Honor Dr. King but Don't Forget How the U.S. Treated hIm and so Many Others

Martin Luther King Day? A national holiday?

I couldn’t have imagined such a thing on the April evening when I walked numbly along Manhattan’s 3^rd Street, processing the fact that Dr. King had just been shot. He was a leader in the movement I was a foot soldier in. Selma had inspired me to do some civil rights work in the rural county east of Memphis. Many Negro families lived in shacks. A huge sign at the county line celebrated a state championship won by the Fayette County High School girls’ basketball team. Black kids didn’t go there. They went to the Fayette County Training School. King was a leader in a movement in which I was a foot soldier.

Stumbling along 3^rd Street, I made eye contact with some Black guys standing around. I probably gave a helpless, sad shrug, thinking of King. One guy reached out to hand me something. Suddenly I thought he was poking a lighted cigarette into my palm. (I was, after all, a white guy.) As I snatched my hand away, I saw, and still see clearly, the marijuana joint he’d been handing me, falling toward the sidewalk. I picked it up and took a hit, reflecting on how the moment had gotten inside me.

Our country has changed greatly, but not enough that we should forget or ignore “racism.”

In our small suburban village, when my mother started a neighborhood cub scout den, it included Jewish kids, Protestant kids, the mix I was, and two Black kids. It was nothing we thought about. (I guess she did. One project we did for a gathering of dens celebrated George Washington Carver. Long afterward, she told me that some mothers hadn’t liked seeing a den with Black kids in it.)

In high school, if a white girl hung out with a black guy, the school called to inform the girl’s family. As a new kid, recently kicked out of prep school, I saw the ethnic tension between blacks and Italian kids. I was friends with both, of course. But they didn’t mix so much. Later, working with kids in Harlem, we had long talks. Being white, I was as strange to them as I was long afterward to Tibetan Khampas, who reached out in amazement to touch the hair growing from the back of my hand.

Once in Tennessee three of us took a local kid out for lunch to celebrate something with him. When we asked where we should go, he named the diner his brother had once been knifed for tying to integrate. We went. Our hamburgers had such an excess of unordered hot sauce that we could not have eaten them except to show the owner she couldn’t drive us away. When I tried to pay, she kept waving the bill at the kid, shouting “The [N-word] pays! The [N-word] pays.”

King grew up in that South. Slavery was gone, but whites tried their best to replicate it. At six, he and a white friend were sent to different schools. The white boy’s parents forbade him to see Martin. They told Martin, “We’re white. You’re colored.” When Martin’s parents explained, Martin said he would hate all white people, always. His parents said he had a Christian duty to love them.

The oppression that killed King had permeated every moment of his life. The nation honoring him shouldn’t forget how it treated him.

                                 – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 14 January, 2024, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on KRWG’s website under Local Viewpoints.] A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM, streaming at http://www.lccommunityradio.org/).]

[Again, too, welcome to the new year! So far, it’s been a particularly good start to mine, and I hope it has for yours too.]

[ On MLK, there’s just so much to say. The key is that although the U.S. has much improved with regard to inclusivity, the prjudice problem isn’t like smallpox – we haven’t nearly eradicated it.\

[Interestingly, the column couldn’t be printed in the newspaper precisely as written. I used “Negro” a couple of times, because I was recounting events from when that word was in general use. (No, I didn’t do the same with “the N-Word,” or try to utter “Nigger” on radio.) All fine. Yet part of me worries that as we “pretty up” the past to avoid hurting folks, we might lose some of our vigilance about repulsing “racism” wherever and however it rears its ugly head.]

[“Race” is a weird word. It describes a distinction that doesn’t exist. There’s a human race, and many other races. “Black,” “White,” and “Yellow” folks are not a different race. We’re different ethnicities; and our skin-colors and hair colors vary; but we’re one race. “Negro race” was invented, I think, because while slavery, particularly of captives or those defeated in battle, was common in the ancient world, the African Slave Trade arose late in the game, when we were already beginning to have more enlightened views on many things, and we hadn’t beaten African tribes in some war, so supposed Christians needed some excuse for enslaving fellow human beings. They created it: there were different races, and God had made caucasians the smartest, the elite, so they could do as they liked with the others, and the contact would teach those others.”

So I’m careful not to use “race” in that way; but, ironically, “racism” is a real force in our society, even if “ethnic prejudice” would be a more accurate but less ugly phrase for it.]

[Two things are particularly worth noting; that although the column focuses mostly on the South, racism was (and, to some degree, still is) alive and well in the North, though mostly in milder forms; and that all the horrors are not so far in the past as racists would like us to think.]