Martin Luther King Jr. : My Favorite American

by Rachel Lagodka

My favorite American thinker and speaker is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I studied Jesus when I was an undergrad majoring in Classics, and cried the first time I read Matthew, but while Jesus didn’t leave me with an obsession, I am persistently enthralled with Dr. King. It’s too bad God didn’t save either one of them. They were both revolutionaries fighting for the poor. I could pull a Tristram Shandy and get to the part about how I ended up crying my eyes out in front of a computer screen while preparing a lesson on Martin Luther King Jr many chapters later, but I don’t have time for that, and as far as a compromise between a stilted essay thesis and a chatty self-indulgent introduction, well, this will have to do. Let’s just say that I have a great deal of liberal outrage as well as liberal guilt.

For the last three years or so I have been starting my spring semester by giving my first year college English students a unit on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his significance as a great American writer, orator, and leader. Each year I read more, and each year I am more impressed with the man and convinced that he was the quintessential American genius of the 20th century. In “Remaining Awake During a Great Revolution King said “And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference… Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.”

I want my students to be shocked, as I am by the beauty of Dr King’s ideals, the beauty of his language, and the brutality of his treatment at the hands of the FBI. Each year I give my students some of the lesser known but brilliant speeches, and articles about how he was crusading against poverty and the war towards the end of his life, and how the FBI hounded him, wire-tapped him, and sent him letters urging him to kill himself.

This semester as I was trolling the internet for some new material, I came across something very disturbing. I wanted my students to write an essay about the “real” Martin Luther King, so naturally I Googled “real Martin Luther King,” to see where that would take me. A website came up that at first glance appears to be a typical informational website about Dr. King. It’s a mild grey color and has an ordinary looking drawing of Dr. King at the center. A closer look reveals that all the information is negative. Really negative. Some shreds of truth mixed with the most vicious lies. An even closer look reveals the source of the information to be a neo-Nazi group called Stormfront. I cried. I continued my research pounding on the keys, determined that something more must be done to rescue a real American hero from being relegated to catch phrases and postage stamps by the mainstream media now that he was also being vilified on the internet by the neo-Nazis. Opening a box I knew would contain something gruesome (a severed hand or a dead rat), I went into the neo-Nazi’s blog to see what was there; to see the monster for myself. I found something I could use. A student was complaining about how his library had responded to his use of the neo-Nazi website as a source of information about Dr. King. He gave the URL and so I gave it to my students and titled it “How to Detect a Racist Website” http://www.suffolk.edu/sawlib/instruction_modules/evaluate/mlk.html

Now I didn’t have to worry about them stumbling upon it unaware. I wanted them to know that the ugly demon, racism, was alive and well in cyberspace. I gave them an article written by Greg Palast and Martin Luther King III about how Bush and his supporters cheated Black Americans out of their vote in 2000: “Jim Crow Revived in Cyberspace” http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15890

If you ignore demons, they don’t go away. When they can hide, they multiply. Lies and hoaxes abound, circulating on email. I found out about an awful email that, as far as I know, is still being circulated. Several liberal friends of mine said that they had gotten it. Naturally I went to snopes. http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/mlking.asp

Snopes and About.com are the best places to check when you get an email that reeks of sulphur. This reading which I titled “Intellectual Racist Cons DJs,” would also be in the package.  The poison is still out there on the conventional airwaves. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05023/446341.stm

Isn’t it weird that there are two ways of crying about all of this? I cried when I saw the racist website but I also cried while I was trying to pick which speeches to include this year. I cried because he was so brilliant, and so humble, and had such an incredible voice. My daughter would walk by my office at home and hear me crying. “Are you listening to  Martin Luther King again?” she asked slightly bemused. But then his voice would draw her in, and she stood there and I knew she felt some of what I felt.  In his last speech is so clear that he knows he’s going to die. Kaba Kamene, who spoke at the event I later helped organize said that King was “prophetic.” Listen to the last speech of Dr. King here   “I’ve been to the Mountaintop”

http://www.drmartinlutherkingjr.com/ivebeentothemountaintop.htm

What amazes me about that speech is not only its drama and its deep compassion, is that he also gives practical advice that still applies today. He tells the preachers to concern themselves with their people in the here and now, not so much in the hereafter. He tells them to boycott Coca-Cola and Wonderbread because of the brutal way those companies treat their workers. He tells his people that they have this great economic power of their combined incomes and that they should use it to boycott the companies that harm them.  

MLK was also an excellent prose writer and keenly interested in eliminating poverty which he saw as the result of a moral failing of the government which neglects some of its people. I want people to see this side of Dr. King.

As the wife of a man I met who was fleeing his oppressive communist country traveling in eastern Europe I understand why people hate and fear communism as it manifested itself in various totalitarian systems. At the same time, I agree with Dr. King that poverty is immoral. It is immoral for a society to maintain a system of government that leaves so many of its citizens without decent basics like housing, healthcare, education, and decent employment. Dr. King spells it out so clearly in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community”

http://www.drmartinlutherkingjr.com/wherewearegoing.htm

The agenda of the United States government that includes trillions of dollars for wars, and more cuts for the meager tuition assistance programs and Medicaid, has not changed since Dr. King made his scathing critiques.

 “The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV” is an old standard I give them.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2269

This year oddly enough I happened to catch the last two hours or so of a five hour movie on TV Fox 5 about Dr King called “King” It was truthful and very emotional with long camera shots on the Black character’s faces as they are betrayed by the Whites again and again. I thought the actors were good, especially Cicily Tyson who was a regal Coretta Scott King. The actor who played Dr. King definitely grew on me. His teeth seemed a little odd, but he did a convincing job on the speeches, catching in some places King’s cadence and deep emotional prowess. There were very graphic close-ups of King’s death and even his autopsy. They told the story of the two sanitation workers who were crushed in the truck because their white co-workers wouldn’t let them be in the office even in the pouring rain. They made it clear that the FBI was after King and that the police department deliberately left King unprotected. They even show King having a pillow fight.

Is this a famous movie and I’m just an idiot for never having heard of it?

Next year I would like to show it on campus, and call it “Kingapalooza.”

We could have breaks for refreshments. I couldn’t believe it was playing on Fox 5 (Though they are the home of the Simpsons and American Dad.) After showing the poignant shots of Coretta/Cicily denouncing war as an immoral destroyer of Black people, they tell you that Cheney has just shot someone in the face in a hunting accident. Over and over again. You still have to turn to the BBC to see the news about soldiers beating up Iraqi teenagers.

In any case I always give them my favorite speech:  “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” I just love the way he talks about Rip Van Winkle. We are sleeping while Paris burns, Baghdad blows up, and New Orleans drowns.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/680331.000_Remaining_Awake.html

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