Each year, on this day, I consider it the very least that I can do to spend some time thinking about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — the civil rights leader whose birthday (January 15) we celebrate on or about the exact date by taking a day off from work or from school. Civil rights is my one “hot button” issue, and Dr. King one of my heroes.
This year, as a new father, I started wondering about the day in the not too distant future on which I will need to explain to my daughters, Abigail and Fiona, about who Dr. King was and why he was so important. I struggled with the thought a bit; Dr. King may be a hero, but the civil rights era manifested both the best and the worst of America. Learning about that chapter of our history — unlike so many others, which are convenient enough to (literally) whitewash in perpetuity — is quite possibly the unavoidable point at which we begin to lose our innocence (or at least our naivete) as children, and begin to see the world around us in a more complex way. It is a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes heartbreaking society in which we live.
We have come a long way as a country since Dr. King’s time, but we still have miles to go. My kids will grow up in a world where racism (at least within our own national borders) is, by and large, viewed as a cultural psychosis, a disease that we’re desperately trying to cure ourselves of; but it still flares up, and the legacy of the civil rights era (and the great injustices that preceded it) will still attend us well after my children have grown. It’s inevitable that the history lesson I teach my daughters will have present day examples from which to draw, making it all the more necessary.
I was sitting with my girls at home today, watching them play around me after lunch time, and listening to the radio over the internet (KEXP 90.3 FM from Seattle) — as I thought about this. As I listened, the DJ, Cheryl Waters, played this clip, entitled “Fun Town U.S.A.: My Little Girl,” from Dr. King’s 1962 speech to the Zion Hill Baptist Church in Louisiana:
In it, Dr. King recounts how he had to explain the concept of racism and segregation to his own daughter, Yolanda. Just six years old at the time, Yolanda desperately wants to go to the “Fun Town” amusement park — but her father must inform her that he cannot take her, because Fun Town is for whites only. (Side note: the park eventually closed its doors later in the ’60s in part because it refused to integrate.)
King references this incident elsewhere, most famously in his canonical “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, which you may remember from the oft quoted line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This was the first time I’d heard the story at length, however. Crucial for me: the conversation references the times that Yolanda rides with her father to the airport; obviously, he traveled frequently (as do I, for infinitely less noble reasons), and so riding with him to the airport is one of the consolations she has won for his being away so often.
I’m a bit of a sap, so this hit me pretty hard. Here I sat, wrestling (kind of ridiculously, I admit) with the idea of some day having to explain racism and bigotry to my children. And here was my hero, recounting how he too had struggled to explain it to his own daughter — albeit, in a context with far, far greater stakes. The plain truth is: it is not, and will never be, an easy subject to explain. Even a master orator like Dr. King, who devoted his life to humanizing the cause of equality and explaining it to others so that they could not just understand it, but feel it, found himself tongue tied when trying to explain the inhumanity of bigotry to his child. And, of course, in this confrontation, he found another lesson.
If you want to take some measure of why Dr. King was a great man, the cause for which he stood can only be part of the equation; the empathy that he engendered on behalf of the people for whom he spoke must play a part as well. The cause of equality is everyone’s cause. I find myself thankful, again today, for Dr. King’s wisdom.
