Here we go again. Here comes that litany of the light-hearted, offering their version of the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. The 60th
Commemoration of The March on Washington has everyone giddy and sentimental. But Dr. King’s Dream got him gunned down.
We always want to lift memories of America on the days that racism gets swept under the rug. Those hopeful days when an event or a well-crafted word galvanizes us as “one nation under God, indivisible”…yaddi, yaddi, yaddi!
King’s 1963 speech drew us close enough to become one choir during one moment of one day!
You have every right to join the sanitized King Chorale, but I can’t hear your voices for hearing the jangling discords that dominated the life Martin King actually lived. King’s adult life was replete with lauding and lament, praise and persecution, and victory amid violence.
You may offer as testimony that 1963 “I Have a Dream “speech where King wanted to be “judged by the content of his character” in deference to being scorned because of his race. But the American government’s character assassinations of the man and his movement produced casualties. For all his work, Dr. King is hailed as a martyr. But martyrdom does not a dream make!
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Nobel Prize winner and a widely accepted international figure. King was summoned and celebrated by heads of state and freedom fighters in Ghana, India, Germany, England, The Vatican, The United Nations, and many other venues. Yet he was hounded and hated by his own government.
Honesty requires that if you recall how well King was received in Australia and Africa, you must regard how he was humiliated from Mississippi to Memphis. Martin Luther King never accepted an invitation to go anywhere that did not bring the hue and cry of the status quo.
Blacks and Whites assailed Dr. King’s non-violent stances. King’s dogma was too subservient for radicalized Northern Negroes and not subservient enough for Southern Crackers.
This man who spoke eloquently of peace and possibility was greeted with venom and violence. Martin King absorbed a daily regimen of verbal and physical threats by those who did not understand or appreciate his Dream.
The videotapes of his enemies often feature powerful Southern segregationists Whites such as Bull Connor, Governor George Wallace, and the Ku Klux Klan. But they never show you images of Ms. Izola Ware Curry, a Black woman who brought him near death by driving a seven-inch letter opener near his aorta. (Like the little White girl interviewed, I’m so glad that he didn’t sneeze.)
Seven years before the “Dream Speech,” his home was bombed because he thought fare-paying Negroes deserved something better than the back of the bus.
Dr. King did not even have the serenity of his own home. Dr. King was never safe.
Politicians and potentates, to this day, pounce on the opportunity to praise and paraphrase King to gain favor of the proletariat. But these “leaders” never mention the gruesome and grotesque way the local and national government treated him.
King became an outlaw to state and federal lawmakers by taking defiant and unprecedented stands against the denial of Civil and Human Rights. His stances on The Vietnam War, the growing rate of those in poverty, and unfair labor practices made him a target of the status quo.
That Dreamer was forced to look into the eyes of parents, parishioners, and people of all races to console them after seeing their loved ones gunned down, bombed, or executed for their courage and his cause. If King’s movement was a walk in the park, he must have been strolling at night and without the Secret Service.
You can talk about how proud he would be in 2023 to see so much of his Dream fulfilled. But a dip in his history suggests that Dr. King would be agitated and appalled to witness the level of institutional and criminal acts perpetrated on the poor, the rise in racism and desegregation, and the willful miseducation of our children.
King lived dreaming of world peace, justice, and liberation and died in a hail of bullets.
King’s Dream has been deferred for 60 years.
How much longer must it languish?
Vincent L. Hall is an author, activist, and an award-winning columnist.
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