grateful to my dad for 'getting me to
the churches' and other collection centers 'on time'. (He was later to beg me to
do the same 'on time' bit with him for my wedding!)
So at seventeen, I found I did have it in me to stand for something. That
self knowledge it turned out, got me through a million later tribulations.
But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took my mini- committment, and kept giving
as we know past the day he died.
I went back to class. Dr. King went back to the marches. Southerners turned
dogs on him. Southerners turned water hoses on him and the other
marchers. Southerners jailed him. Constantly. Finally Dr. King had to
marshall his inner strengths for fighting the war in Vietnam. Young black
men were coming back from the war with no cheeks left to turn. Dr. King
had begun talking with Macolm X. And people like me just loved Huey Newton.
Dr. King in America had become Nelson Mandela in the old South Africa.
Our society began to see they were going to choose from among Milton Henry,
Dr. King, Malcom X, Huey Newton. After 1967, and 1968, we naturally chose
Dr. King to lionize. He was the only one associated with peaceful coexistence
in a nation of many cultures. Huey didn't have the humanity to match his devotion. He was hero of returning warriors who mocked the "para-military".
Later, in South Africa, the apartheid government was to choose from among
Nelson Mandela, beloved the world over, Winnie Mandela's "boys", (a majority
of black youth in South Africa were teenagers at the time) and the Zulu Nation.
They surely didn't want either of the latter two.
We as black people did not get jobs or any equal access or any EEOC attention
until after our civil insurrections in '67 and '68. Laws on the books had no
teeth we could see in the cities. Of course I call them civil insurrections.
Our journalists and officials called them 'riots'. Young people don't hear or read
the real history of '67 and '68. They don't hear the truth of how Dr. King was
treated when he was alive. They don't even know the history of Thaddeus
Stevens. The true history of slavery is obscurred and obfuscated in countless
high school texts. Even at the height of black pride we skipped over our
slave ancestors to be proud of our ancestors who were kings and queens in
Africa. Our children, however, don't study African history. The true history of the
Mau Mau is nearly impossible to study in America. I hope one day
the history of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords will be honestly told.
For though she is not a traditional civil rights hero, she voted for Congressman John Lewis for this Congress's Minority Leader, even knowing her girl Nancy Pelosi would win. Hey, we love Nancy too. But Giffords honored the venerable one. And whereas '67 and '68 , a more violent part of the struggle,
are glossed over in the U.S. - Osama Bin Laden obviously
studied it intently. And whereas Congresswoman Giffords has suffered
terribly, possibly for being so honest, possibly for being so forthright, you can
bet your bottom dollar that if the Reverned Jesse Jackson, or the Reverned
Al Sharpton had put rifle cross-hairs on a map of certain congressional districts
the resultant conversations wouldn't be so "kinder , gentler".
If we really love Dr. King we will study the history of his work more closely.
We will conclude the truths about the meaning of his work in modern
culture more precisely. We will know more assuredly the work left still to
be done. And we will note, for instance, more of the little noticed affects of
his legacy. For instance, the Liberal Arts and Sciences, literature, and
western civilization studies before Dr. King, and after Dr. King, are like
night and day. If you are a black person - teach you children. If you are
not a black person, you should teach your children. Run and tell that, all
of you.