As a writer, I’m always working on something and I don’t often think about national holidays. So when I recently tried to schedule a phone meeting for January 15, it took me a minute to register why my respondent was off that day.
Since 1983, January 15 has been recognised in the US as a public holiday commemorating the life and work of the theologian, civil rights leader and activist Martin Luther King Jr. If he were alive today, King would be 95 years old. But MLK, assassinated in 1968 at the age of 39, has now been dead for far longer than he lived.
All the same, his legacy of fighting courageously, determinedly and resolutely for racial equality and human rights remains. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in 1964, and inspired people to imagine and work towards a world in which people of all races, nationalities and religions would be considered equal and have the same human rights afforded them.
It is a beautiful thing to celebrate MLK, and to draw inspiration from his tireless efforts. And yet, as we are often prone to do with great leaders, we tend to remember him at the moment of his crowning achievements. But we can also learn much from recognising the ways in which he was a human being like the rest of us. To consider that there were many sides to Martin Luther King Jr might be not just a deeper way of honouring him, but might help us to look again at the possibilities within our own lives, reminding us of the call of unfinished work.
The 1957 watercolour and pencil work “Martin Luther King Jr”, by Time Magazine illustrator Boris Chaliapin, is held in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. The portrait of King, dressed in a grey jacket, white shirt and red tie, takes up most of the canvas. His eyes are piercing as he looks out determinedly towards some point in the distance. To the right of King is a pencilled image of a preacher behind a pulpit; below King is an illustration of people of different races boarding a bus. We might sometimes forget that MLK did not set out to become a world-changing leader, the Martin Luther King Jr we know him as. He studied theology, obtained a doctorate and was working as a minister at a Baptist church when, in 1955 at the age of 26, he was called to head the organisation that planned the famous Montgomery bus boycott, which eventually led to the desegregation of buses. His strong leadership and preaching of non-violence during that campaign catapulted him into the public eye.
The depictions in Chaliapin’s artwork, made in the year that King and other civil rights leaders founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, are symbolic of where King came from, what he achieved and his fierce commitment to his mission. We know how the story continues — his “I have a dream” speech, the sit-ins, the Selma March in 1965, his powerful “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, his Nobel Prize — all aspects that built his legacy and made him the lauded, almost godlike figure he is today in the public imagination. All this before he was 40. But there was more to MLK than his relentless fight for justice. And much that he sacrificed for his work and vision.
I love the illustration “Family Man” by South African artist Pola Maneli. Used as a cover for The New Yorker in January last year, it depicts MLK laughing wholeheartedly while seated on an armchair and surrounded by his four children. The two older kids by his side are smiling and looking directly and confidently at the viewer. The younger son, dressed proudly in a suit, stands between his father’s knees, an ice cream in his hands. The youngest, a little girl, is perched on King’s lap and holding a single maraca. It is a joyful image of a family delighting in one another.
It is also a stark reminder of some of what MLK had to put on the line for his commitment to justice. He was forced to spend a great deal of time away from home, and from his wife and children, and his life was often at stake. When he returned, he was surely exhausted or holding meetings, or endlessly on the phone, or trying to regroup from all that he was exposed to outside the house. Not to mention the threats of harm to his family and his home.
Justice, freedom, equality, peace, the ways of life we deeply desire for ourselves and for others, rarely come without some costs to the comfort of our current lives. So many of us feel devastated by the painful and unjust realities of the world right now. But a hard question to ask ourselves is what, if anything, are we willing to put on the line if we truly believe in making the world a better place for everyone, including our children and our children’s children? It’s not easy to consider our honest answers. And there could very well be a tendency to say, “Well, I’m no MLK. He was special.” He was an extraordinary person. But we all have things about us that make us extraordinary; whether or not we fully recognise those things is another question.
There are endless black-and-white photographs of King. Many capture his great charisma, but others show him when he wasn’t at his best or most composed, as in the powerful 1961 photograph by Paul Schutzer. It was taken during the Freedom Rides, when black and white activists travelled across the American South together on desegregated buses as a form of protest. Schutzer’s photo shows an exhausted-looking King with a hand across his face. On the wall behind him is a blurred image of Christ with a crown of thorns on his head.
The picture was taken at a church in Alabama where King and other activists were sequestered as a threatening mob of white people surrounded the building. The Freedom Riders were trapped inside the church and had to wait for the US attorney-general, Robert Kennedy, to intervene before they were safe to leave.
Images like this remind us that King was not perfect, fearless or ever-confident. He made questionable choices, and even reportedly had extramarital affairs. He was human like the rest of us, probably doubtful at times that a mission would be successful, or that the means were as effective as he’d hoped. Certainly afraid for his life and for those who were with him. We tend to forget that to be courageous means to act in the face of one’s fears, not to act without fears. But despite his fears, his fatigue, his stress, sacrifices and mistakes, King still believed it was his duty to work continually towards freedom and equality.
In 1960, in a speech delivered at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, King said: “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving forward.” It was a poetic way to communicate that, even with our real personal hardships and limitations, each of us can still do something to bend “the arc of the moral universe” towards justice. Where one person flies, another crawls, and with everyone’s efforts, we might actually get somewhere.
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