I worry sometimes that MLK Day will become a generic holiday, like “President’s Day” and we’ll forget what it is we’re supposed to be honoring today.
Last year, I reposted his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, and since bytes are cheap, I’ll gladly do it again.
I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face Jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.
They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My fleets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he k alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?
If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.
I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
We are blessed to live in one of the least racist countries in the world; and yet we have a sad road behind us and a long road ahead of us to make race truly irrelevant. Actually, that’s wrong. The goal isn’t necessarily to make race irrelevant, but to make racial contempt irrelevant, and to make sure that race is no obstacle to full participation in civic and economic life.
And today is a good day to contemplate that, and to also contemplate the role one human being – as flawed as any one of us – played in changing the world.
IMO, MLK was the greatest American of my lifetime. I am now 61. I moved to the south in 1960. Anyone who lived through the segragation in the South during the Civil Rights Era cannot begin to understand how evil a system it was. Anyone who does not feel a sense of shame in recalling the period that led up to King’s destruction of that Jim Crow system, quite simply has something wrong with them.
Now 50 years later, a deep anger wells up in me when I think about it. This anger ebbs when I remind myself that King was a blessing to all of us. A gift. The fact that he was able to navigate us through that time without widespread slaughter was a miracle.
Before we slap ourselves on the back, segregation may have been for the most part defeated, but the battle against racism is still in its infancy. We wrestle with it, as a people everyday, whether we recognize it or not.
I must admit, when I see and hear Obama speak, it is impossible not to see and hear King’s legacy lambent and reverberating in him. His calls to make us a better people by shunning the lesser angels of our nature, I find very compelling. Not on the order and magnitude of King, but something I have not seen for a long, long time.
“IMO, MLK was the greatest American of my lifetime.”
I second that perspective, TOC.
Amen. What a lovely letter. It is easy for me to forget the depth of man’s eloquence. We didn’t learn a lot about MLK here in California in K-12. Fact is is where I went to school there were no African American kids and when, in high school in 1974 a family moved into the neighborhood, they were very popular and everyone wanted to be friends with them. I had come to think that racism was a thing of the distant past… so distant that it was irrelevant but history has taught me some very uncomfortable lessons. Yeah, it makes me feel guilty but, unless things are wildly different in the rest of the states, I’d say that racism is something on the way out. I hope I’m right.
There is no doubt that MLK was great American. Barak Obama is no Martin Luther King.
Martin Luther King has another little-known distinction: He was one of five American public figures who were targeted by a major KGB disinformation campaign, aimed at portraying him as an “Uncle Tom” agent of Lyndon Johnson.
The other four were J. Edgar Hoover, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
I too respect the extraordinary things Martin Luther King did, said, and what he caused to be. I also wonder why the Republican party lets Democrats claim MLK as one of them, when he was a lifelong “conservative”:http://wolfpangloss.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/conservativism-is-the-real-reality-based-community-in-america/ “Republican”:http://www.nationalblackrepublicans.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.DYK-Why%20MLK%20was%20a%20Republican&tp_preview=true who was smeared both by JFK’s orders and the KGB, making him an ideal example of Republican moral rectitude.
It’s not clear to me that JFK did the ordering. J. Edgar Hoover was reputed to have run his own show in most respects, probably including getting (fabricating?) dirt on MLK.
#4 from lurker at 3:03 am on Jan 22, 2008
_Barak Obama is no Martin Luther King._
No one ever said that.
It is hard to overestimate how afraid white people were of any blacks who even presumed to aspire to political leadership. Saying that Re3publicans or democrats were better adjusted in relation to to their views on Black political power is a comparison between Kettles and Pots.
The whole political spectrum had failed African Americans since Recustruction. Lincoln, a few months before the Confederate defeat ended his second Inaugural Address with the following.
_ One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” 3
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations._
Although the war ended, it was King who began in earnest the process to to bind the nations wounds.The animosity between North and South was still very much alive before him.
One can look at the Civil Rights Era as the Second and concluding Phase of the Civil War. Luckily, King was here to lead that battle non-violently. His generalship, as opposed to leadership, was dazzling.