A day to renew hope, not be weary
The day we set aside to honor Martin Luther King Jr. is like no other national holiday because it is, simultaneously, a celebration and a rebuke.
In what is a very troubled passage for our country, we should not forget how significant it is that we reserve a date calling attention not to a former president or a founder from the revolution of 1776, but to a staunch critic of our injustices. He was killed after giving a speech in Memphis suffused with admonishments to anyone who looked down on others, most powerfully when he noted that the low-paid Americans whose strike he was supporting were “public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”
This radical witness on behalf of the equal dignity of all God’s children made King a founder in his own right (or, perhaps, a re-founder). He called on his fellow citizens to build a new republic that, as he said in Memphis, would “be true to what you said on paper.”
The “paper” in question included the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence with its still stirring insistence that “all men are created equal.”
In the dismay of this moment, we should recall how controversial the creation of this special day was at the outset.
During the debate on creating the King holiday in 1983, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., charged that the civil rights leader espoused “action-oriented Marxism” and other “radical political” views.
When the first King holiday was celebrated in 1986, several southern states combined it with a holiday celebrating Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. (Alabama and Mississippi still do.)
Calling our attention to King every year is a way of highlighting the urgency of our still incomplete battle for racial equality. It signals our reverence for those — in King’s era, and before and since — who risked a great deal in that struggle, including their lives. The martyred King stands in a line of other martyrs.
For this reason, the holiday is an occasion to renew hope and to fight for a narrative that sees our nation’s history as a long journey of self-correction.
No one championed this view more passionately than former President Barack Obama.
In 2015, he offered his most powerful testimony on its behalf when he traveled to Selma, Alabama to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march for voting rights.
“What could be more American than what happened in this place?” Obama asked. “What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people — unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many — coming together to shape their country’s course?”
And he cited Isaiah’s injunction that we “run and not grow weary.”
But in 2020, it’s impossible not to experience this holiday as also a reproach to what we have become in recent years and a marker of ground once won that is being lost.
When overt racism is on the rise, when the Supreme Court undercuts the very voting rights the Selma marchers bled for, and when a president of the United States ascends to notoriety by challenging, through shameless lies, the legitimacy of our first African American president, we have reason to worry we are in retreat again.
African Americans certainly sense the dangers we face. A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that roughly twothirds of them say it is a “bad time” to be a black person in America.
But turning backsliding into progress must become the cause of Americans of all races who reject the idea, as Obama put it in Selma, “that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America.”
In the celebrated and ominously prophetic passage of his Memphis speech, King declared: “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.”
We must never give up on King’s confidence. We must never grow weary.
But we must also be honest with ourselves at times like ours, when we risk allowing visions of the promised land to fade away.