Martin Luther King Day comes once a year as does Memorial Day, D Day, Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays, 9/11, and eventually Jan. 6th.
As years go by how critically important will these memorial days mean to the average American? How much do they mean now to those who no longer feel the real meaning of these days because they do not relate to them or care to understand why they have become a staple of every year.
Today, politicians in various parts of the country find themselves in black churches talking about the importance of what MLK tried to do about ending segregation and getting white America to understand what needs exist in the black community and how just a decent, humane approach to these problems would mean so much to help meet those needs.
Television stations mention remembrance of Martin Luther King on every station break.
Schools in certain States spend time during the day to discuss his life’s mission, playing and replaying his important speeches…those that still ring in our consciences today…or don’t.
But with the passage of time and new problems and struggles in this country, it is inevitable that those messages will lose their power, even lose their genuine meaning.
Four days before he was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee where he went to support a strike by the sanitation workers in that city (King had begun to expand his influence beyond just black and white to reach out to the struggling working poor – and in the eyes of conservative Americans like J. Edgar Hoover, Father of the FBI – had become a communistic danger to America) King delivered a sermon in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.
In it he made an interesting analogy which still rings true today in an America in which a Democratic Congress could not pass a Voting Rights bill which would stop a conservative effort to limit voting in black communities and the Supreme Court is about to strike down the reality of affirmative action in America’s colleges clearing reducing opportunities for Black students after years of an attempt to open doors to that kind of diversity.
In his sermon, King reminded America that Blacks were slaves in this country for 244 years. When Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed them, that freedom was all they got. Not compensation for their free labor, not land in which to farm and work their own crops. Nothing.
His analogy had us see a prisoner just freed from years of imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. He has nothing but the clothes on his back as the gates are open and he becomes free. Nothing else.
That is not what we do with such prisoners but that is what was done in freeing slaves.
At the very same moment in history, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the Midwest and West to whites who would venture across the country to take possession of this free land.
In addition, the country provided free help throughout this new territory to understand how to make the best use of the land…how to farm crops and cattle.
None of this land or assistance was offered to the freed slaves.
King saw this fundamental injustice produce a level and depth of poverty that had not existed in America before. And in that sermon he compared that unending poverty to what he had seen in Latin America, Africa and in many Asian nations.
We see it today in the millions of Latin and South Americans who are fleeing poverty and an endless lack of opportunity to cross thousands of miles on foot to arrive at our Southern border seeking entry to what they believe is the World’s land of opportunity.
And if they get that chance they will find the way of those previous millions of immigrants who came to our shores to make America what it has been.
Here is what King understood and was beginning to preach with authority and impact beyond the reality and tragedy of racism: America had to be the land of justice and opportunity to continue its powerful position in the world. And if instead injustice, the same fundamental injustice that existed in 1863 and beyond, became our habit we would lose our way and our power with it.
Perhaps he was killed for understanding that message and for preaching it with a total commitment.
He is not with us but that message is too true today to ever forget what he meant and what he will always mean to America.
“Perhaps he was killed for understanding that message and for preaching it with a total commitment.”
The circumstances of his assassination, like those of JFK, will be controversial and debated about well into the future,
1/27/2023
Related to this post was a beautiful song sung by Moms Mabley “Abraham, Martin and John,” which she performed on the Dick Cavett show sometime after 1968 — I saw her performance on TV at the time. She added the words “and Bobby” to refer to Robert F. Kennedy who died after winning the 1968 California Democratic primary election. The late actress Whitney Houston also sang that song more recently before her tragic death.
Dr. King’s message and legacy lives on!
Stephen R. Rolandi
Larchmont, NY
1/27/2023
Correction — Moms Mabley appeared on the Merv Griffin Show in 1969, not 1968.
Mea Culpa,
SR