MLK Day Every Day

Today, in what has become an annual tradition, I am reposting an essay I wrote in 2012 on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day. 

MLK Day Every Day

Today, our nation honors its single greatest citizen, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr King seized upon the ideals of the founders and sought to bring intellectual honesty to the precept, "Justice for all." Like so many people of beneficent conscience, he sought to remake the world in the image of what it could be. Unlike so many before or since, he succeeded, at least in moving our society toward that goal, chiefly through the relentless courage of his convictions.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, black Americans who'd served overseas began to agitate for the sort of equality to which they'd been exposed in Europe. They came to realize that, if they were to fight and die for the American cause, perhaps that cause ought to include their interests. From this burgeoning movement emerged Martin Luther King. A young minister with a degree in divinity, he was radicalized by the rampant culture of abuse inflicted upon American blacks, particularly in the south. His expansive philosophical interest led him to, among others, Henry Thoreau, whose views on the tyranny of the majority were the intellectual foundation of Dr King's interpretation of the problem faced by black Americans, and Mohandas Gandhi, whose philosophy of non-violence was the inspiration for Dr King's solution.

The importance of the cultural shift under way in the 1950s to the effectiveness of Dr King's message cannot be overstated. In the years after the Second World War, Americans collectively enjoyed a growth in prosperity previously unseen. As more and more white Americans escaped poverty and enjoyed President Roosevelt's "freedom from want," it became increasingly clear to non-whites that they were not to be included. The expansion of radio and the advent of television hammered home the point that economic security and middle class luxury in 1950s America were monochromatic. Radio and television also provided the viscerally powerful orator an audience wider than that enjoyed by earlier prophets.

In 1965, Dr King's focus on social improvement expanded to include the economically disadvantaged, regardless of race. The escalation of the war in Vietnam struck at the heart of Dr King's fervent belief in non-violence. He also came to see conscription, as practiced in 1960s America, as an unfair burden upon the less fortunate, and blacks in particular. His inclusion of poor whites in the pantheon of the dispossessed whose lot he sought to improve posed a particular threat to the political and economic establishment because then, as is still so sadly the case now, this establishment relies upon poor whites as their agents of oppression, forming a bulwark against the political and economic gains of poor minorities.

That Dr King was killed before his job was done is not to be mourned. It is not appropriate, either, to draw primary inspiration from his tragedy. It is a disservice to his legacy to focus our attention too greatly on any aspect of his story beyond his message. Dr King was no utopian; he lived in, and was of, our time. He did not advocate equality of result, merely equality of opportunity. Much of the last forty years has seen the rise of philosophies committed to the maintenance of the status quo, such as free-market fundamentalism. While this would surely sadden Dr King, it is important to take a long view, as Dr King acknowledged when he observed that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." To recognize that our society has come so far in furtherance of the betterment Dr King envisioned is not to blindly settle for what progress has been made, but rather to understand how much more is possible.

The holiday in honor of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr comes once a year, in January. Every day that we consider the plight of the poor and of the disadvantaged and work toward improving our shared prosperity, however, is Martin Luther King Day.

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."