Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is the holiday to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy.  Last year, I was talking to a white accountant who truculently told me, “It’s not a real holiday.” Keeping that piece of bigotry in mind, I wanted to break for a moment to write about what Dr. King’s legacy means to me personally.

First, Dr. King is today remembered primarily as a civil rights leader who led the Afro-Americans people’s struggle for equality in the 1950’s.  True enough, of course.  But to keep it at that limits the influence Dr. King had on people of all races in the twentieth century.  It has to be remembered how radical the concept of non-violence was, and is, in American culture.  It was Dr. King’s insistence on non-violence as a means of political action that struck a chord among the idealistic white youth growing up in the 1950’s, a generation that was first to become disenchanted with “the American way of life,” a culture of greed and bias.  White youth flocked to the banner of civil rights Dr. King held aloft because it offered them their chance to opt out of  the American Dream and to choose instead a more moral way of life.  These youths worked side by side with Afro-Americans in the South on voter registration drives and protests and learned from them the techniques of marches and sit-downs.  When the Vietnam War erupted in the 1960’s there was a already an infrastructure for the anti-war protest to build on in order to influence American policy.  Sadly, today, in the era of Bush’s “pre-emptive war” against Islam, a war that is really about oil and not terrorism, Dr. King’s techniques have been put aside as interesting historical artifacts and are not being used as they should be to speak out against an illegal war of aggression that has claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives and that is all the more evil because it hides behind the phrase “spreading democracy.”

Secondly, the civil rights struggle is usually seen today as a fight that’s been won and can now be forgotten. This is not the case. Under the Bush administration, not only has affirmative action for minorities been methodically dismantled, but the civil liberties of all Americans, of all races, have been steadily encroached upon. Even here in liberal NYC, bag checks and pat-downs have become routine. Playing on the fear of another 9/11, police have stepped up their practices of intimidation. But against whom are these practices really directed? Not the white businessmen in suits whose briefcases are never checked, but against the minorities who wear turbans, hoodies or durags.  These are the real targets of the police.   They use the bugbear of terrorism as an excuse to harass individuals who’ve done nothing but use a Metrocard to ride the subway system.  There was even recently a case in NYC, as reported in The New York Times, of a man who was arrested for doing nothing but standing in on a street corner in talking with friends. The tragedy of today is that there is no Dr. King to step forward to denounce these poorly disguised racist tactics. Minorities and immigrants have made great, but now they’re no longer welcome in their own city. If Mayor Bloomberg has his way, the minorities will be pushed from all the boroughs to make room for “gentrification,” which really is just another euphemism for the establishment of a tax base of affluent white business people in place of economically disadvantaged minorities.

Finally, Dr. King was a Christian minister who taught tolerance and non-violence. How disappointed he’d be to see where the evangelicals have taken Christianity in our current culture. When did Jesus Christ become a white Republican bigot? To hear the evangelicals tell it, Jesus these days is a business friendly guy in a pinstripe suit who has no tolerance of human rights. When did Jesus ever speak out against abortion and hold that a woman has no right to do with her own body as she pleases? When did Jesus ever speak out against gay rights or same-sex marriage? When did Jesus say people were going to hell for having sex or listening to music?