WJBC Forum: Don’t forget Dr. King’s challenge

By Mike Matejka

Sunday would have been Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s 87th birthday, if he had lived.  Dr. King has become a venerated American icon.  He well deserves that honor, but in that enshrinement, it is too easy to forget his hard questions and challenges to our society.

This coming weekend, television and radio shows will replay his 1963 “I have a Dream” speech.  It deserves hearing, but it also creates an image of Dr. King as an idealistic dreamer, rather than the hard-pressing and emboldened freedom fighter that he was.

When he was shot in 1968, many Americans still resented his message and his methods.  Let’s not forget that when he came to Illinois in 1966 and marched in Chicago for equal housing, he was met with Nazi flags and thrown rocks.   He made the remarks that Chicago was worse than what he had seen in the South.  On April 4, 1967, he gave a controversial speech at New York’s Riverside Church, “Beyond Vietnam – Time to Break the Silence,” condemning the Vietnam War.   This was taken as an affront by Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party, who were supportive of Civil Rights, but did not want to hear King on war, particularly his linkage of Vietnam with race relations within the U.S.  Playing that speech on his birthday might insure we don’t just safely package him away as the idealistic dreamer.

In his final months, he was formulating a poor people’s campaign, attempting to unite what he called a “multiracial army of the poor” to march on Washington for an “economic bill of rights.”

When that fatal bullet struck him in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was all of 39 years old.   He was in the prime of his life, a prophetic figure who had shown courage, helping the nation face issues that dated to slavery days.

Imagine the years since 1968.  Civil Rights law were passed, we are more accepting of diverse people in leadership, from the President on down.  Yet the issue of economic inequality and opportunity that King was raising in his final months has actually grown worse since his time.  African-Americans still have a higher unemployment rate and a harder time winning home mortgages.   The resurgence of racially-tinged rhetoric in this last election I’m sure would cause his head to shake in sadness and his voice would call us again to our better natures.

Let us honor Dr. King’s birthday this weekend.  But let’s not put him safely away on a pedestal, make a plaster saint of a man with his own internal struggles, yet who also thoughtfully called to us to look in our collective American mirror.  He praised the possibilities of democracy and equality, yet reminded us to embark on the next journey to justice.  Happy Birthday, Dr. King.

Mike Matejka is the Governmental Affairs director for the Great Plains Laborers District Council, covering 11,000 union Laborers in northern Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. He lives in Normal. He served on the Bloomington City Council for 18 years, is a past president of the McLean County Historical Society and Vice-President of the Illinois Labor History Society.

The opinions expressed within WJBC’s Forum are solely those of the Forum’s author, and are not necessarily those of WJBC or Cumulus Media, Inc.

 

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