What Did Doctor King Actually Do?

The 57th anniversary of Doctor King's murder

I’m a wanderer, currently hanging out in my favorite area – the Barrio - of maybe my favorite big city – Tucson AZ.

visittucson.org

The Rosebud Bakery

But today, the 57^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s murder, is a good moment to pause and reflect.

The Atlantic Journal Constitution

I was just out of Marine Corps boot camp on lovely Paris Island, SC and was now undergoing Advanced Infantry Training at Camp LeJeune, NC on the day that Doctor King was murdered.

Military.com

It was my misfortune to draw guard duty at the base enlisted men’s club. Just a grubby little hole-in-the-wall that served beer to a bunch of young men who thought they were tough. Some were. And mean. I was given a night stick and I guess I was supposed to maintain order and jump into the middle of brawls. I’m glad there weren’t any brawls that night because I don’t think I would’ve jumped into the middle of them all by myself.

But I remember that night vividly because all of the White Marines were celebrating Doctor King’s murder. Or at least it appeared that way to me. Many harassed me trying to get a reaction.

But there’s probably good news here too if we pause for a moment. 57 years on, I don’t think that that murder would be cause for public celebration. Private probably, but not public. Progress has been painfully, unimaginably slow, but not non-existent.

At any rate, I’ve published this piece on Doctor King before. As you know, Mara, my CCP partner, and I as well as two major stakeholders have spent some time in Montgomery AL over the last two years. Montgomery is one of the epicenters of America’s Thing With Race – from slavery to today. One of the things that is inescapable in Montgomery, and especially so if you visit the Equal Justice Initiatives’ Peace and Justice Memorial, aka The Lynching Museum, is the constant, daily potential for violence and death that Black Americans lived with for generations. So of all things written about Dr. King, about all the tributes made to him and what he accomplished, this one is one of the most poignant. So here it is again.

One might ask, “What did Doctor King actually do?” 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. This is what he did.”