Happy Birthday Dr. King!
He was born in 1929. He wouldn’t even be 100. They act like it was so very long ago. But his children are still alive. Not just grandchildren. Children. And they’re relatively young. He was barely 39 when he was killed. He was murdered in 1968. My parents were born the following year. My maternal grandmother marched with him as a teenager in Birmingham. That wasn’t that long ago. Jesse Jackson is still alive. It wasn’t that long ago. There are people who can vividly remember what it was like when he was killed. It’s not so very long ago for people to act as if his progress has been going on for many, many years. There are people alive who remember segregation. Yes, my great great grandmother was a sharecropper and she was still in the cotton fields when my grandmother was a baby. My grandmother is not even 80 years old. We are not that far removed from Dr. King’s fight. His dream did not have to die with him. His work, did not have to die with him. His methods, his message, his hope for our future did not have to die with him. Yes, we had a Black man be president, but that does not cast aside the continued racism. The first Black president was seven years old when Dr. King was murdered. He was already in school, which had just been made possible seven years before he was born. When the first Black president was born, he could not vote. Not just because he was a baby, but because he was Black. Black people still weren’t allowed to vote. Then Dr. King set things in motion to get our rights recognized by the government. We were born with those rights. They didn’t give them to us. We were born in this country. We live here. We work here. Those rights were always ours. Our rights are always ours, even when other people don’t want to recognize them. And a Black woman just ran for president (And yes, she’s mixed, but they don’t know the difference). All the same I know that we have not reached the mountaintop.
That’s not because Dr. King did not get us incredibly far. In truth, the so-called Civil Rights Movement was not a decade long. It was centuries long. There was never a time when the enslaved Africans were not fighting for their freedom. The enslaved were constantly running away. They were constantly being killed. They were constantly fighting to end their condition. Then our freedom from the horrors of enslavement was won. The more we assimilated into American society the harder it became to deny our rights to citizenship. By the time Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer and young Dr. Michael Martin Luther King Jr. began to rise to prominence there had been many victories to get us in that direction. I do not write any of this to diminish what Dr. King did. Quite the opposite. I’m letting you know that he was the accelerant that took a fight that trudged along for centuries to the point of tangible victories. There had already been some progress, but that progress was incredibly slow. That dream was built brick by brick, life by life for centuries, but it was the work of 50s and 60s era of the Civil Rights Movement that laid the groundwork for Black people to become recognized as having a right to be here. After we were dragged across the ocean to these lands against our will it took us centuries to be recognized as actual citizens. We were here for centuries before we had a right to be here by law as independent entities and not property.
A major part of that was that Dr. King gave us the necessary imagery to show who the monsters really were. By remaining calm, neatly pressed, completely peaceful there were enough images put out to show that all these Black people wanted to do was to be able to go on about our lives. We were not trying to take anything from anybody, we just wanted to be able to earn our own. One of the cruelest tricks that empires have ever played is making their attacks seem like wars. It’s not mutual. One person attacks and the other defends themselves. But what Dr. King realized is that if we didn’t defend ourselves then that just left the attack in stark reality. We did not obscure it by returning with our own blows. Did we have a right to defend ourselves? Absolutely. However, that just maintained a cycle of us being treated poorly and attacked and then when we tried to defend ourselves, we were criminalized as thugs. What Dr. King helped do was make it clear who the thugs were. You can defend attacking people when they become violent, even if you incite that violence. It just proves your point that they’re violent. If you just let them hit you and never hit them back that exposes the myth of their assertion that you are horrible, violent people. If even when you hit me and sick dogs on me and set hoses on me, I maintain my cool and show complete control over myself, how can you assert that I am the animal? Not only am I not the violent one here, I am a saint. A person is attacking me and I am such a harmless person that would never hurt anybody that it is clear that they are wrong about us. It is clear that they are the ones who are violent. To have a Black man speak so powerfully and show that we can be educated and people of God made it very difficult for white people to contend that the horrible things they did to us were valid.
The Black Panthers were born because Dr. King was murdered. He prevailed in his nonviolence to show that Black people could be good and if we could be good then there could be no justice in discriminating against Black people as a whole. If some of us could be good, then more of us needed to be given the opportunity to be that. Inevitably as that came to pass, the man who set it in the motion would be struck down in retaliation. As a result, the next generation learned that peaceful resisters still got killed so they needed to get some guns. The U.S. government taught Black youth that even a peaceful Black man who did nothing but speak words of hope and love to the world would be murdered just the same. That is what radicalized them. That does not, however, have to be what we do with Dr. King’s legacy.
Without Dr. King’s commitment to being a man who showed that God lives in Black people too, we would not have gotten a little further up that mountain. Further down, the top was too far to see. Dr. King brought us up so that we could see what life as truly free Black people could be. That does not mean creating narrow spaces where some among us can thrive. That means us truly being given full access to all necessary resources for us to be able to nourish ourselves into full enough beings where we can manifest our genius without having to use it to navigate the constant hurdles of racism. We were not guaranteed an education until Brown v. Board of Education. The legal victories won in part because the demonstrations of Dr. King gave enough evidence that Black people were worthy of being incorporated into society, laying the groundwork for the relative freedom that we have enjoyed and learned to take for granted. Dr. King was born only approximately 66 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted. Barely a full generation out of enslavement. His grandparents would have almost certainly been enslaved at birth. Within two generations, their grandson enabled Black people to be able to further solidify our freedoms by having laws on the books that offered us protection against some of the more heinous and treacherous implications of racism.
I am choosing to attempt to carry on Dr. King’s legacy by continuing to fight to not only maintain the progress that Dr. King and his contemporaries won, but to keep making that climb towards that mountaintop, toward that dream. Dr. King may have been taken away physically, but his dream could not be taken and still can see its way to reality. We must find the strength and spirit of those who came before us to continue to state in perfect peace that we deserve a fair chance to live lives of dignity, joy, and purpose. That fight is not about fists or guns, it is about insisting on being good regardless. Not to racists, but to our people and good people in general. It is about finding ways to serve my community as I also find more ways to help us gain access to the means to live better lives. Acts like feeding the hungry and helping people seek shelter, safety, and warmth. The good we do works so many different ways to help inspire people to want to not only go on, but feel more secure doing good knowing that they aren’t the only ones. We so often come together to bring out the worst in each other. If we could unite as Dr. King united us before we could accomplish so many great things together.
On Monday January 20, 2025, I have committed myself to doing good acts to honor Dr. King. I will be finding ways to serve the community and help those in need mitigate the harm of greed. I will be donating, seeking out opportunities to volunteer, and generally devoting myself to making my good manifest in as many ways as possible. I hope others will join me. Instead of allowing ourselves to be drawn into the depravity setting in, we can counter it by making a good day that will help many of us combat our feeling of doom. For any who would like to join, I will be gathering information and resources so that as many people as may want to participate can find ways big and small to sow positively in the world. Together perhaps we can take one step closer to the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream, which is many of our dream: a world of justice and peace.
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