Martin Luther King, Jr.

On Monday here in the United States we will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I was growing up, I lived in South Carolina. It was the mid-sixites and the legal institutions of American apartheid were being dismantled. As a white kid, of some priviledge, my peers weren't all for these changes, just as surely as many adults around me were not. I had an advantage over some of my school mates in being less well-off than they. Indeed, in addition to caring for the five children in my family, my mother was a school teacher. She taught in schools that were being racially desegregated. There were many battles that led to these changes, but perhaps the most significant were court rulings which found that segregated schools were inherently unequal. So my mother in her everyday work life was on the forefront of these changes.

It's rather off point, but when Dr. King was assasinated a schoolmate at school was telling the same general outlines of a conspiracy which emerged again in 1999 and here I don't know what the truth is. This is what the Department of Justice reports. The sad truth is that many Americans hated Dr. King and believed strongly in white supremancy. Too many Americans still hold fast to their hatred.

I like Howard Sochurek's Life magazine portrait because it shows Martin Luther King, Jr. as a handsome man, a real man and not the mythic hero. We have learned he had feet of clay like all of us. That doesn't detract from his legacy, because it reminds us that ordinary people can make a difference. Of course it wasn't Martin King alone, but the thousands who walked beside him. But Martin Luther King, Jr. was extraodinary; his words remain as some of the most eloquent in the English language. I love these words from Strength to Love (1963):

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

In the spring of 1967 King spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City, Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence:

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Many see this speach a marker of his doom to come; calling for a "restructuring" too dangerous to contemplate. Via the wonderful blog 3quarksdaily comes this review by Stewart Home of Mark Kurlansky's , 1968: The Year that Rocked The World. The times they were a changing.

Louis Menand in his book The Metaphysical Club writes about the development of Pragamatism as an American intellectual idea:

Pragamatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs.

But he notes: "The Cold War was a war over principles." So thinking in America strayed into distinctly non-pragmatic territory, of black and white; good and evil. He also points out that the inspirations for Dr. King had come from Reinhold Niebur and Mahatma Gandhi rather than the pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey. Values of tolerence and liberty took root in soil of a worldview that split the world into two.

There is a strain of that Manichaenism in today's "War on Terror." I wonder what if Martin Luther King hadn't been murdered? Where would his strong mind and compassionate heart have taken him? His opposition to the Vietnam War was a watershed. He had moved irrevocably from a worldview supported by fixed principles to a worldview shaped by patterns of relationships.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable to being conquered.

Nowadays, the tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. are often rote and spoken in well-worn cliches. Still his words can move and are worth reading and listening to. There are numerous sites with quotations from Dr. King: here, here, and here, for starters.