Victoria Brownworth

Today is supposed to be a day of service in tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. Even in a recession, the corporate sector is respectful: there are no MLK sales going on. Throughout the nation people are doing work in their communities in honor of Dr. King, who gave his life in an effort to change this nation. 

Sadly, this particular day of service is made more compelling by the tragedy still unfolding in Haiti where more than 70,000 people are now known dead and are being buried in mass graves. The outpouring of response to the crisis has been intense–both multi-faceted and multi-national. 

Only a few sour notes have been sounded throughout the crisis–not surprisingly from the Right (see my post Making Hay of Haiti), which never seems to miss an opportunity to make itself look like the political phalanx of crassness and heartlessness. (I was particularly stunned by a posting on Rush Limbaugh’s website that said “don’t give aid to Haiti, Obama will steal it.”)  

Like so many Americans, I feel a personal connection to Dr. King’s legacy.  My parents–young socialist ideologues that they were then–were civil rights workers throughout the 1960s. This meant I had the honor of  growing up stuffing envelopes, making signs and meeting some of the major players in the black civil rights movement. My childhood years were spent listening in awe to the stories being told by the men and women who came North and stayed in our house, spoke at our church and did organizing with my parents. I have no doubt that these experiences–as well as the concomitant threats against my parents from the KKK and the John Birch Society for what they were doing–informed my own political and social activism which began in those years when I was an elementary school child.

I was still in grade school when Dr. King was assassinated. I had already frequently experienced being called “nigger-lover” without even really understanding what the slur meant, only that it was indeed a slur.

The morning after Dr. King’s murder I got into a brawl with several other girls in the schoolyard. It wasn’t pretty. By the time it was over I had slapped a nun in the face and excoriated her for not standing up for Dr. King against the girls who were making jokes about his death. 

Of course in my child’s outrage, I had lost all sense of Dr. King’s non-violent approach to social change. Pushing, shoving, yelling and slapping was obviously not what he advocated. But I was a child and I was angry, hurt and incensed for Dr. King. I wasn’t in a Gandhi-esque mode.

Like so many other sad days in America it was bright and sunny and warm. But a light had gone out, and even as a child, I felt it. And I still remember what that felt like.

I still have fits of rage like the one I had that April day in the schoolyard in response to the vile racism that still sparks here and there in this country—Rush Limbaugh’s remarks last week about Haiti typified that racism as have so many comments about Barack Obama since his election.

I don’t hit anyone anymore, of course and I am still embarrassed about that scene in the schoolyard. Not that I spoke out, but that I shoved several other girls and slapped a nun. The girls were only repeating what they had learned at home and my response taught them nothing.  As for the nun–there are fewer excuses for her. Likely she was a product of her racist era and really didn’t understand that her role was to inculcate us girls with Jesus Christ’s perspective–which wasn’t racism. She didn’t make the connection between Dr. King and Jesus. But some of us–the children of King’s legacy–were taught that there was a connection, that King was representative of Christ.  I wonder now why that nun didn’t see it–it seems so obvious.

When one reads of the final weeks of King’s life, they pattern Christ’s with eerie similarity. King knew he might be killed and didn’t want to die. He was exhausted from the work he had been doing for years, tired at 39–not that many years older than Christ was at his crucifixtion–of the nights in jail, the separations from his family, the endless losses and the endless attacks. And yet, like Christ, he went on, even as he had premonitions of his own assassination.

I replay that day after King’s assassination  in my head–the fight in the schoolyard which was so not in keeping with Dr. King’s legacy, the poem I wrote for Dr. King as I sat outside Mother Superior’s office waiting to find out if I would be expelled, the men and women from Mississippi and Alabama who would call later at my parent’s house, the overwhelming sorrow and anger we all felt, even children like myself.  I replay that day on every anniversary of Dr. King’s death  and on his day of tribute. Kids like I was then, the children of the Sixties, were being raised on leftist ideology and protest songs. The music of our lives was by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and Odetta. We were being innoculated with the antidote to generations of racism and Jim Crow laws and “coloreds only” signs. We were being taught that there was indeed no difference between white and black. We were the children of Dr. King in ways that were not biological but sociological. And so the killing of Dr. King seemed for a child like I was then, terrifying as it was incomprehensible. It was one more killing that I didn’t understand–like the murder of four little girls like myself  in a Birmingham church and three civil rights workers only a few years younger than my parents in Mississippi and all those others whose names we’ll never know. Dr. King would not be the last to die for the sins of others, and he wasn’t even the first in my own childhood; I had already watched the funeral of John Kennedy on TV. But I was just old enough when Dr. King was assassinated to feel how terrible his killing was and that it was an event that would touch millions and ultimately inform my own life and my future.

And so on this day of tribute I remember Dr. King in my own, very personal way, as do so many other Americans. But within those personal reminiscences there are also the wishes for the future of today: that we really do move toward a post-racial or at the very least post-racist society. That people like Limbaugh either cease to make their racist comments or cease to be honored with listeners. That we each examine ourselves for any hints of bigotry–and not just racism of whites toward blacks, but any malice that is borne out of racial, ethnic, religious or gender-based stereotypes we have internalized.

The best tribute to Dr. King and all he fought for and gave his life for is that we not hate, that we not perpetuate bigotry and discrimination. We may all be able to sit where we want on a bus today, but we are not all equal—not blacks and whites, not blacks and Latinos, not Asians and Latinos, not Jews and Muslims, not women and men, not queers and straights.

Let us pay tribute the best way we can—not with a fight in the literal or metaphorical  schoolyard, but with understanding and love. Dr. King exhorted us to open ourselves to difference and gave his life in the quest for equality. On this day of tribute, what are each of us doing to carry on his legacy?—VAB