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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.

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