Or maybe not. You just had a much-needed day off, if you were a public employee, and tried to get caught up on stuff. Don’t worry -- I am not trying to make you feel bad. I never met Martin Luther King, but I have talked to many people who did.
My guess is that he would have privately hated yesterday. Sure, he would have been pleased that there was a federal holiday to commemorate the struggles African-Americans went through. But he would have instantly recognized that we are doing this in part instead of thinking about the problems that remain.
By setting aside a day for King, we are able to once more ghettoize our feelings about race, walling them off into this one day. The day, by the way, is supposed to be MLK’s birthday, but most of the time doesn’t fall on the actual day.
When Congress was establishing the holiday, they decided to put it on the closest Monday to his birth, which was really January 15. The most important thing, of course, was to have another three-day-weekend. You have to keep your priorities straight.
Following the assassination, America made Martin Luther King Jr. into a plaster saint.
He could then be held out as the “good” civil rights leader, all about nonviolence and peaceful protest, and be contrasted with those “bad” civil rights leaders like Malcolm X.
The radical parts of MLK’s legacy were forgotten, such as his bitter denunciation of American policy in Vietnam, and he was reduced to some safely sanitized quotations from the “I Have a Dream” speech. He would have hated that.
That was not who Martin Luther King Jr. was. He was militant and shrewd. He was also a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being, and he knew it. By the way, here’s my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “Nothing pains some people more than having to think, Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.” Those words are especially relevant for Michigan today.
For some years, the folks at the Martin Luther King center in Atlanta made a point of working on the holiday. Now, there is a growing drive to turn it into a day of service, under the slogan, “a day on, not a day off.” I hope that catches on.
Few remember this today, but MLK was in Grosse Pointe three weeks before he died, speaking to a hostile crowd in a high school gym. They called him a traitor. He told them: “However much we dislike it, the destinies of black and white America are tied together. Whether we like it or not, culturally and otherwise, every white person is a little bit black and every black is a little bit white.”
That meant, he said, no separate paths to power and fulfillment; either we figure that out, or we all “perish together as fools.” King’s holiday was yesterday. Starting today, we should try to live his message every day of the year.
I heard this on the air today and thought it was particularly excellent, and thought I'd say as much!
I love these pieces, excellent work =D.
Posted by: Aaron | January 19, 2010 at 07:35 PM