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I had been looking forward to the extra day of a Martin Luther King Holiday until dark thoughts clouded my anticipation. It occurred to me that from a moral standpoint a Martin Luther King Holiday wasn’t such a good idea.
It wasn’t just the crass materialism of a GIANT CLEARANCE SALE. Sure, binge shopping strains the dignity of a day set aside to honor a truly spiritual man— but we all recognize that we now live in the ownership society and at some level we expect that everything is for sale.
No, the great injustice of Martin Luther King Day is that it is a holiday for college professors and bank presidents. They get paid a lot of money for not working on this day, while cleaning ladies and construction laborers continue to toil for poverty wages just like they did the Friday before and the Tuesday to follow. Somehow that doesn’t seem right; I feel sure that the man who died helping garbage men fight for a living wage wouldn’t be happy with how things turned out.
This got me to thinking about a better way to run a holiday. What if everybody who made less than thirty grand got the day off with pay and the rest of us had to work. Or better, what if everybody took the day off and for one eight-hour day we professional types were paid forty-one dollars and twenty cents while nannies and house cleaners billed us a cool $200 an hour for staying at home. Now that would be a Martin Luther King Holiday worthy of the man himself.
I was so thoroughly in the throes of my undeserved holiday funk that there was no turning back. I got to thinking how hypocritical the whole civil-rights-in-the-rearview-mirror celebration really was. Looking back forty years later the right and the wrong all seems so clear but that doesn’t mean much. The real test is if you can live in the heart of great injustice and have the courage and presence of mind to challenge it: right then, right there.
I am old enough to remember something of those days. In the spring of 1966 my family moved from North Plainfield, New Jersey to Germantown, Tennessee, right outside of Memphis. I remember quite clearly the day I met Miz Camp, my seventh grade English teacher. After asking me if I were a Jew, she set me straight that “down here, we say yes, ma’am and no ma’am.” To which I replied, “OK”— which was the wrong answer.
I learned that the American Civil War was actually the war between the States (alternately, the War of Northern Aggression,) and I leaned that the Ku Klux Klan was really a kind of ex-confederate mutual aid society that got a little out of hand.
I also learned that corporal punishment was an art form in Tennessee. “Taking your licks,” was the dues you paid for being a teenager. Every teacher had a paddle hanging on the wall. But nobody worried much about the teachers; whether it was due to lack of strength or a lack of meanness most teachers didn’t really pack much of a wallop. It was the coaches and the vice principal that you had to worry about. As far as I could tell the entire responsibility of a vice principal consisted in administering licks. This they did with an enthusiasm that now would pass for sadism.
Each coach or vice principal had his own special paddle. Some preferred the real thin wooden ones, about three inches wide, because of the force per square inch these could deliver. Others preferred the wider paddle, resembling a cricket bat, because they covered more real estate. It was a common practice to drill holes in the wide paddles to reduce wind resistance.
While teachers, who weren’t serious about causing real pain, might take a swing while you just stood there, the professionals had a fairly standard method of administering licks. You had to bend all the way over and grab a hold of your ankles. This position stretched the gluteus maximus to reduce any protective padding a scrawny teen age butt might afford. Clutching your ankles with the blood rushing to your head, there was a moment of dread and terror as you awaited the punishment to come. And it did come—usually in a set of three. No child was spoiled for sparing the rod at Germantown Junior High. The vice principal was not the type to hold anything back.
I remember the closing days of my eighth grade year when Miz Tilden, my English teacher, warned us how next year the coloreds were coming to our school and that we must work extra hard so that they would not surpass us. Even at the callow age of thirteen I was able to recognize the collective insanity of Southern racism, but it was through this and similar comments that I gained the critical insight that white supremacy was as much rooted in a profound sense of white inferiority as it was in a theory of racial superiority.
When Martin Luther King was shot the next spring I had no idea of the significance of the man’s life, let alone his death. I remember crude jokes, something about a sanitation workers strike, and the photographs in Life magazine. At the age of thirteen my level of moral sophistication had not advanced much beyond that of your average nation state.
In my three years in Memphis I witnessed the crudest forms of racism. This is a fact that somehow fails to convey the whole truth about the Southerners I knew in the nineteen sixties. I can remember Miz Haines, my ninth grade English teacher, whose strictness I did not much care for. One of the books she had us read in her class was To Kill a Mockingbird; it was only years later that I came to understand the courage and conviction that must have been required of her to teach this book in a time when our school was in the turmoil of integration.
Intertwined with the cruelty and hatred of these people was a grace and dignity I had never known in New Jersey. Unlike the north these folks didn’t seem to be going anywhere: they were born here and they would die here. Their sense of belonging to a place and time seemed to give them a sense of leisure to live life in the present moment— but a leisure that always existed in the shadow of a tragic past.
Most white people who experienced the legacy of racism in the Old South, now openly renounce it as an evil system. They never thought of themselves as evil people, only pawns caught up in the system. It was all beyond their control or influence. The same can be said for any number of social conventions, once accepted, that we now abhor: slavery, racism, child labor, genocide, colonialism, torture.
I realize that most people, black and white, just accepted the racism of the old South the way I and my fellow students accepted our licks. Social conventions, both good and evil are very powerful forces; but beyond a system of injustice is the inescapable fact of individual moral blindness. These evils were not subtle or hidden. They were clearly present, and yet most people simply chose not to see them. This is the lesson to be learned.
We should celebrate the great moral battles of the civil rights movement, but the heroism of Martin Luther King consisted in his challenging the moral blindness of his day not the easy target of yesterday. In the last years of his life Dr. King began to see the nation’s next moral challenges were war and economic injustice. This cost him many supporters, and we can only speculate what might have happened had he lived his full life to pursue these battles.
If we sincerely want to honor the man, then let us singly and as a community renew our dedication to removing the moral blinders that obscure the social evils in our midst. These are the every day injustices that benefit some of us, but at a very high cost to others. We will instinctively rationalize the necessity of these injustices in the name of security, or efficiency, or freedom and yet someday in the future our children and our grandchildren will look back upon these times and say, “How could they ever let that happen?”
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