I don’t see the timidity of a lamb when I think about slain civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I see the raging ferocity of a lion instead. He was meek but he wasn’t a turnover puppet. King walked by the nonviolence standards he preached about. But he was always ready and prepared to go to war with anyone seeking to inflict psychological, emotional and physical harm on those who bled pain and suffering.
His speeches and sermons, while poetically and commercially brilliant on the rhetoric scale, pinpointed and dug to the core of America’s racist heartstrings on a lot more concrete level. King marched for peace. But he wasn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with bigots who sought to keep segregated Jim Crow laws as a way of life for American citizens.
King fought back against the drumbeats of oppression with “We shall overcome” constantly echoing and ringing loudly in his ear. The social conscious civil rights movement featured a placecard of heroic, courageous individuals-some anonymous- who had the nerve to stand up to the many injustices black Americans had to endure during that time.
King writes in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? those segregationist Jim Crow laws simply dehumanized black Americans and caused a ripple effect of immoral judgment on them as rightful citizens and human beings.
“The immorality of segregation is that it is a selfishly contrived system which cuts off one’s capacity to deliberate, decide and respond,” King writes. “The absence of freedom imposes restraint on my deliberations as to what I shall do, where I shall live or the kind of task I shall pursue. I am robbed of the basic quality of manness.
“This is why segregation has wrecked havoc on the Negro. It is sometimes difficult to determine which are the deepest wounds, the physical or the psychological. Only the Negro understands the social leprosy that segregation inflicts upon him.”
King, through his firebrand speeches and coalition-seeking backbone, became the face of the civil rights movement. King didn’t back down from the obstacles that stood between black Americans and their right to vote. He went to jail, became ostracized and hated as he and other civil rights leaders pushed, prodded and eventually prevailed in getting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enacted.
King didn’t run away from the challenges staring down the faces of labor workers fighting for justified pay and compensation. Instead he found himself on the frontlines of marches supporting sanitation and garbage collectors in hopes his “Poor People’s Campaign” would call attention to the issue of fairness and equality in the workplace.
King didn’t dismiss or hide from the plight of high unemployment, impoverished conditions, confronting black Americans in this country. Instead of ducking and backpedaling on the suffrage endured by black Americans and people of color in this country, King chose to run to it and hoist that mantle on his young shoulders.
In his book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, King talks candidly about the burden of race, a subject that continues to scorn America even today.
“Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race,” King said in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? “She has been torn between selves-a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she practiced the antithesis of democracy.
“This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to step backward simultaneously with every step forward on racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans.”
As the nation gathers itself to honor King once his memorial statue on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is finally unveiled to the public, we are mindful of the fact that this proud lion was forced to laid down his life as a sacrificial lamb to make this country a better one.
Dennis has covered and written about politics, crime, race, sports, and entertainment. Dennis currently covers the NFL, MLB, NBA, NCAA, and Olympic sports. Dennis is the editor of News4usonline.com and serves as the publisher of the Compton Bulletin newspaper. He earned a journalism degree from Howard University. Email Dennis at dfreeman@news4usonline.com