Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Apparently J. Edgar Hoover didn't get that memo.  One example:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html?_r=0

Attribution for any major social movement is challenging, as there is a tendency to oversimplify matters.  Bayard Rustin was, himself, asked by A. Philip Randolph and A.J. Muste to play an advisory role in Montgomery in 1956.  It's true that Dr. King was protected by armed guards prior to Rustin's arrival, but Rustin's commitment to Gandhian nonviolence was likely influenced by his participation in both Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Muste's Fellowship of Reconciliation, the latter of which was an explicitly pacifist organization.  (Muste has been referred to as an "American Gandhi.")

No one emerges from the womb (or college, for that matter), fully formed.  There exists a great deal of mutual influence, and Dr. King benefited from this just as Rustin did, and Muste, and so on. 

While Rustin's sexuality reportedly prompted his departure from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, it was allegedly his past as an organizer in the Young Communist League at the City College of New York that motivated many within the movement, like Emery O. Jackson, to try and force him out of sight.  There was considerable fear that the presence of Rustin and Jack O'Dell, among others, would grant red-baiters the ammunition needed to discredit the movement. 

Both Dr. King and Malcolm X understood the two-pronged, or "vanguard" effect they produced in tandem.  

Malcolm once told Coretta Scott King, "I want Dr. King to know that I didn't come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King."

Both men wanted fundamentally the same thing: freedom.  They simply had different ideas about what that looked like, and how it should be attained.  

No serious student of history would call Dr. King an accomodationist.  He did not believe in gradualism and would accept nothing less than full equality.  He was hardly an apologist for the United States government, which was inherently complicit in the institutionalization of racism, and he staunchly opposed both the war in Vietnam and the economic system he faulted for producing widespread poverty.  

Two months before he delivered the speech now widely reduced and renamed the "I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. King spoke at a march on Detroit.  As part of that address, King said, "Now there is a magnificent new militancy within the Negro community all across this nation. And I welcome this as a marvelous development. The Negro of America is saying he’s determined to be free and he is militant enough to stand up."  He did attempt to advocate some limits to this militancy, as you can see in the full text, but his caveats are not dissimilar to Malcolm's views following his Hajj.   

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index...try/doc_speech_at_the_great_march_on_detroit/

Obviously some were growing increasingly frustrated with the rate of progress, especially after Chicago, and felt there was a limit to what could be accomplished through nonviolence.  Then, too, there were differences in opinion with respect to separatism/nationalism vs. integration.  (As James Baldwin once put it, "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?")

To suggest that Dr. King was a tool of pacification, however, is not well founded and rests primarily on assumptions about his legacy as it has been distorted and co-opted by obstructionists and conservatives, generally, in the years following his assassination.  (For example, the King family had to sue Ward Connerly et al. for attempting to excerpt Dr. King as part of a political ad opposing affirmative action in California.)  His actual positions are, in many respects, more progressive than he's typically given credit for. 

 

With primary season nearly upon us, many of the demagogues currently seeking to leverage popular prejudice to vault themselves into a position of power will cynically attempt to trade on the righteousness and integrity that Dr. King has come to represent, even as they labor to undermine all that he stood for.  

Given the increasingly vitriolic state of political speech in recent months, I hope some of the following make the rounds alongside the usual quotes today:

"[D]isappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness. Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all." 

“We can choose either to walk the high road of human brotherhood or to tread the low road of man’s inhumanity to man.  History has thrust upon our generation an indescribably important destiny – to complete a process of democratization which our nation has too long developed too slowly.  The future of America is bound up in the present crisis.  If America is to remain a first-class nation, it cannot have a second-class citizenship.”  

“The softminded man always fears change.  He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new.  For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.”   

“The guardians of the status quo lash out with denunciation against the person or organization that they consider most responsible for the emergence of the new order.”  

It's worth noting, too, that Dr. King wasn't just a speaker.  Dr. King was a listener.  He led because he listened:  he listened to his colleagues and allies, who requested his support and presence.  He listened to the stories of suffering experienced at home and abroad.  He listened to his conscience.  He even listened to his critics.  

“Help us", he urged in Trumpet of Conscience, "to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.  From his view we may indeed see the basic weakness of our condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”  

In this season of soundbites, spin, and snark, it's important to remember that the loudest person in the room is not necessarily the strongest.  

Dr. King recounted the following story for Liberation Magazine, and it's one I feel everyone ought to be familiar with:

“One anonymous phone caller, whose voice I have come to recognize, has been calling me for months to insult and threaten me and then slam down the receiver.  Recently he stayed on the phone for half an hour, giving me the opportunity to discuss the whole underlying problem with him.  At the end of the call he said:  ‘Reverend King, I have enjoyed talking with you, and I am beginning to think that you may be right.’  This willingness to change deeply ingrained attitudes buoys us up and challenges us to be open to growth, also.” 

Though, in his retelling of this story, Dr. King praises his erstwhile harasser for his openness and willingness to consider the perspective of his perceived opponent, how many of us can honestly say that we'd replicate the extraordinary patience and civility Dr. King exhibited by taking the time to have an earnest conversation with someone who'd shown him such cruelty and spite?  

I can only hope that all the would-be representatives of the American people who will quote Dr. King today will absorb - rather than merely echo - his words.  

What are your thoughts today, on the thirtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day?