MLK, from ambition denied to divine rage
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
There is a genetic code for every kind of human expression. It runs the gamut from pure wit to cold-blooded paradox, from arm wrestling to spiritual evolution.
Martin Luther King came to maturity, we might more appropriately say power, at the end of a golden age of African-American expression. His personal DNA, which was a profound gathering of pure force – something like a human version of atomic or nuclear concentration – was both a call and a response from the depths of the collective experience of African people in the “new” world.
He was the result of a historical necessity that finally emerged out of a 300-year-old dream of black power (although he would never use this term). He was a prophet who combined personal reality and human vulnerability in a way we had never witnessed.
He understood, in the end, the ferocious forces he had unleashed into the world. He felt them turning in on him and realized, some months before his martyrdom in Memphis, that there was no possibility for even a strategic retreat. In his great world-reckoning sermon, delivered the night before his assassination, one hears world-weariness, temporal acceptance and overwhelming joy as he literally chants the words, “I might not get there with you, but we as a people will get to the promised land.”
His great aural presence was the culmination of a tradition of protest, confrontation and resolution through sound that went back to the first landing of kidnapped Africans at Jamestown, Virginia in September of 1619. He had mastered literature and writing and understood the subtleties of modern mass communications, but his true calling was the high, beaming speech of the human voice. He had the debating skills of Frederick Douglass, the enlarged personal self-esteem of Marcus Garvey, the political wisdom and vision of W.E.B. DuBois, and the exalted ability to embrace an enemy of Mahatma Gandhi.
He was a lover and a great singer of the holy blues.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929, his lineage declared that his life would become something great. Mentored by a driven father, who was himself an influential minister and a classic version of the self-made man, and a loving mother, he early became a focus of the biblical line, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
In his youth he was surrounded by two great messages that pounded against his mind. On the one hand there was the message of stability, tradition and modest political ambition, coming from a protective community whose high moral and ethical standards were buttressed by an ancient law and a loving God. On the other hand there was the Jim Crow world of black codes, racial separation and intolerance, social scorn, economic deprivation, political disenfranchisement and arbitrary violence. It was a puzzle for a young man, and it seemed to have no solution.
Before the cultivated onslaught of his acrobatic verbal skills, sense of mission and social strategy, this other world refused to bend. He knew how this world worked, he knew of the main players, he longed to meet them on an equal footing and show them the power and purity of his way. They would not budge. Historical consciousness was no match for their blindness.
A strategy often employed by apparently powerless people is the summoning of faith. Personally it can lead or even drive one through passages of hard and dark times. It can also conjure a social consciousness employing the power of memory; what was forgotten can be rediscovered or remembered as a rite or an action that once served people nobly or admirably. It used to work. Let’s try it again!
Faith leads to memory leads to forgotten rite leads to summoning others to help leads to right action. This was Martin’s first great political move. He went outside of himself and summoned other helpers. Memory, action and help lead to fundamental change. The game was moved from the backwater of the privileged Southern elites manipulating poor whites, as shock troops against black aspirations. The game was moved onto the global stage.
International opinion exerted powerful political pressure, as people around the world watched the daily drama of blacks being beaten, hosed with water cannons and even murdered, as they asked for something that was already guaranteed by the most admired and honored national statement of purpose in the history of the world, the U.S. Constitution.
King’s example of personal control and group discipline had set the stage for a showdown, a political showdown, that had been coming since Lincoln’s desperate attempt to save the Union had led to the emancipation of enslaved Africans in North America. His successes in changing the way people viewed themselves and their neighbors, however, led to a bull’s eye being placed on his forehead. The modern doctrine of intense and unbearable public scrutiny became a cross that he would have to bear to the end of his days.
Power is the right to choose; but, it’s also the burden of being chosen. Those who are sanctified are subject to a super gravity. His attempts to synchronize and align his self with the soul of his people and the transformed and turbulent character of the nation began to wear him down in body and spirit.
A year after his most significant civil rights triumph, the Voting Rights Act of 1964, he was overwhelmed by the ratcheting-up of the U.S. incursion into Vietnam. His self-concept was bending, but not breaking, under the mad surveillance of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. A combination of despair and a final reconciliation with the unbearable inner knowledge that the end of his life was near was the creative fodder he used to march on to Chicago and finally Memphis.
These last days were the antithesis of the glory days of the march on Washington. The fellowship of that time now was like the most bitter pill that God could force a man to swallow. He felt he was swallowing it without water or sweet reason. Chicago and Memphis were like hell on earth. Poor people energized by his example were now opening up, creating egos for themselves, while he was slaying his own. In the dark night of his soul he was no longer a holy man, but a whipping boy for all the ills of the nation.
Media supporters and liberal ideologues were saying, out loud, that he had gone too far. A small and loyal group of acolytes and friends were the only thing that stood between him and the inevitable exile that is the lot of all fallen heroes. He was standing in the shadow of love, waiting for the heartbreak to come.
The evening of April 3, 1968 was like a warm consecration. He could barely stand. He was literally carried by his disciples to the podium. Once there, he braced himself and took three deep breaths. In the short space of his 38-minute delivery, he was consumed by the congregation. They were like a great psalm being sung by Solomon, and he was the lute that accompanied them. The remainder of the evening was liquid and motion and fire. That’s all.
The next evening a bullet flew and ended the age. And then we entered a period of divine rage.
