The Reverand Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 17, 2022

Today we honor the legacy of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr, murdered in April 1968 as he spoke yet again for racial justice.

The designation of this day to honor Doctor King was a path fraught with not only love and respect, but racism and hatred as well as . Legislation to honor Doctor king was introduced just four days after his murder. Today, when most of the 332,000,000 Americans now alive were born after Doctor King died, the popular national narrative is that he was a leader loved by all Americans. The truth is more nuanced, as truth always is.

It took 15 years after the legislation was first proposed for Ronald Reagan to reluctantly sign it into law…“I would have preferred a non-holiday in King’s honor”… and an additional 17 years for the holiday to receive some sort of recognition in all 50 states. Arizona and New Hampshire observe it as “Civil Rights Day”. Wyoming as “Wyoming Equality Day”.  Alabama and Mississippi combine it with “Robert E Lee” Day, the southern general who fought to keep people like Doctor King enslaved and tortured. No irony there.

From our perch so many years after the end of his life, it’s hard to remember or for younger folks to even understand the animosity towards King while he was still alive. One of my most searing memories of my time serving my country in the Marines was the night that Doctor King was killed, is the large number of white Marines who rejoiced in his death.

Little known or remembered is the support that Stevie Wonder gave to passage of the bill. His 1980 album “Hotter than July” featured the song “Happy Birthday”, an ode to King’s vision and a rallying cry for support for passage of the bill.

I just never understood / How a man who died for good / Could not have a day that would / Be set aside for his recognition ... in peace, our hearts will sing / Thanks to Martin Luther King

Wonder continued to spread his message with regular appearances alongside Coretta Scott King at rallies. He also capped a four-month tour with a benefit concert on the National Mall, where King had delivered his famous “I have a Dream” speech 18 years earlier.

But one might ask, “What did Doctor King actually do?” And there are certainly many answers to that question. But the one that has stuck in my mind is from something I read many years ago, penned by a man named Hamden Rice. I’ve edited his poignant piece of writing for brevity.

“I remember that many years ago, when I was home from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

A bit of context here:  All four of my father’s grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had been born slaves. He and his family lived in a "holler" in rural Virginia, where all the landowners and tenants were black.  

On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they lived in isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did have to leave the valley to go to town where all the rigid rules of Jim Crow applied. By the time I was little, my people had been in this country for six generations much longer under slavery than under freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism.

So I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X's message when my father got really angry at me.  

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his "I have a dream speech.” My father responded with a cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."  This is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches. He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I'm guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south, and in parts of the Midwest and in many ghettos of the north, was living under terrorism.  

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.  

This constant low level dread of violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.  

White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of "assault," which could be anything from rape to not taking off one's hat, to "reckless eyeballing."  

When I was little my father taught me many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady.  This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.  

I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents' vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, when state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns. Everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.

This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.”

I grew up in NH in an all-white town and attended all white schools all the way through High School, so I was kind of indoctrinated into being comfortable around white people. I was vaguely aware that I was different, but I don’t recall thinking very much about it. But I do recall when the Marine Corps sent me to Jacksonville Florida, my Mom taking me aside and saying very simply, “You know, you don’t have to date white girls. You can date colored girls.” I was kind of embarrassed. I don’t think I responded and I had no idea why my Mom was saying that to me. But years later I realized that she was terrified that I’d be beaten or lynched. Jacksonville was a beaten down, deep south, military town. I never met any gal, white or colored, so I never dated. Good thing. I might have been lynched.