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In the late fall of 1983, the U.S. Congress passed a
bill declaring the third Monday of January each year
as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. President Ronald Reagan
signed the bill into law on November 2, 1983, fifteen
years after King’s assassination. Passage of this
bill had not been easy, as some conservatives and Southern
members of Congress had issued strong objections to
it. During the debate in the Senate, Senator Jesse Helms,
Republican from North Carolina, delivered a speech declaring
that although there was no evidence that King was a
member of the Communist Party, some suspected that he
had ties to Communists and others on the radical left
of America’s political spectrum. Others argued
that there were already too many federal holidays, nine
in all, and that, except for Washington’s Birthday,
none honors a single individual. Some of the most fiscally
conscious opponents argued that the cost of the holiday,
as they calculated it, would be too high. In response
to this argument Senator Bob Dole countered, “I
suggest they hurry back to their pocket calculators
and estimate the cost of 300 years of slavery followed
by a century or more of economic, political, and social
exclusion and discrimination.”
Clearly, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement
with which he was so closely identified remained extremely
controversial in American politics and society, almost
a generation after the passage of civil rights and voting
rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. Even in the twenty-first
century, some continue to have difficulty accepting
King as an appropriate American to honor with a holiday.
In Virginia, the state legislature adopted a novel approach,
which continued until 2000, of combining the King holiday
with existing observances of Robert E. Lee Day (January
19, celebrated since 1889) and Thomas J. “Stonewall”
Jackson Day (January 21, celebrated since 1904). Lee-
Jackson-King Day, as it was called, revealed a twisted
reading of history that conflated honoring Confederate
generals with honoring civil rights advocates, equating
the Southern Confederacy with the civil rights movement.
Some Virginians argued that both movements called upon
Americans to stand for their beliefs. One wonders at
the logic of honoring all those willing to take strong
principled stands without regard to the principles being
advocated.
Although it may be true that King, Jackson, and Lee
each had personal beliefs that they were willing to
defend, King’s commitment to human freedom was
more directly in keeping with the values and commitments
set forth in the founding documents of the nation, those
principles American founders offered in support of the
Revolution. Although the institution of slavery existed
in all thirteen of the original British North American
colonies, the nation coming into being at the end of
the eighteenth century identified itself with human
freedom and a respect for the human rights that Thomas
Jefferson and other Enlightenment devotees rhetorically
championed. King spoke and acted in this tradition,
using the language of freedom and equality and advocating
these values, which are at the core of America’s
founding rhetoric.
In his most well-known public speech, King described
his dream, which as he said was deeply rooted in the
American dream. This was more than the two-cars- in-
every- garage dream of economic success to which the
American dream is too often reduced. This was the dream
of a bright and promising American future characterized
by human freedom and a respect for human rights. As
King reminded his audience at the March on Washington
-- some 250,000 people gathered on that hot August day
in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
-- this had been the original American dream of those
who saw themselves as oppressed people in the grip of
tyrants.
The March on Washington at which King delivered his
speech was the largest political demonstration in U.S.
history that had occurred up to that point, an inspiring
occasion. It was a day filled with lofty words from
a range of speakers, from NAACP president Roy Wilkins
and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) to actor Charlton Heston representing
a contingent of artists, including Harry Belafonte,
Marlon Brando, Diahann Carroll, Ossie Davis, Sammy Davis
Jr., Lena Horne, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier. Heston
read a speech prepared by the African American writer
James Baldwin, and John Lewis then reflected the sentiment
of the day with his declaration that, “We cannot
be patient, we do not want to be free gradually, we
want our freedom, and we want it now.” Yet no
one’s words inspired and electrified the crowd,
the entire nation, and much of the world, more than
those of Martin Luther King.
As we think about that day and about King’s words
when we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, it is fitting
that we recall the historical context for the formation
of the modern civil rights leadership. It is especially
important for those too young to remember the man and
his times to understand that King was not the first
great advocate of American civil rights, but one in
a long line of those who took the nation’s promise
of liberty and equality of opportunity seriously enough
to force the nation to reflect on its shortcomings and
to demand that it live out its dreams. King would not
have been completely comfortable with a day set aside
in his honor. He was a man of great public humility,
who realized that he was not the totality of the modern
civil rights struggle but that he only symbolized the
work that others were doing and had done over generations.
He also understood that he was both a part and a product
of a long history of human rights struggles, a history
that, even now, few Americans appreciate.
One story that has become part of civil rights lore
vividly illustrates this lack of understanding. During
the early 1960s, hundreds of college students participated
in the “jail, no bail” campaign to pack
Southern jails to overflowing, signaling that African
Americans would not submit to racially discriminatory
laws that denied them everything from a cup of coffee
served on the basis of equality to the right to vote.
The mother of one jailed protester attempted to post
bond for her daughter’s release. The daughter,
however, refused to accept bail, admonishing her mother
that, “If your generation had done this, my generation
would not have to.” Despite its dramatic appeal,
the daughter’s accusation was based on an ignorance
of history. King and many others in the movement understood
that they were following in the footsteps of their ancestors,
white and black, those who in every generation since
before national independence had struggled for freedom.
Among African Americans and their progressive white
allies, the dream of the 1960s was older than the nation.
The original American dream, set out in Thomas Jefferson’s
essay that became the Declaration of Independence, made
no direct mention of racial equality or of equality
of opportunity unrestricted by race, for Jefferson and
few of the national founders considered such a condition
practical. During the 1770s and for the preceding generations
of colonial life in British North America, human slavery
had defined much of American race relations. Moreover,
nearly half of those who signed the Declaration that
brought the nation into being were themselves slaveholders
whose personal fortunes rested on the uncompensated
labor of bound Africans. Herein was forged the great
American contradiction -- a freedom-loving nation that
tolerated human slavery. But for all its contradictions,
the original American dream provided the foundation
for a freedom struggle that began at the nation’s
birth and continued beyond the life of Martin Luther
King.
King’s call for America to make good on its commitment
to human freedom and on the country’s belief in
the existence of “inalienable” human rights
given by God, rights protected by the U.S. Constitution,
drew upon centuries of tradition. Even before the nation
had secured its liberty from Great Britain, African
slaves had made a similar demand on those American patriots
seeking national independence for themselves. In 1773
and 1774, Massachusetts slaves confronted colonial authorities
with the question of freedom for America’s slaves.
"We expect great things from men who have made
such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow
men to enslave them," they said. Other New England
slaves issued similar petitions, highlighting the parallels
between their cause and America’s desire to become
a "free and Christian country."
It was with freedom and opportunity in mind that escaped
slave Crispus Attucks led an interracial group of New
England sailors and laborers to confront the British
sentries at what became the Boston Massacre in 1770,
an event that John Hancock called a noble stand for
liberty. The desire for freedom also spurred African
Americans to join with other colonial minutemen at Lexington,
Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775, standing against what
Americans called British tyranny. These and others who
served in the American forces during the Revolution
were laying the groundwork for King’s dream, demanding
through their actions and with their lives that America
live out its ideals and make good on its promise. Americans,
black and white, stood together in the pre-Revolutionary
protest against British tax policy, the Stamp Act, and
British impressment of Americans, black as well as white,
into the Royal Navy. They fought in interracial military
units of the Continental Army and the American Navy.
When African American former slaves, freed by British
proclamation, served with English forces, fighting alongside
British, German, and Native American Indian troops,
they did so in the name of freedom.
In the decades after American independence, whether
as troops in the War of 1812, standing with Andrew Jackson
at the Battle of New Orleans, or as prime movers in
the abolitionist struggle against slavery, African Americans
continued as leaders in the freedom movement. In all
these efforts they found some white Americans, such
as abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown,
willing to stand beside them, risking life and property
in the name of America’s dream of liberty and
human rights. On the battlefield of the Civil War and
in the political struggles of the Reconstruction era
and beyond, freedom fighters continued their work, even
as the iron grip of Jim Crow segregation closed on that
brief moment of progress brought by the constitutional
abolition of slavery.
Growing up in segregated Atlanta during the 1930s and
1940s, Martin Luther King was well aware of the struggle.
Born in 1929, he was too young to remember 1930, when
robed and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan marched
through the heart of Sweet Auburn, the black residential
and business area of the city, in an effort to intimidate
any, even professional, blacks who might dare attempt
to integrate other parts of Atlanta. Yet King learned
much about the civil rights movement from his father,
who was minister of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and
who during the 1930s had served as president of the
city’s branch of the NAACP. Daddy King, as the
senior King was called by his family and his congregation,
was also a charter member of Atlanta’s Negro Voters
League and an active community leader who developed
educational programs for African American youth.
As a child of the movement with a family tradition of
community activism, Martin Luther King, Jr. clearly
understood his place in the long freedom struggle. That
the struggle continues even into the twenty-first century
is not from lack of effort in earlier time, but because
racial inequality is so embedded in American society.
Ironically, this inequality is as traditional as is
the nation’s commitment to human rights and human
freedom. As King would see it, the overwhelming significance
of Martin Luther King Day is that, beyond the shopping-mall
sales and the public media events, it provides a time
to reflect on the contradiction that he and those before
him refused to allow America to ignore. King’s
work and message should be viewed in the context of
a long history stretching from eighteenth-century slaves
to 1960s freedom riders to twenty-first- century community
activists, all of whom refused to give up on the American
dream and vowed to someday make it America’s reality.
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