NEWS FEATURE: MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr.: An inconvenient hero, King dared the world to do more than dre

c. 1997 Religion News Service Now that he is safely dead Let us praise him … Dead men make such convenient heroes: They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. Carl Wendell Himes Jr., 1977 UNDATED _ In the 29 years that have elapsed since his assassination, the Rev. Martin […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

Now that he is safely dead


Let us praise him …

Dead men make

such convenient heroes:

They cannot rise

to challenge the images

we would fashion from their lives.

Carl Wendell Himes Jr., 1977

UNDATED _ In the 29 years that have elapsed since his assassination, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has taken his place in the American pantheon: He is a holiday. He is a hero. Above all, he is known as the Man Who Had A Dream.

And yet that metaphor, which has consistently been linked with King since his birthday was proclaimed a national holiday in 1983, has obscured both the contradictions of King’s character and the sharp edges of his difficult and demanding theology.

At King Day observances on the third Monday in January, schools and banks are closed and rhetoric abounds, the focus of which is the triumphant 1963 March on Washington, when the dream was one of many metaphors King invoked as he called the nation to account for its materialism, intolerance of minorities and injustice toward the poor.

But absent from most observances are images of an anguished King, only a few weeks after the March on Washington, when four little girls were blown to pieces in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Or King the revolutionary, who saw the civil rights movement as the vanguard of a worldwide struggle for social justice. Or King the prophet, who condemned the war in Vietnam from the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church in 1967, casting the United States as”the greatest purveyor of violence”in the world.”We have domesticated him, cultivated him. We’ve made him into somebody who is acceptable, a kind of nice man who did some nice things some time ago,”said Calvin S. Morris, dean of Atlanta’s Interdenominational Theological Center and a former director of the King Center, a non-profit library and archive in Atlanta.

If King the prophet has become a casualty of popular culture, there are those still dedicated to communicating his radical message: to lead the nation and the world to repent of racism, materialism and violence; and repair the harm that has been done by building a”beloved community”and cultivating a compassion that leads each person to work for the good of all.

Such a message, says civil rights activist Vincent Harding, makes King an”inconvenient hero,”an insistent moral voice that calls a violent and divided world to do far more than dream.”For those who seek a gentle, non-abrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man,”said Harding, professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology at the University of Denver.

Harding and Morris are among a number of scholars, social activists and old soldiers of the civil rights era determined to wake the nation from the collective delusion that King was some sort of amiable dreamer, who assembled the multitudes in the 1960s and secured justice once and for all.

King’s heirs, who since his death have closely guarded access to his papers, made headlines Jan. 9 with the announcement of a multi-million dollar publishing agreement with Time-Warner that would make the civil rights leader’s life and work more available to the general public.”The media has only played the top-40 version of his work,”complained Dexter King, the civil rights leader’s third child and current chairman of the King Center.

As part of the arrangement, which includes books, CD-ROMs and a Web site,Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson will write an”autobiography”of King, based on his sermons, correspondence, published writings and recorded statements.”It will offer the closest approximation of the memoir Dr. King would have written had his life not been cut short by assassination,”said Carson, senior editor of”The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.,”a massive, 14-volume project that promises to be the definitive scholarly work on the life of the civil rights activist.


Carson said the misperceptions that have resulted from the”iconization”of King had become so prevalent they have prompted him to write a popular”autobiography”of King _ much as Alex Haley did for Malcolm X _ that would present the man, in his own words, in all of his complexity. “He has become a mythological figure rather than a flesh-and-blood human being,”Carson said.”Just as George Washington gets boiled down to the cherry tree, King gets boiled down to the `I have a dream’ oration _ not the entire speech, but the last few sentences have come to symbolize the entire man. For 90 percent of Americans, that’s the image. In turn, that image becomes not only King, but the entire black freedom struggle. There is a real need to remind people of the rest of King’s life.” To historian Carson, who has sorted through more than 100,000 papers in the King archive, the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner was a man of many dimensions.”He was a theologian who could discourse on Reinhold Niebuhr, but he was also a person who could go into a black church and move an audience. He combined the qualities of the intellectual leader and mass leader to a degree that has not been matched by any other American in our time,”Carson said.”He could transcend racial boundaries, class boundaries, educational boundaries. His uniqueness comes from the fact that he was not limited to one type of leadership.” He was also a deeply conflicted man. Vincent Harding, who lived around the corner from the King family in Atlanta in the late 1950s and 1960s, and later served as a director of the King Center, believes it is imperative that the nation _ particularly young people _ abandon the one-dimensional image of King and understand what a complex and inconvenient hero he was.

In his recent book,”Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero”(Orbis), Harding remembers King as courageous in facing down hostile mobs, but also tormented by the deaths, beatings and incarcerations his followers endured. He describes a King who was uncompromising of his principles but occasionally uncertain of his leadership. Hounded by his enemies _ first among them, Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover _ he fought to keep his sanity and sense of direction, battled depression, and sometimes strayed from his marriage.

But in Harding’s view, the force that unites King, the flawed human being, and King, the national hero, is in the enduring truth of his message. And the test of his greatness is in the way current and future generations put his teachings into practice.

King’s journey, which began with a challenge to white supremacy in the American South, continues today, Harding said. The same social and spiritual pathologies King condemned in his lifetime _ racism, violence and materialism _ continue to bedevil America and the world.

In”Tell the Children,”one of the final chapters of his biography of King, Harding gives a glimpse of how the world changed when a bullet fired onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, ended the civil rights leader’s life. It is a story in which the dream is subsumed into the hard realities of a mystical yet pragmatic vision:”When word of his assassination reached the house in Atlanta, tell the children that his oldest son, Marty, then 10 years old, was devastated not just by the loss of his father, but by the notion that a man who tried to love so many could be brutally assassinated for no apparent reason. Tell the children what Marty knows now: that love and compassion are not shields against the instruments of physical destruction. Rather, they provide us with the power to stand and face the enemies of light; they generate energy to create perpetual starbursts of brilliant hope, even as we take our last breath.”So tell the children that King lives,”Harding writes.”Let them know that we saw him facing the tanks in Tiananmen Square, dancing on the crumbling wall of Berlin, singing in Prague, alive in the glistening eyes of Nelson Mandela. Tell them that he lives within us, right here, wherever his message is expanded and carried out in our daily lives, wherever his unfinished battles are taken up by our hands.”

MJP END CONNELL

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