Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King Day

 Musical Choice – Shed a Little Light – James Taylor

It’s Martin Luther King Day, celebrating the 90^thanniversary of his birth.  How far has America come?  Well, it’s Martin Luther King Day:  the concept of celebrating a national holiday for a man who led a movement to alter our society, challenge our existing beliefs, and was harassed by the FBI; that concept would have been unbelievable when I was a child in the 1960’s. 

In 1964 my parents and I visited a friend in a Virginia suburb near Washington, D.C.  I was surprised, the kids had a day off of school in the middle of January. It was Robert E. Lee Day, a state holiday. Today, that’s still a state holiday in Alabama and Mississippi, joined together with Martin Luther King Day. There’s a true contrast in history. 

Just a year before my visit, Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (there’s a plaque marking the spot) and gave us his vision for our future in the “I have a Dream” speech.  With full awareness of his position on the stairs of the “temple” of Lincoln, King echoed the Gettysburg Address, telling of the “…five score years…” since the Emancipation Proclamation, and the “hallowed spot” where they now gathered.

King answered a question for white America.  When should black people be satisfied?

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one; we can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No! no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”(I Have a Dream Speech – Martin Luther King)

If those are the goals, America still has a ways to go.  Argue with the Black Lives Matters movement if you will, but the problem of police brutality continues.  This week’s sentence of a failed police officer in Chicago, eight years in jail, is six months for every bullet that entered the body of seventeen year-old Laquan McDonald as he walked away.  And as for voting rights, the machinations of Brian Kemp in Georgia to prevent black people from voting in this last election were almost as obvious as the literacy tests of the Jim Crow Era.  

Justice; while the flow may be more than a trickle, it has not become “the mighty stream” that King hoped for.  The election of Barack Obama was a beacon of hope, the election of Donald Trump was a blanket thrown over the beam.

And it was in that same location, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that the theatrical drama of America was on review this weekend.  A group of high school boys, brought from Kentucky by their Catholic school to march for the “Right to Life” (or the right to tell others how to live their lives) were waiting for a bus.  A few black men, steeped in their own religious belief and determined to point out the racism that still exists in our nation, challenged them.

The boys reacted like high school boys often will, in defense and with derision, and without any understanding.  A Native American and Veteran, aware of the rising tensions, stepped in between the few black men and the many students, and tried to use his traditional drum and chants to keep the peace.  He was met with obvious disrespect.

It’s a “right of youth” to be ignorant, that’s what schools are supposed to do; educate them.  In the “education business” it’s called a “teachable moment,” that instant when reality creates the opportunity for responsible adults to step in and present the lessons of acceptance of differences; of when it’s time to react, and when it’s time to listen.

So where were the chaperones, the teachers, the administrators of Covington Catholic High School in the state of Kentucky?  They put their students in the line of fire, the placed them in protest in Washington, D.C.   Weren’t they ready for some kind of counter-protests, some response to their presence?  Their “boys” were chanting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where were the adults? Not at the concession stand, it’s shut down, as are the restrooms under the Memorial.  That’s why no Park Police appeared.  There was nowhere else for the adults to be, but supervising their kids.

So while the sixteen year old smirk under the red Make America Great Again hat may be symbolic of our nation today, in contrast to King’s Dream, it really represents the failure of the adults in his life.  They needed to be there, and they were not.

Kentucky celebrates Martin Luther King Day today.  They moved Confederate Memorial Day, in a state that never joined the Confederacy, to June 9^th this year.  

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And this is where I should end.  But that isn’t what I really believe, that we are a nation that cannot move forward, where adults allow racism and hate to further their own causes.  I don’t even believe that about the Catholic Church.  In that kid’s smirk, and those red hats, I see hate, but I see hope in the man who risked abuse and injury to make peace. Hope is what Martin Luther King, and his “Day” is about.

…And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”