I remember Stevie Wonder campaigning to make Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday. I also remember Bull Conner, whips, dogs and firehoses on my TV as a child. And I remember my dad looking up from the phone, when my sister called to tell him King had been murdered.
I don't think this is what Stevie had in mind when he sang that we need a holiday. I realized, this weekend, that I don't recognize the King that most of the country is celebrating.
As I sat in church Sunday, the lady giving the talk during "kid church" told them that Dr. King was a good man that wanted people to be nice to each other. Some people were bad to him. Just like sometimes people are grumpy with us. Just like Jesus, King wanted us to treat others as we'd want to be treated.
No! No! No! If that was the case, we'd have never heard of him. He'd be just another anonymous minister preaching the gospel on Sunday mornings. Yes, he preached the Gospel of Jesus and emphasized the principal of turning the other cheek. But the point was to prod the conscience of the wider (whiter) nation. He didn't travel and preach niceness. He demanded justice. He condemned racism, militarism and economic inequality. Both Jesus and King knew where their defiance of the powerful would probably lead. Crucifixion for Jesus and, for King, death from blunt force trauma from a truncheon, his neck in a noose or (as it turned out) a bullet.
We're guilty of doing the same thing as the book burners and banners. We're obscuring history. As those of us who lived during King's (and the movement's) time age, it's imperative that young people learn the unadulterated story. King wasn't trying to change the minds of grumpy people. He was fighting wicked, evil people who were willing to bomb children, shoot fathers in their driveways and condemn millions of fellow citizens to second class citizenship.
I reject the argument that children's psyches are too fragile, too undeveloped to be given such traumatic information. We're doing them no favors hiding reality from them and we commit a second crime against the victims of the violence King was resisting by diluting their stories. Children were in the protests! Children were beaten and killed. White children, like me, in the North witnessed this on our televisions when we were in primary school. It happened. We saw it. And because of that, we can never not know.
Many of us became human rights activists because of how we grew up. But, only because we had a realistic picture of how dangerous violations of civil and human rights can be. If we sanitize history, and if the growing fascist movement erases history, how can we expect a future generation to stand up for their rights or those of others?
For years now, we see politicians, preachers and, heck, even our relatives quoting King and holding him (and selective quotes from him) up as support for their political views on any given topic. Instead of allowing Martin Luther King to become a mythical figure like George Washington confessing to chopping down the cherry tree, let's take him back. The real Dr. King. The one who chastised moderates in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The King who gave the Beyond Vietnam speech at NY's Riverside Church one year to the day before he was shot. The one who said,
" ...we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
As we should with Jesus, let's celebrate not the King we are given after his death. Let's celebrate the one that was hated during his life.
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