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April 06, 2008
Thinking about history and MLK
I was listening to NPR the other day, a report on Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech before his death, "I've Been to the Mountain Top."
"I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
The next day he was shot and killed. As they played the speech and interviewed people who were there when he gave it, people who were there the next day when he was killed, I pulled up to a gas station to fuel my tank.
I was crying. In Oregon you can't pump your own gas. So I wiped tears from my face and sniffled as I handed over my plastic and said "fill me with regular." The gas pumping guy must have felt bad for me, because he washed my windshield while I sat there, riveted to the radio by the words of a great man.
Here's the thing I've been thinking about in the three or four days since I listened to that speech and pondered a 40-decade-old assassination: The day before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, there were a lot of Americans who did not think he was a great man. A lot of people agreed with his cause but disagreed with his approach. Still others disagreed with everything he stood for, thought his civil rights fight would destabilize the country and grant rights to those who did not deserve him. And then there were those still more impatient than MLK himself, those unwilling to push peacefully for change when what they wanted was a revolution then and there.
On the day that he was killed, how did those people - those critics of a man who now has a national holiday - how did they feel upon hearing the news? Did they shake their heads at the shame of it, even if they disagreed with his mission and his passion and his life and his accomplishments? Did they rejoice? Did they feel a hole ripped in their hearts? Did they feel more American or less, closer to their neighbors or more distant, vindicated or isolated or simply lost?
I'm having a hard time putting my mind and my imagination into that moment in the past. Like most good public school children of my generation I've learned that Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement that transformed America. But there's so much more to an event, to an assassination, than the narrative we choose to teach our children.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at April 6, 2008 10:22 PM