What did you do on Martin Luther King Jr. Day? Hopefully you weren’t on campus. Maybe you had a little extra time. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you were working—nose to the grindstone; one more day of the daily grind.
Whichever it was, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was for you. Well, it is for you.
Commemorations, celebrations, and memorials can lose their meanings, of course. Need we look further than the Confederate statues? While many Americans are finally letting go of stone figurines that glorify the Jim Crow ideas that their creators stood for, most Americans are keeping their statues and their traditions.
Why?
Is it so we can have a day off from work or school? Is it so you can spend the day with your family and friends? Is it so you can overeat really good food?
The simplest answer is that we keep them to remember.
What is it, exactly, that we are remembering?
If you’re anything like me, you know about Dr. King as the larger-than-life civil rights leader in the 1950s and ‘60s. You’ve read his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” You’ve heard excerpts from his “I Have a Dream” speech. And maybe you know that he was assassinated. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his death. He was 39 years old.
This year, as in the past, I attended the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast. Taking place at the Boston Convention and Exposition Center in the Seaport district, the breakfast began 48 years ago and is the longest-running event of its kind to celebrate Dr. King.
The event has a decidedly political bent. Up front sits the mayor of Boston, the governor of Massachusetts, both U.S. senators from the state, as well as many other important people, including members of the clergy and special guests.
Over and over, in remarks shared with the breakfast attendees, the speakers asked themselves: “What would Dr. King think of where America is now?”
Many of the answers were political. There was some resounding Trump-bashing from the U.S. senators. There was even some weighty Trump chastisement from the clergy.
There was, undeniably, an underlying sorrow in this year’s breakfast. Events of the past year caused many of the speakers to articulate the thought many Americans have shared over the last year, wondering if we’ve moved forward at all.
After a year under the Trump administration, the speakers moved past the jittery fear resonant a year ago to words of reckoning and resilience.
But their resolve evidently grew from having faced fear and doubt. The keynote speaker, Bakari Sellers, the youngest ever African American state senator and current political analyst for CNN even asked: “Does Dr. King’s dream still matter?”
Was King’s dream too big? Was it unachievable? Has our obvious inability to cultivate a “beloved community” by 2018 indicated a fault in the dream itself?
Does that mean the dream is irrelevant?
In 1967, more than six months before the devastating Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, Dr. King delivered a speech entitled “Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”
In a church in New York City, in a sermon, King spoke these words:
“[O]ne of the difficulties in speaking out today grows out of the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent.”
I am reminded of our current president exhorting NFL owners to “get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” referring to players like Colin Kaepernick who took a knee during the national anthem to protest current racial injustice and police brutality.
King also said, “The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”
I am reminded of the upsurge of white supremacist groups who veil their racism behind the rhetoric of their “western culture” being under attack.
Who was Dr. King?
In a 1990 speech celebrating the great preacher’s birth, Cesar Chavez, the prominent farm worker, labor leader, civil rights activist, and King’s contemporary, spoke about the “Lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
“Who was Dr. King?” Chavez asked.
“Many people will tell you of his wonderful qualities and his many accomplishments, but what makes him special to me, the truth many people don’t want you to remember, is that Dr. King was a great activist, fighting for radical social change with radical methods.”