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Ml. KING FOR A DAY
Fifteen years since its original commemoration as a national hol
iday, how many Americans remember that the Martin Luther King
Day bill was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, the most reactionary
and racially insensitive president of our time?
Yielding to public and congressional pressure in the mid-'80s.
President Reagan—whose famously symbolic visit to the Nazi ceme
tery at Bitburg, Germany endeared him to racists everywhere—ironi
cally became the reluctant advocate of our official celebration of Dr.
King and his progressive legacy. This
curious twist of history testified to
the moral power and inevitability of
King's humanistic vision of integra
tion, tolerance and equality, however
far humanity has yet to travel to
reach those goals.
It's also interesting to note that
most of the gains achieved over the
last 40 years in the realm of civil
rights and equal opportunity occurred during the administrations,
and to some degree under the leadership, of three presidents from
the South: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
King's eventual opposition to the Vietnam War turned Johnson
and other liberals against him—a black man campaigning for inte
gration was one thing, but at the time it seemed rather uppity for
the Nobel Peace Prize recipient to be lecturing the white power
structure on foreign policy—and ultimately led to his murder.
Now, many of the people who resisted King's influence during his
lifetime have embraced the King holiday as an opportunity to white
wash the image of a non-threatening black leader whose trademarks
were nonviolence and some kind of harmless "dream." Safely
enshrined as a historic statue, the reality of King's militancy, his
inspirational leadership in labor struggles and the antiwar move
ment, his increasing acknowledgment of the connections between
war abroad and poverty at home are easily ignored.
Yet King is such a con
temporary figure—assassi
nated on April 4, 1968 at
the age of 39—that many
people remember firsthand
what he was doing and
saying, so the man's vision
can be carried forward...
with the birthday commemo
ration serving as a reminder
of what he actually was.
SPIRIT AND CELEBRITY
Retired UCSC sociology
professor Hardy Frye, who
worked in the deep South in
the 1960s as an organizer
with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee
(SNCC)—often working in
concert with Dr. King and
his organization, the
Southern Christian
?adership Conference
(SCLC)—has called the King
holiday an homage to "all
the people who worked in
the movement."
After he retired, Frye
joined the Peace Corps and
went to Africa. In a conver
sation held some time
before he left, he remem
bered that the SNCC and the
SCLC often differed over
strategy or tactics, but that
King was universally
admired.
"He was the most decent person I've ever known," said Frye,
adding that the man whom he and his fellow activists half-jokingly
called "de Lord” was both completely approachable and somehow
almost saintly: "You couldn't hear him speak without being electri
fied."
It was a combination of brilliant intellect, personal magnetism
and oratorical eloquence—integrated with a deep commitment to
spiritual values—that swept King into the leadership of a movement
that mobilized thousands of people and made him a national hero.
He skillfully used his own celebrity and the tactic of nonviolent con
frontation to focus the attention of U.S. media on the struggle for
civil rights.
King would often use the drama of a local crisis—in Montgomery,
in Selma, in Chicago, in Memphis—to gain national publicity for his
cause. SNCC had a different strategy, Frye said, whereby "you build a
political organization at the grassroots level and you work your way
out of a job by strengthening people to run their own communities.
We didn't believe you bring NBC, ABC and all the cameras and
churches in to push through national legislation.
"Not that we didn't think national legislation was important," he
added, "but we were more in tune with people's daily lives than per
haps Martin was—because of who he
was 3nd how much traveling he had
to do."
Of course, it was in part the trav
eling, the expanding contact with dif
ferent people in different communi
ties that helped King understand the
larger implications of black people's
struggle for freedom, and to see that
struggle in an international context.
As early as 1963, King was referring in speeches to "our brothers
and sisters in Africa and Asia who are moving swiftly toward inde
pendence, while we are moving slowly toward a hamburger and cup
of coffee at a lunch counter."
CRITIQUING THE CULTURE
The solid religious basis for King's activism prefigured what was
to become known in Latin America as liberation theology. "God
loves all his children," he said. "God is interested in the freedom of
the whole human race." The power of nonviolence, he insisted, was
in its ability to disarm the opponent from a position of moral
strength, dignity, courage and compassion. It was a political exten
sion of the revolutionary message of Jesus.
King's Christian critique of a supposedly Christian culture
exposed the contradictions between America's ideals and its reality.
As he drew the connections between racism, poverty, economic
exploitation and militarism,
his call for change grew
more comprehensive. In the
last year of his life he was
saying that "a nation that
continues year after year to
spend more money on mili
tary defense than on pro
grams of social uplift is
approaching spiritual death."
Unable to ignore the
implications of nuclear
weapons, he observed that
the choice was no longer
"between violence and non
violence, it is either nonvio
lence and non-existence."
These were fairly radical
things to be saying in 1967
and '68—so radical, in fact,
and so dangerous to the
status quo that this
visionary individual had to
be crucified for his teach
ings. Whoever it was that
ordered his murder. King's
execution served to decapi
tate for the time being a
growing movement
throughout this country for
social/spiritual/political
transformation. Part of that
transformation has occurred,
as Frye pointed out, through
the integration of numerous
black activists of the King
era "inside the margins of
the system," where they
have some impact as standard-bearers of a humane legislative
agenda.
A subtler aspect of the transformation, so dramatically embodied
in King as a person, has been the courage of individuals inspired by
his example to change themselves and thereby change reality.
Though there may be a long way to go before King's famous dream
is realized, his birthday can serve as a beacon of commitment for
those on the path of peace and liberation.
Stephen Kessler
Stephen Kessler writes for Metro Santa Cruz, where this article
originally appeared.
KING'S EVENTUAL OPPOSITION TO THE
VIETNAM WAR TURNED JOHNSON AND
OTHER LIBERALS AGAINST HIM ...
AND ULTIMATELY LED TO HIS MURDER.
JZL
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