Embracing King's radical message

Joye Brown

January 16, 2007

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gestures and preaches to his congregation in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga. (AP Photo / April 30, 1967)

Now might be a good time to cut Martin Luther King Jr. back down to size.

He's become an icon, someone bigger than life. And that can only get worse now that his widow, Coretta Scott King, who died last year, is gone.

Once a year, most Americans take a holiday from work and from school to celebrate King's birthday, and to remember the days King marched and struggled for the cause of civil rights during his short life.

"I have a dream," King told a crowd of a quarter of a million people on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1963. Those words have been repeated in numbers geometrically greater than all of the days King walked this Earth.

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King was 39 when he was killed. He left a wife, children and footsteps too big for mere mortals to fill. Yesterday, thousands of people tried, by devoting their day off to community service. It beat going to the mall for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Sale.

But that's the problem with King's becoming so big.

George Washington, the nation's first president, got big too. The nation took his birthday off, but later lumped his day in with Abraham Lincoln's birthday, and still later, with every person who served as U.S. president. The result? President's Day, a respite that usually involves shopping.

King didn't start out as an icon. He began as a man who became a minister, who had the guts to say things and do things that made others brave too.

Take that famous speech in Washington.

I remember it well. I was a child then, and on the night before the march, my parents invited friends to our house in Washington, D.C. The kids were dispatched upstairs, but we huddled near the hallway stairs, eavesdropping as our elders worked out where to meet and what to do should things get ugly. The adults were being practical, but we didn't know that. The older children whispered about the television news pictures they had seen of angry police, snarling dogs and stinging fire hoses hurting freedom marchers in Birmingham, Ala.

The next day, we watched the speech, along with our babysitter, on television. And when the adults, jubiliant, returned to our house later, they didn't send us upstairs. They sat us down and told us everything. To them, King was an inspiring speaker. But, more to the point, an extraordinary man urging others to make things right.

King delivered his least remembered and most criticized speeches at Riverside Church in New York City in 1967. He spoke of "silence as betrayal" and challenged the nation with words that ring true today:

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values," King said. "We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered...

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."

King, the man, calls us to service. His birthday was yesterday, which leaves us 364 more days to join in.