Today we are here to commemorate the birthday of Dr. King who was born on Jan 15, 1929. He would have been 77 today.
American history is a history of social change pushed up from below by mass movements of committed citizens: abolitionists, suffragettes, labor and community organizers, civil rights workers, environmentalists, liberated women, proud gays, and courageous immigrants. Yet of all our many public holidays, only one honors that kind of up from below freedom fighter — Martin Luther King Day.
We should begin our MLK day remembrance by recalling an earlier January — January of 1777 when an ink-stained wretch named Tom Paine huddled by a tiny fire in the blood-stained snows of Valley Forge and wrote:
THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Ever since, those who stand and endure against discouragement, adversity, and defeat have been called "Winter Soldiers." We, the women and men here in this room, Black and white, red and brown and yellow — We are the Winter Soldiers of the unfulfilled American Dream.
Dr. King was a Winter Soldier.
Dr. King was a Winter Soldier, and he was killed in action on April 4, 1968 while supporting a strike of Memphis garbage workers.
When I worked for Dr. King in the mid-1960s we used to joke that we were part of his "freedom army." In that context, Dr. King was the general and I was — at best — just a sergeant. My view of Dr. King was from the rank and file, not from the inner circle. Yet even from that distance, what struck me most about Dr. King was his profoundly humanist vision that united people of all races and creeds. A vision founded in the unkept promise of America, that "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
What struck me about Dr. King was the depth of his compassion for the suffering of all people, of all races, of all nations. What struck me about Dr. King was how much he cared for people, not just people in general as an abstract concept, but people as individuals.
What struck me about Dr. King was his humility. He was profoundly uncomfortable with the adulation that he received, but he consciously used it to move people into action. Yet he never made money for himself, even his Nobel Prize money was put back into the Movement.
Dr. King was often criticized for not being "militant" enough. But what we often forgot — or failed at the time to understand — was that he agonized over every jailed demonstrator, over every beaten voter, over every martyr's death. When we were wounded, he bled. When we were beat, he ached. Later in life I experienced leaders who casually sent others to the barricades without qualms or doubts, and I realized how lucky I had been to be a sergeant in Dr. King's freedom army.
Successful social movements always focus on specific issues as points of attack for much broader goals. The Southern Freedom Movement focused on segregation and voting, but the Movement's vision was much broader than just the limited notion of achieving those two civil rights. The Southern Freedom Movement was really about the overthrow of an entire system of feudal oppression and exploitation that had replaced slavery after the Civil War. Our song and chant was, "Freedom Now!" not "civil rights now."
By defining the Freedom Movement as a "Civil Rights Movement," the media limits its scope to that of a modest reform within a benevolent broader system. In reality, it was a fundamental attack on the existing political and economic power structure in the South.
Just as the media distorts the Movement as a whole, it distorts Dr. King by freezing him at the moment in time when he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Freezing him in time at "Black & white together," and "Judging people by the content of their character rather than color of skin." Over this holiday, compare in your minds the number of times you see images of King on TV saying those words versus the number of times you see him:
By freezing Dr. King in time, the media conceals one of the profound truths about him, which that is that he evolved — that he rapidly evolved.
By freezing Dr. King in time, the media also conceals one of the profound truths about him, which that is that he evolved — that he rapidly evolved. It's not often mentioned, but like all of us, Dr. King made mistakes and experienced failures. Yet one of the great things about him is that he learned from his mistakes and failures. From the errors he made during the Albany, Georgia campaign of 1962 came the Birmingham victories of 1963 which played such a key role in eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Out of defeat in the Chicago struggle to end slums in 1966 came the brilliant concept of the Poor People's Campaign in 1967 — an effort to unite people of all races to fight for economic justice. So often we encounter leaders and theoreticians who are so wedded to the correctness of their opinions that they endlessly repeat their failures rather than learn new ideas, new tactics, new strategies. King was not like that. He learned. He grew.
I remember when he spoke from the steps of the Alabama state capitol at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March. He said "Though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends towards justice." And as I think back on it now, I'm astounded at how far his personal political arc traveled in just 13 short years. From the improvised podium where he stood, he could see the little church in Montgomery, Alabama where he had begun his ministry. On the day before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955, Dr. King was a socially conventional, politically moderate Baptist preacher. On the day he was assassinated in Memphis 13 years later, he was a global "Trumpet of Conscience," who was shaking the powers of the world with his calls for social, economic, and international justice.
And that's why they killed him.
Let's be clear about one thing, I do not know of a single Freedom Movement activist who believes the "lone gunman" lie. We all believe that King's assassination was engineered by the power elites for two reasons:
First, because he was uniting poor people across race and ethnic lines around issues of economic justice. Under his leadership the Poor People's Campaign threatened to directly challenge the culture of greed and exploitation on which the wealthy elite base their power.And second, by opposing the War in Vietnam he was challenging a foreign policy driven by global corporate expansion and the ideology of neo-colonialism disguised as anti-communism.
Malcolm X was killed for the same reasons. When he returned from Hajj in 1964, Malcolm renounced Black separatism, and said he would work with people of all races. And his first effort was organizing a petition to the UN documenting that the treatment of Black Americans violated the UN Charter and Declaration of Human Rights and demanding that the U.S. be charged with human rights violations.
When Medgar Evers was assassinated, his widow Myrlie said: "You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea." And when Dr. King was killed, it was said that, "You can kill the dreamer, but you cannot kill the dream." And that is true. But it is only true if there are Winter Soldiers with the courage and determination to carry on.
So let me close by taking note of something we often forget when recalling history.
Those Winter Soldiers shivering in the snow at Valley Forge did not know they were eventually going to win. At that time, the Redcoats occupied the major cities and dominated the colonies — only a handful villages and hamlets dared wear liberty blue. The college students sitting in at lunch counters, the freedom riders defying KKK mobs, the children standing against fire hoses in Birmingham, the women and men who marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma Alabama did not know they were going to win. There was no easy promise of quick success. The summer soldiers gave up and went home. The Winter Soldiers held on. And that is the essential definition of a Winter Soldier — someone who continues fighting for justice even in the coldest winter.
Dr. King called himself as a "Drum Major for Justice." He was also a Winter Soldier.
Copyright © Bruce Hartford
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