Without needing recognition
Heather Cox Richardson offers a reflection on heroes for Martin Luther King Day:
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
Two months after King died in Memphis in 1968, another assassin murdered Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. On the day of King’s assassination, Kennedy broke the news to a crowd in Indianapolis where he was campaigning for president as others are today in Iowa:
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black–considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible–you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization–black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a difficult year. Two heroes died at the hands of men who hated the change King represented and Kennedy promised. The Civil Rights movement King led had already accomplished much, at least on paper, by the time of his death. Without his leadership, progress on civil rights slowed even as the backlash to progress gained momentum, if in the shadows at first.
As the Vietnam War dragged on, American popular culture turned to cynical antiheroes. There was Dirty Harry (1971), followed by Death Wish (1974) the year Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, and by Taxi Driver (1976). Rocky (1976) may have won best picture the next spring, but American optimisim was waning. By 1980, Ronald Reagan had won the presidency, introducing America to the cynicism of trickle down economics riding on the support of the religious right backlash to the 1960s and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
On this King holiday, that backlash continues with white resentment to the shifting power dynamics represented by Barack Obama’s presidency layered on top. Like homicidal maniacs in slasher-films, it’s hard to keep white supremacists from rising like the South again.
Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk means to tarnish King’s memory this day (The Root):
“We’re gonna be hitting him next week,” Kirk stated last week on his podcast. “Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr. You better tune in next week. Blake has already been preparing. It’s gonna be great.”
Last month at America Fest—which was organized by Turning Point USA—Kirk also used his platform to go after King. “MLK was awful,” he stated. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe,” referring to judging people by the content of their character and not skin color.
How cynical is that? Kirk would not fare well if judged by either.
King was satisfied that if he would not get to the promised land, he at least got to climb to the mountaintop and look over and behold it.
Asheville, N.C. hosts perhaps the country’s oldest MLK prayer breakfast, second in size in the southeast only to Atlanta’s. The keynote speaker for Saturday’s 43rd edition, James E. Ferguson, II was born here and, after graduating Columbia’s law school in 1967, co-founded the first integrated law firm in North Carolina. Looking out over the crowd, he reminded the 1,100 attendees that a gathering like this was illegal when he was growing up. The very notion was inconceivable. That was then. Despite backlash and cynicism, progress continues.
Richardson concludes:
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Usually without recognition.