But for titanic storms of natural elements, today would have been graced by another colossal event, the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial in Washington, DC. Although Hurricane Irene and a rare earthquake may have postponed that dedication, King’s memorial, if not his work, is finished.
While I was out-of-country much of the past couple of decades, King’s legacy underwent a dramatic transformation here in the USA. Time has a way of doing that, of smoothing over rough edges, of filling gaps, of blurring memories like a Monet.
As a boy of 13, I was singularly impacted by King’s death. He has remained a hero and an influence ever since. Not every one of my generation shared my enthusiasm.
Way back on that fateful day in ’68 when King was gunned down in Memphis, much of the nation held King in high suspicion. This catalyst for disruption of a faulty social order was ascribed all sorts of odious labels, a fate common to prophetic voices. Surprising to me therefore that in such short order he would become highly acclaimed as a voice of democracy and truth by those who had accused him in vilest terms of being a communist agitator, and thus a traitor to his nation.
I suspect there remains an undertow of unease among some of those who now quote King or speak well of him publicly. But the dead, especially the long buried dead, become convenient heroes for those who oppose the living of similar vision. None other than the co-founder of the Salvation Army was called a socialist in her day. In any case, King has been transformed into the ubiquitous quotable of most spectrums of American political and religious life, even by those who feared him when he lived and fought his legacy long after he died.
He was no perfect leader by any means. He hesitated, then joined and led crusades others more bravely launched. He vacillated in his own convictions, loyalties and commitments. While not excusable, these faults put him up there with the best. But he had metal of heart to seize an historic moment and the vision and voice to fight the beam in the eye of the American dream as no one else of his century did or could.
If he, the pacifist, unwittingly unleashed the demons of inner city convulsion, he likely saved the nation from an even greater catastrophe, for justice delayed will have its day in court and the longer the delay the more violent the trial by fire. If he, the Moses of American minorities, seemed to lose his way in opposing the war in Vietnam, it was only because others failed to recognize the moral connectedness the two causes shared.
Great leaders are invariably complicated and largely misunderstood in their own generations. True greatness is rarely recognized in real time. And so it was with MLK.
My present concern is not with the mistakes of the past, but with the blunder of not owning those faults and connecting the same dots in the present. When we fail to comprehend how we “missed it” back then, we allow our vision in the present to be clouded by the same ineptitudes of judgment. Sadly I daily uncover those very misperceptions in the rhetoric that graces our own 21st century.
Someday I hope to visit the new King Memorial in our nation’s capital, to meditate on its inscriptions, to walk through its Mountain of Despair and to gaze up at the Stone of Hope. Meanwhile, I pray that all Americans will realize how central to our collective vision King’s dream really was and how vital it is to continue “to work and fight until justice runs ‘down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”
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