I choked up on the way to work this morning, listening to NPR replay Robert F. Kennedy announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. to a crowd in Indianapolis. A wail rose from those gathered as he said those terrible words and I felt the tears come to my eyes, listening these 40 years on. Later this afternoon, I laughed when I heard John McCain stumble over half-assed apologies for failing to vote in the senate for a national holiday to honor this revolutionary character in American History. And I crossed my fingers when I heard Barack Obama's lofty oratory, echoing many of the same themes as those cherished by the late Dr. King.
But I always find it a little disheartening each year to find that all that remains in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are all these events -the Montgomery bus boycott, and the March on Washington, the lunch-counters and bombed churches. Not to suggest in any respect that these moments in history are not significant, because they are -incredibly so. They revolutionized our country. But revolution is born first of ideas, and we need to keep those ideas alive in order to continue growing and changing in radical ways. We should not look upon him as just another important figure in history among many important figures. We should not just let the movement he led be relegated to a time gone by, and make of him a phantom of the past, worthy of little more than bronze monuments and fancy speeches.
What I always wish to hear spoken of on the anniversary of Dr. King's death -and on every day, is the profound philosophy that compelled Dr. King to take these historic strides: the philosophy of non-violent resistance. It was a philosophy that underpinned his every decision as a leader, and it led him in his later years to not only take on racial segregation in the South, but all injustice everywhere -economic injustice and, to much public consternation, the injustice of war. Five years into a war with no end in sight, I cannot help think it might do us good to recall the non-violent tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I heard one fellow on NPR whose name I cannot recall -he was an old friend of Dr. King, and I felt he said best what I am intending here. The interviewer asked him if he was happy with the way Dr. King was remembered. He said that yes, for the most part, he was pleased with the legacy. But, he said, there is a tendency for folks to think of King as little but a great social worker. He was quick to state that while his social mission was indeed significant, it was his philosophy of nonviolent resistance, his deep commitment to living a life centered in love, this radical idea of justice for all that should rather find greater focus this time of year when we come around to remembering.
In his essay, "An Experiment in Love," Dr. King writes:
"Nonviolence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment; nonviolence is ultimately a way of life that men live by because of the sheer morality of its claims. But even granting this, the willingness to use nonviolence as a technique is a step forward. For he who goes this far is more likely to adopt nonviolence later as a way of life."
As Dr. King saw it, all the protests and the boycotts and the marches were but an outward manifestation of a deeper commitment to living ones life in dedication to a moral principle.
But this is all not to say that we ought simply bury our noses in the sand or contemplate our navels or lose ourselves in academic philosophizing. The philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. demanded action. One of my favorite King quotes comes from his last speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,"Where Do We Go From Here?" (look it up -it is one of his most amazing), in which he rails:
"Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice."
The thing I love most about Martin Luther King's philosophy of nonviolence was how all-encompassing it was. It seemed that there was no end to the potential application of such a radical philosophy. And Dr. King seemed utterly unafraid of taking it exactly as far as it would lead him -even unto his own death (his friend said that Martin had told him with resignation that he would not likely live to see 40).
M said he heard a scholar on NPR yesterday who suggested that an embrasure of feminism and gay rights was the natural trajectory of King's philosophy. I think I'd like to believe that.
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