1/9/2009 4:32:00 PM With some effort, we could each be Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been 80 this year. He has been dead for longer than he was alive. As his living memory fades, replaced by a feel-good I have a dream whitewash that ignores much of what he stood for and fought against, it s more important than ever to recapture the true history of Dr. King -because much of what he fought against is resurfacing or still with us today, in Seattle and throughout our country and the world.
This year, our annual, facile third-Monday celebration of King is inextricably linked with the next day's inauguration of Barack Obama as the United States' first African-American president. Pundits will undoubtedly suck up a lot of air, ink and pixels comparing the achievements of the two.
It's a gross disservice to both. Obama is a politician who happens to be a groundbreaker; his race is, to be sure, a key part of his identity, but racial issues are not what propelled him to power. Dr. King, by contrast, was a groundbreaker who became an (unelected) politician. Obama has inspired billions through who he is and through his gift for inspiring rhetoric. But he is, at the end of the day, a politician trying to get and stay elected.
Dr. King was not about elections; he was about liberation. King spoke truth to power; Obama is power. Obama is not King. King was not an Obama. We need to remember the difference, and remember that King was far more than a dream that Obama has (supposedly) become the culmination of.
King, the man, was, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention - citing a higher moral authority - and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks to his own life (and eventually lost it) fighting for a higher cause. King is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals and the extraordinary social strength of the black Southern churches behind him.
What little history TV will give us around King's holiday this year is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering, as much about self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American as self-examination that American racism made him necessary and that government, at every level, sought to destroy him.
We hear "I have a dream;" we don't hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don't see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the years of beatings and busts before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We don't hear about the mainstream American contempt at the time for King, even after that Peace Prize, nor the FBI harassment or his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe.
Here in Seattle, few whites know our local chapters in that history: the housing and school segregation, laws barring Asians from owning land (overturned only in the '60s), the marches downtown from predominantly black Garfield High School, police harassment of both radical and mainstream black activists, the still-unsolved assassination of a local NAACP leader.
Those struggles, against the way poverty and militarism and segregated schools and law enforcement abuse affect all people but particularly non-whites, all continue, in Seattle and across the country. Sure, gifted African-Americans like Obama can achieve at a level unthinkable in King's day. But the better test of a society's colorblindness (or gender equity) is not how the most talented of each race or gender fare, but how the mediocre do. A black George W. Bush could still never, ever become president of the United States.
While Jim Crow and the cruelties of overt segregation are now largely unimaginable, much remains to be done. And the moral outrage of Americans that made Dr. King's work so politically effective? We don't do that any more. We can torture thousands of mostly innocent Iraqis and Afghans, in plain sight, and nobody is held accountable. It'd take a whole lot more than Bull Connor's police dogs to make the news today.
The saddest loss in the modern narrative of Dr. King's career is the story of who he was: a man without wealth, without elected office, who managed as a single individual to change the world simply through the strength of his moral convictions.
His power came from his faith and his willingness to act on what he knew to be right. That story could inspire many millions to similar action - if only it were told. We could each be Dr. King.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark Card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by dissembling politicians.
Dr. King deserves better.
We all do.
Seattle community activist Geov Parrish can be reached via editor@southseattlebeacon.com.
