Much more than a dream:
Best way to honor King is to embrace his full vision
by Audrey T. McCluskey
Bloomington Herald-Times
January 16, 2005
It is safe to say that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday has now become ensconced in American popular culture, with a full measure of both good effects and irony. Some people, in an attempt to trivialize the day, refer to it as the "black holiday," and others note the fact that the commemoration of Dr. King includes the renaming of streets to honor him in almost every American city with a sizable black population. These boulevards are usually located in economically neglected and under-resourced areas inhabited by the poor - people who were championed by Dr. King, but are totally absent from the present political discourse. Exploiting the perception that these areas are incubators of crime, comedian Chris Rock has advice for anyone who gets lost on MLK Jr. Boulevard at night - "RUN!"
Jokes aside, we are now celebrating the 19th anniversary of the national holiday, which resulted from leadership by Reps. John Conyers and the late Shirley Chisholm, and an intense campaign of grassroots organizing by followers of the martyred leader. Since President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation making his Jan. 15 birthday a holiday, celebrated officially on the third Monday in January, it has grown in prominence and silenced most of its early critics. Many of those who once called King a "communist sympathizer" and "anti-American" now sing his praises. Except for the occasional King day skating party or sale-a-thon, the holiday, unlike many others, has evaded rampant commercialization. In the spirit of Dr. King's notion that everyone can be great because each of us can serve, the holiday's theme of "A day on, not a day off," asks for a day of service in one's own community. While the success of the holiday has deservingly exalted one of America's greatest spiritual and political leaders, it has also served to seriously oversimplify and skew his message.
The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular culture is one who writer Charles Johnson says suffers from "the curse of canonization." That is a syndrome that befalls the elevation of complex, formerly controversial figures such as King and Malcolm X who in exchange for public acceptance, become symbolized by simplistic rhetoric or images. Remember the "X" caps of a few years ago that some wearers thought meant Malcolm the 10th?
Dr. King was a learned student of renowned philosophers, theologians and activists including Reinhold Niebuhr, who preached "Christian realism" and resistance to injustice; and Mahatma Gandhi, whose nonviolent philosophy King embraced. His own background as the son and grandson of Baptist ministers provided an added sense of destiny, augmented by the centerpiece of his philosophy - the transformative power of love. Regrettably, King's enlightened synthesis and praxis has calcified into the "I Have a Dream" speech that school children recite, beauty contestants feel obligated to invoke and comedians feel compelled to spoof. A stirring and powerful speech when delivered at the 1963 March on Washington, it presented only one phase of King's ambitious goal of transforming America. Surely, Dr. King wanted an end to the suffering of black Americans and the accumulated injustice of four hundred years of mistreatment. But he wanted much more.
Four months before the March on Washington, "The Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written on scrap paper while under arrest for leading a nonviolent demonstration in what he called "the most segregated city in America," is a fuller and more radical enunciation of his ideals and practice. When chided by the city's leading clergy for being an "outside agitator" and leading an "unwise and untimely" demonstration, King responded in the letter by reminding the clergy - Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish - that like the apostle Paul of Tarsus who ventured well beyond his home to evangelize for Christ, he, as a "drum major for justice," felt compelled to go anywhere that injustice prevailed. He reminded the clergy that if they had as much concern about the appalling conditions of segregation and inequality that necessitated the demonstrations, there would be no need for them. In subsequent speeches, King went against the status quo and risked alienating those whose support waned as he extended his direct action to the fight for economic justice and opposition to the war in Vietnam. In a sermon, King deplored American arrogance and self-righteousness while declaring his love for this great nation. "God," King said, "didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war."
If Dr. King were alive today, we can imagine that he might have similarly strong opinions and be a steady moral compass on the state of world affairs. Meanwhile, as we celebrate his birthday, it behooves us to get to know the man and his ideas by reading or re-reading some of his collected speeches and sermons, one of his three books, or one of the excellent biographies such as Taylor Branch's "Parting the Waters."
In one of his last sermons, King defined his work as unfinished, and in constant need of renewal. We honor him by engaging his full moral, spiritual, and political vision - and by picking up the gauntlet.
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