“Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a better person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.” -MLK
By Vincent L. Hall
Texas Metro News
https://texasmetronews.com
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was a Nobel Prize winner who was a widely accepted international figure. King was summoned and celebrated by heads of state and freedom fighters in Ghana, India, Germany, England, the Vatican, the United Nations, and a myriad of other venues. Yet he was hounded and hated by his own government.
Honesty requires that, if you recall how well King was received in Australia and Africa, you regard how he was humiliated from Mississippi to Memphis. Martin Luther King never accepted an invitation to go anywhere that did not bring the hue and cry of the status quo. Hate for him was not bound by race, class, or creed. There is someone in every demographic who hates a dreamer.
This man, who speaks with such eloquence of peace and possibility, was greeted with venom and violence. Martin King absorbed a daily regimen of verbal and physical threats and assaults by those who did not understand or appreciate his dream. And during his dream was his personal and debilitating bouts with depression.
The historic videotapes of his enemies spotlight powerful Whites such as Bull Connor, Governor George Wallace, and the Ku Klux Klan. But they never show you images of Ms. Izola Ware Curry, a black woman who brought him near death by driving a seven-inch letter opener near his aorta. The number of haters he suffered among his Black peers in the pulpit was far greater than those who loved his message.
Dr. King made a career of humanity. He was committed to the noble struggle for equal rights. But it came at a cost.
Politicians and potentates to this day pounce on the opportunity to praise and paraphrase King to gain favor. But they never mention the gruesome and grotesque way in which the government, local, and national, treated him.
King became an outlaw in the eyes of state and federal lawmakers by taking defiant, unprecedented stands against the denial of Civil and Human Rights. His stances on the Vietnam War, the growing rate of those in poverty, and unfair labor practices made him a target of his enemies.
That Dreamer had to look into the eyes of parents, parishioners, and people of all races to console them after seeing their loved ones gunned down, bombed, or executed for their courage and for his cause. If King’s movement was a walk in the park, he was strolling at night during a power outage, without the Secret Service.
You have every right to join the sanitized King Chorale, but I can’t hear your voice for hearing the jangling discords that dominated the life Martin King really lived. King’s adult life was replete with lauding and lament, praise and persecution, and victory amid violence.
You’ll replay that 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in which King said he wanted to be judged by the content of his character, rather than being scorned because of his race. But the confluence and content of the character assassinations against the man and the movement produced casualties. King was the most pronounced among the dead.
Dr. King’s quote was entirely correct, but the postscript was never written. There is no shortage of political and human rights causes that need our hands. However, once you commit to a career of uplifting and protecting humanity, accept that you cannot be a catalyst for King’s “finer world” without suffering and sacrifice.
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
