What Dr. King Means to Me

Few people know this but Dr. King's holiday was long in coming. Four days after Dr. King's death John Conyers, that esteemed representative of Detroit, took to the floor of the US House of Representatives and demanded America to pay tribute to one of its true heroes. We had days dedicated to colonizers and conquerors, to slave owners and middling political talents, but here was the opportunity to create a day for a true hero. A man with the courage to point out to America its unfinished journey, its unfulfilled promise, not with anger or revenge, but loving kindness. Now anger and revenge would have made sense. But Dr. King was not that kind of person. He believed that to use the tactics of violence and revenge would lessen his own humanity and therefore make any victory hollow. That was not a popular position. At the time of his death, Dr. King was easily the most hated man in America.

Now, Representative Conyers demanded a holiday for Dr. King in 1968, but Dr. King's birthday was not declared an official holiday of the United States for another 15 years. Fifteen years. That's not to say that it went unnoticed during that time. In fact, Dr. King's birthday is the only national holiday to be born out of a grassroots struggle--a grassroots union struggle.

Dr. King was no stranger to the struggles of working people, in fact he understood that the oppression of blacks and the oppression of the working class were two faces of the same monster. After Dr. King and the "Civil Rights Movement" claimed victory through the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act he moved into a small apartment in a housing development in the Greater Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago to begin his Poor People's Movement. The intersection of race and class was never so obvious in the North, and in July of 1965 Dr. King joined AlRaby and the CCCO's Chicago Project. Dr. King once spoke of racism in Chicago as some of the most overtly violent that he had ever encountered. Dr. King had high hopes for his Poor People's Movement but it did not capture the imagination of the Corporate Media and therefore the American public like the Civil Rights Movement had. Dr. King continued to fight for working people and on the eve of his death visited Memphis to join in a sanitation workers strike. There he delivered his final address just a day before his assassination (I've Been to the Mountain Top).

Dr. King's dedication to working class struggles was very well known if not by bourgeious America, then at least by the working class themselves. And it did not go unrecognized. On the first anniversary of his birth managers in a GM plant in New York threatened to disciplined a small group of workers who refused to work. They backed down when a much larger group walked off the job in protest a few days later. Again in New York, thousands of hospital workers walked off the job demanding better pay, better benefits, and a paid holiday on Dr. King's birthday. 25,000 more hospital workers and 80,000 dressmakers won similar demands in that first year after Dr. King's assassination.

Unions provided the financial and social capital to extend the movement nationwide. That support was coordinated by DWA leader Robinson, a close friend of the King family. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, invited Robinson and Conyers to kick off the campaign for a national holiday at a 1969 birthday rally at the new King center in Atlanta. At the rally, Conyers recounted his bill's defeat in Congress and expressed hope for more support the following year. Robinson called for direct action, declaring, "We don't want anyone to believe we hope Congress will do this. We're just sayin', Us black people in America just ain't gonna work on that day anymore." (Working Class Hero)

And they didn't. While the bill languished in Congress, working people stepped up and refused to work on Dr. King's birthday. Working class people, especially working class blacks, but also allies in the white and Latino communities made Dr. King's birthday a national holiday regardless of what the US Congress had to say.

Fifteen years passed, a President's endorsement came and went, and the King Center had to struggle to assemble the largest petition drive in US history, six million signitures in all, before Dr. King was honored with an official day commemorating his legacy.

Fifteen years. What was it that Dr. King represented that could organize people for fifteen years to jeopardize their jobs to ensure that he was honored? What was it that he represented that forced people like Jesse Helms well into the 1980s to call him unpatriotic, a traitor, a communist on the floor of the Senate? What is it that Dr. King means to us?

The champion of the better angels of our nature. There are few days when right and wrong are so clearly obvious. Dr. King represents courage most fundamentally to state what is right and what is wrong plainly and then to throw our bodies upon the wheels and gears of the machine of the wrong and to bring it to a halt. He reminds me of the Buddha's comment on work, "Your work is to discover your work and then with all your hear to give yourself to it." Dr. King represents the courage of compassion, nonviolence, and loving kindness in the face of violent oppression and the darkest urges toward violent vengance and bitter despair.

Dr. King was a human being, he was flawed, he was unfaithful to his wife, a victim of human weakness. This, I believe, only serves to make his legacy more important, he was a person. As complicated and as basic as that, he was a person. He struggled in the spotlight and in his heart and no figure has ever been more interrogated while he did so than Dr. King. Twenty-four hour surveillance courtesy of that same US government that refused for 15 years to honor him with a day off of work. That same US government that recently colonized his wife's funeral, demanding that Harry Belafonte, a man who had paid for Dr. King's bail from the Birmingham City jail (as he did with many other civil rights activists), who funded the march on Washington in 1963, who financed the freedom rides, who was blacklisted because of it all, and who paid for Dr. King's funeral, be disinvited.

Talking about Dr. King is interesting today. All day I looked for memoriums, the History Channel had one half hour on Dr. King as a holiday. They had four hours of "Consipracy?" and four hours of UFOs, but only one half hour for Dr. King. It was cable access that came through finally with a day of videos of lectures and discussions about black America.

As a white man, explaining what Dr. King means to me must be understood through my efforts at honestly interrogating my privilege and the truth of history, the gifts of black folk and the costs of white supremacy. This is one journey that remains unfinished and if you read this will be one that I continuously return.

Be Brave. Be Kind. Be Loving.