The best way to commemorate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is to listen to his words. I’ve linked to a portion of his “I have a dream” speech (from YouTube).
Some other thoughts follow:
Sean Gonsalves, a columnist and reporter for the Cape Cod Times, offers some thoughts on King in a dispatch on Alternet.org that not only acknowledges the flaws in King’s character but explains that they make King human — and available, meaning that his legacy is our legacy.
While haters point to these things as proof that King is unworthy of adulation, it had the opposite effect on me, similar to my reaction when I discovered Thomas Jefferson owned and fathered slaves. I was inspired because King (and Jefferson) were no longer mythical gods but flawed human beings who achieved greatness. That means ordinary people like me could do extraordinary things, despite fundamental flaws.
The idea, Gonsalves says, is to stop worshipping the myth and remember the man, and emulate the effort and sacrifices he made fighting to make the world a better place.
Another powerful column comes to us from James Carroll in The Boston Globe, who makes the point that King’s commitment to nonviolence was part of a larger vision of a better world.
He says that
racial injustice and poverty are inextricably linked to violence. That is why non violence formed the evolving center of King’s vision. It was no mere tactic with him, a way of coping with racist sheriffs who had guns. Non violence was a defining affirmation of the value of life, and it was the practical engine of a powerful political movement.
King’s was one of the main voices to which Johnson was responding when he sought to lead the nation out of war. 1968 is recalled as a year of hated turmoil, but first it was a year of rare illumination: Racial justice and economic justice depended on peace. King was the first American to speak that triple truth to power, and for a moment, power seemed to hear.
Today, the war in Iraq is both a symptom and a cause of the chronic disease of US violence. Bush feeds the virus, and it infects every organ of the body politic. King would be appalled at the way guns now shape the hopelessness of young black men. But King would name the link between gun supply in American cities and the flood of weapons pouring from a global arms industry across the most impoverished regions of the world. Indeed, poverty has become the ground of global violence, and terrorism is its poison flower. What King and Johnson knew as the war on poverty has become an all-but-declared war on the poor. Washington is its headquarters.
Martin Luther King Jr. is held in precious memory because he made an alternative world seem possible. He spoke of a dream, but he mobilized a pragmatic program for change. Idealism, in his terms, was the height of realism. Thus, healing between races, the lifting up of the socially downtrodden, and the amelioration of all that made for violence were not three items on King’s agenda, but one human project.
We honor King today not as a way of recalling the past, but as a way of resuming his campaign in the present. A dream, yes. But equally a three-sided political movement. No racial justice without economic justice! No justice, period, without peace!
I’d like to believe that we understand this legacy, but I think that Gonsalves is right, that we have allowed King to become a myth on the order of the Greek gods, someone from another time. And we have simplified his message, turning King into a touchy-feely profit of racial harmony when what King was calling for was peace and justice. We need to remember that not only today but every single day.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 