History as it exists inside my head

It is MLK day, so I'll talk about the Martin Luther King, Jr as he exists in my imagination. This is like writing a scholarly work without doing any research, so understand that anything I say here is by definition apocryphal, or not really, depending on who wins when one wrestles with the word apocryphal. For instance, some definitions include the stipulation that an apocryphal story be of dubious authenticity AND be widely circulated and believed to be true. Clearly what I say here will satisfy the first criterion, but it will not likely be widely circulated, nor believed to be true.

That MLK has an official holiday is offensive to his memory. At least he deserves a holiday (remind me to do an entry on columbus day 2007), but if he could see that a country that so half-heartedly embraced his ideals officially honors him anyway, he would be mightily and eloquently enraged.

The holiday that co-opts him remembers his earnest and optimistic battle against segregation, and by proxy against racism in the south. He changed laws and attitudes with moral force and intellect. He was an orator, in a time when eloquence rather than marketing was a unit of political capital. He saved us from some embarassing and backward legislation. This was certainly a movement everyone can agree to honor in retrospect.

The MLK in my mind is not proud of these accomplishments, because I remember the man as he left off. As his knowledge and activism expanded from local to national to global, he began to refigure the scale of the problem of injustice. He travelled to the north and found racism there too, racism that scared him a lot more. This wasn't the cartoonish racism of segregated drinking fountains; this was insidious, systemic, subtle.

He found large black communities already deep in the grip of the cyclical social problems poverty engenders. These communites had been oppressed long enough that a blow had been dealt to their moral fiber. In cities quick to incarcerate a black man and slow to educate him, a cycle of incarceration, crime, teenage pregnancy and drugs had already been established. Fear set in. Had the accomplishments in the south just been to convince the legislature that racism couldn't be codified? How much harder would it be to fight racism that lives in between the laws? The grand scale of history became clear. The 20 year old black man in prison, working eight hours a day for a few cents an hour was still a slave. He was part of the same historical system of oppression and struggle for resources as a Vietnamese family caught in the midst of a war betewen the US and the Soviet Union.

So MLK's activism became global. He began to speak out against issues that made him seem radical. He began to denounce the Vietnam war before this was politically acceptable, and for this he was ostracized and reviled. He was abandoned by the NAACP, who, in their defense, had to play politics. But King was done with politics. He was beholden to the truth, and he understood history well enough to know that the truth he was to speak would cost him his life. Without fear, without the slightest inclination toward violence he presaged his own death.

Today is as good as any to think about this man and what his life meant, but don't let the government fool you into thinking he was on their side.