Monday, January 20, 2014

Dr. King: The Hero I Never Knew

I think most young black men go through a phase where they turn against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I know I did.  It happened to me around the time I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

When I started learning about Brother Malcolm, I got excited.  Here was a guy who wasn't taking no shit off white folks.  He dared them to do something in a time when they could have done it and gotten away with it.  He wasn't concerned with racial harmony or any of that bullshit.  He wanted what was right, and he wanted it now.  He was openly dismissive of anyone who stood in the way of that message.  When you're a young black man in a country that doesn't seem to like or respect you, it's empowering to read his thoughts.  And who didn't want to be the dude telling off these white folks, and they couldn't do shit about it?  I wasn't racist or anything, but I liked to believe that, if I was alive then, I would have stood with Malcolm X. 

Compared to that, Martin Luther King was boring as hell.  Oh, he gave some speeches?  He marched on Washington?  "Man, please.  Let me know when he starts fighting back," I'd think, like there was gonna be a later chapter of his life. "Ol' weak ass Dr. King.  Malcolm X is a real nigga."  That's how young I was.  I used ignorant words like that. 

Speaking of ignorant, that's exactly where that attitude came from:  Ignorance. 

Except for four years, I went to school in the South.  I started out in Sumter, SC, and finished in Biloxi, MS.  And in all those years of school, I learned like, five things about black history.  It wasn't because I was in the South, because the American schools overseas weren't exactly opening the floodgates of black history for me, either.  I can't imagine it was different anywhere else in America.  By the time I graduated from high school, all I had learned in school about black people was "The March on Washington," "I Have A Dream," "Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad," "George Washington Carver," and "Crispus Attucks was the first person to die in the Revolutionary War."  Didn't even learn what Crispus Attucks was doing there.  And what made it sadder was that my history teachers at Biloxi High were all black. 

Point is, if you grow up thinking that's all he did, then you're gonna think he's weak.  Every year, they celebrate this man and all they say is that he created racial harmony through nonviolent resistance.  They paint him as weak willed, like he just took abuse from white people until they felt bad and signed the Civil Rights Act.  Based on what is said about him in the mainstream, Dr. King didn't win because he was determined.  The white folks just got tired of hitting him, and that's how we got our rights.

I kept that attitude about Dr. King for a long time.  After I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I decided to read up on other black names that I had heard about, but didn't know anything about.  I wanted to know about the revolutionaries who empowered us and fought back.  The ones that scared Whitey back in the 60s and 70s so bad that they never talk about them now.  So i bought books about Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver.  I read books of speeches from revolutionary figures of the time.  I wasn't becoming militant, but I felt like I was learning about who we were during those times that schools don't talk about.  Fighting the power, in a way.

But it never occurred to me that I didn't know enough about Dr. King.  I figured they had to be telling us all we needed to know about him, because white folks love the man.  If he had been militant or anything, they wouldn't celebrate him like they do.  The Panthers.  Brother Malcolm.  This is that real, right here.  So I never bought books about Dr. King.  Still haven't, in fact.

But I did make an effort to learn more about the man, out of respect, really.  I mean, he got shot with firehoses and had dogs sicced on him.  And he suffered the indignity of having Paul Winfield play him in a movie.  So here and there, I'd pick up little factoids or read articles about him online.  And I came to understand where he was coming from.  I also saw that he wasn't the weak-willed simp I always believed him to be.

I also understood why they only teach us two things about him, because this man was trying to bring this whole system down.  Yeah, white folks like him now, but they didn't like his ass back then.  They weren't embracing his message, J. Edgar Hoover was tapping his phones.  They thought he was a terrorist and Communist, bent on destroying America.  Yeah, nice ol' Martin Luther King.  Sure, the FBI was on Malcolm X and the Panthers, but they were just criminals to the FBI.  No one considered that they were toppling anything.  Not even with Malcolm X's plan to speak before the United Nations.  White America truly feared Dr. King. 

Some of them still do, because there are tons of websites bent on discrediting everything Dr. King stood for.  The man's been dead for almost 50 years and they're still throwing dirt on his name, as if he's gonna come back and lead the revolution again. 

And that's because he was a true revolutionary, planning to bring the poor right to rich folks' doorsteps.  He was against the war in Vietnam, because he could see that it was just another way to exploit poor people.  He wasn't just trying to help black people, he was trying to change this whole system.  His "second bill of rights" was so ambitious that this country would be unrecognizable today had it fully been implemented (it probably wouldn't have, but still).  The only reason why rich people celebrate him now is because he's dead and couldn't do all of the things he had planned.  If you hate socialism, then you should just go ahead and start hating Dr. King retroactively.  Dr. King thought so much bigger, and even though we celebrate him today, we're actually doing him a disservice by reducing the expanse of his vision.

That's what should be taught in schools.  Racial harmony is cool and kids need to learn that, because kids are assholes, but they also need to see the totality of his message.  I wish I had seen it when I was younger, and I'm ashamed to say that it took me until my late 20s and early 30s to learn what I do know.  I'm not done learning about him, though.  I've found that I identify with him more than I ever did Malcolm X.  In today's world, Dr. King resonates more than ever.  Which says a lot about where we are as a nation.

No comments: