Remembering Dr. King
Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 93 years old this past week. Only a few years my senior, I like to imagine he could still be alive today, bending the American journey towards a greater sense of justice and empathy. How might we have been different had he lived? We of course will never know.
He was taken when he was only 39 years old. That fact never ceases to shock me. How much he was able to accomplish. How much promise remained unfulfilled. How much the country and the world needed his voice.
When I first met Dr. King, in the early 1960s, we were both young men, with young families. There weren't many reporters around him then, but he clearly understood the power of the press as a megaphone for his message, particularly the images that television could transmit. He was always cordial, but never overly familiar. He knew we had a job to do and so did he. We were separated by that relationship, and by all the other divisions of American society. It was clear to me then that this man had the power to change America forever, but in doing so he would put himself and those around him in grave personal danger. He knew that all too well.
Dr. King would be the first to admit that he was not a perfect man. That made him more interesting, and the power of his message all the more difficult to ignore.
I fear that the elevation of Dr. King to the pantheon of great Americans who have national birthday celebrations has come at a subtle cost. These days almost no public official would dare speak ill of Dr. King. However I worry that this universal acclaim has deadened the radicalism of Dr. King's message. And by radicalism, I mean that what he espoused was far outside what was then the mainstream. It still is.
We must remember that he was a deeply contentious person at the time of his death. Dr. King would not, could not, suppress the moral clarity with which he saw the world. His messages about racial prejudice and social justice were not welcome in most corridors of power. He was a danger to the status quo and many who benefited from it. He not only preached powerfully about the necessity for racial healing and integration. He also issued stirring rhetoric from his pulpit on the need for economic fairness across racial lines. And he was a fierce critic of the Vietnam War.
To re-read his writings and listen again to his speeches in today's political climate is to reconnect with the hard truths he eloquently hurled at the American establishment. If he had survived the assassin's bullet and continued on his life path, I am convinced that he would have remained a divisive figure. I fear that many who now pay homage to his legacy with florid paeans would be singing different tunes if he had spent decades more actively rallying civil disobedience toward the twin causes of racial and economic fairness for the marginal and dispossessed.
So today, please don't revere Dr. King the American saint. Please engage with Dr. King as the unique vessel for a message America was long overdue to hear. And please reflect on how that message, with all its unsettling fervor, is still one of great urgency.
I would like to share this essay with my 9th grade English students as part of our upcoming Civil Rights unit with your permission. Risky in Texas, but it’s my last year teaching for the state. I’m happy to take the risk.
All that you have written is so resonant, Dan Rather, especially today! So I leave our little(?) community two offerings to follow through with this charge you have made:
(1) heed the contemporary words of Rev. Dr. William Barber and the national (state-by-state) work of the Poor People’s Campaign — we can breathe life into Dr. King’s exhortations;
(2) read the words of MLK’s speech written at the behest of the 1964 Berlin “Jazztage” organizers. King is perhaps remembered for traveling to Berlin (actually two weeks before the festival, which he did not attend in person) and his electric crossing to East Berlin, still adapting to a three-year-old wall, to speak before a spontaneous crowd of 20,000. He knew of walls, King said. But it was his expression of hope shared at the festival two weeks later — the nuance and breadth of emotion — that jazz stirs which spoke then and now to the complicated travails of oppression:
“God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
This is triumphant music.
Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.
It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.
Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.
And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.
In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”
(8:39am — Edited to add back the last three paragraphs which somehow dropped off)