I know it's been a few days since MLK day, but I've been holding onto this quote for months. I read Stewart Burns' To the Mountaintop back in October. It was a small attempt on my part to get to know the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.--the man and his vision. At some point I would like to read more of King's own words, but for now, I felt this biography was a good introduction.
"'We stand today between two worlds, the dying old and the emerging new,' King told the fiftieth-anniversary gathering of Alpha Phi Alpha, his college fraternity. 'The tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world is being born and an old world is passing away.' [King] saw that people of color more than whites, at home and abroad, were straddling the boundary of old world and new, wandering in the twilight between darkness and daybreak, navigating the complex ambiguities of a transition time from winter to spring, Good Friday to Easter. Between two worlds--a familiar stance for dark-skinned peoples. To prepare for entering the new world, he felt, black people needed to adopt a spirit of interdependence free from bitterness, open to forgiveness.
"This idea of personal and social rebirth was not an idea that King came up with out of thin air. He was interpreting what he was witnessing, doing what he did best, translating into eternal diction what the people were teaching him--leadership rising from the pews." [Burns, Stewart, To the Mountaintop, pp.112-113]
This is a quote that I loved, because I feel that it still rings true for this moment, our moment for growth. I also love the religious resonance in King's vision. It impressed me that despite his faults, King was a man of the cloth. He was brought into the work almost by happenstance, hand-picked to be the young, appealing face of the movement. What's more impressive to me is that Burns interprets King's ideas as reiterations of what he was seeing and hearing. He truly was a mouthpiece for the movement, "translating into eternal diction what the people were teaching him."
Now I have to say that though it is contreversial to think so, that I get frustrated with Black History Month. By keeping the labels on, we are not moving toward more equality. Having a month of events focused on Black History Month will not make up for the centuries of oppression. I believe it only furthers the gap between those who support equality and those who still choose to be racist. But I am white. So I fear that my thoughts on this will only ever be construed as racist.
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