The Suffering of the Prophet

After Reading Jonathan Eig's "KING: A LIFE"

I was eleven years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. made his glorious “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. My parents went to Washington to attend; I watched on television at home with my grandmother.

As the child of communists (by then, former communists), I understood the basics of what those thousands and thousands of people were demonstrating about — but like the demonstration itself, the issues stood at a distance. Yes, we had spent my first four years of life in the Black neighborhood of St. Albans, Queens, where my parents and several other leftwing couples had bought homes in order to try to stem “white flight,” but by the time the March on Washington took place, we had been living in a Jewish-majority neighborhood for seven years and had hardly any contact with people of color. “Diversity,” for me, was Sam, the Black maintenance man in charge of our garden-apartment complex, and my close Chinese friend, Marty Chow, whose immigrant parents owned the local laundromat. During quick stints at progressive summer camps, I met a few Black and biracial kids, but at my year-’round schools, the only Black kids were orphans living at a place we called “the Home,” a place I never saw.

My relationship to racism at that age was mostly confined to a vague, guilty feeling about Black oppression and what today might be called my “white privilege.” Why did Black people suffer so much? Were they really different from me? Was their poverty their fault? Was it okay to wonder about such things? Was I a racist?

Then, sitting alongside my grandmother, I heard Martin Luther King, Jr. say this:

“[M]any of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.”

Dr. King was offering this boy an escape from guilt into self-help. By learning about the Black experience, by joining my energies to the Black liberation movement, however I could, I might free myself from eternal uneasiness and help to create the kind of America I wanted to live in.

As I grew older, Dr. King’s philosophy of resistance-through-love and love-through-resistance established itself the most deep and abiding political insight of my life. Over and over I saw how only the humanization and rehumanization of political opponents could overcome the perverse “othering” that is so fundamental to human nature. Over and over I saw how the failure to undertake that very, very difficult challenge of rehumanization would yield hopeless violence and mutual hatred.

As in: Israel/ PLO, PLO/Israel, Israel/Hamas, Hamas/Israel, murder-and-terrorism/occupation, occupation/murder-and-terrorism . . .

Over and over I would try to understand, even empathize with, rather than merely despise, America’s own “basket of deplorables” (they’re damaged, they’re afraid, they’re the product of social conditions, they’re personally miserable, they’re trapped in false consciousness . . .?), just as I tried to empathize with the young Black men who had robbed me several times during my decades in New York. Over and over, I confirmed the belief that King’s was the only path to social transformation, a realm beyond reform.

All of this was fairly easy to do in my armchair. What I could never emulate in Dr. King was his courage and his willingness to sacrifice.

Now that I’ve read Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin Luther King, I’ve begun to comprehend how profound that courage truly was. King was terrorized and terrified by the brutal racists he encountered throughout his years of leadership. He repeatedly suffered paralyzing anxiety attacks. He frequently resorted to hospital stays to recover from his terror. He was appalled and overwhelmed by the hatred and violence he encountered, and needed deep prayer and contemplation to hold onto his faith in nonviolence. He longed to leave the civil rights movement and become an academic, a writer, a private citizen. Yet he felt compelled by his God, his destiny, his conscience, and his people, to continue his relentless campaign for an end to American apartheid and racist oppression, even if it meant — as he predicted many times — his own early death.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a far greater prophet than America has ever deserved. He he inspires me, year in and year out, to try to make our country — and myself —worthy of his immense sacrifice.

Rehumanize!

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JOIN US!