Skip to main content

MLK

We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday tomorrow.  When I was younger I struggled with naming important holidays, roads, cities, etc. after people who all have feet of clay; it is always disillusioning to learn that George Washington owned slaves, etc. Folk find faults in MLK who, as a human being, had them, and use that to attack the day.

As I am older I understand better that for many folk it is a step further than they can take to instead celebrate a Civil Rights holiday explicitly, championing the work of John Lewis, Diane Nash, all the other SNCC leaders, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and all the many many people whose names I do not know that gave their lives and their deaths to helping our citizens and our nation be more free. So we have an MLK day, and I remember the furious battles having that national holiday caused by people who were willing to ascribe all kinds of evil intentions to someone willing to disrupt a culture of first and second class citizens, of those who were free and those who were tolerated (up to a point). It's not clear what part of that is Communist but that was the word thrown around by adults when I was a child.

I was raised as a fundamentalist Protestant and my head was full of Christian martyrs and of folk dying at the hands of the KKK around the same time and as a child I confounded them in a way that I decades later see no reason whatsoever to disentangle. Civil rights is the Lord's work and I will defend that belief while I still have breath and probably a few minutes more.

So now Trump (as both cause and effect of a racist/misogynistic/homophobic/generally-hateful reaction against the gains of diversity) and his ilk have unleashed scores of folk who do not feel shame in attacking MLK Day and the notion of civil rights. Their arguments aren't really arguments; they just allow folk to pass the time while hating.

As always, context is everything. I wish it had been called Civil Rights Day to explicitly honor all those who toiled, but MLK gave voice and leadership at a time when both were sorely needed so that my country could be better. 

I celebrate MLK Day not as an accomplishment but as a call to take us to a more godly place.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more