And so, here we are, celebrating Martin Luther King Day once again this Monday.
I look across the national landscape and ponder the things Dr. King lived, fought and died for. I look out upon our country, and a combination of sadness and fear continues to arise. And then, the pages turn, as they always do at this time, and once again I am back in a small row house, outside of Newark, New Jersey.
It was a cold Wednesday afternoon, Feb. 5, 1964. I’d come home from a friend’s to hear my parents arguing. My father was saying, “There’s going to be trouble, the Birchers and the rest of those bigots will be out in force.” My Mom simply replied, “He’s a great man and I want the kids to see him.”
Martin Luther King was going to be speaking at Drew University, several miles away from where we lived in northern New Jersey. It was an evening when he would give his “The American Dream” speech in which he said, “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.” It was also 74 days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
My mother told us to bundle up warm because we might have to stand outside to hear Dr. King’s speech. We arrived at Drew University, where thousands had congregated to hear the man who had just been announced as Time’s Man of the Year.
As we walked down a university path, a young man, cloaked only in a light jacket, with a chiseled jaw and hardened face, pulled a paper from the sheaf he was holding and thrust it into my mother’s hand. Characteristically, this 5-foot-1, soft-spoken Iowa farm girl said, “Thank you.” Several steps later, as she perused the page, she turned around, walked back and handed the hate literature back to the young man, politely saying we didn’t have any use for it.
As she turned and began walking back, my sister and I heard a phrase that was more serpentine hiss than spoken word, “You f…... n….. lover.” In a tone I never heard before or after, my mother looked at me and said, “Take your sister’s hand and stay there.” She turned, walking slowly back to the young man, who with each step leaned away from her, until she was inches away, face to face, standing up to him. She then gently replied, “I’m very sorry you weren’t raised any better than that.”
En route to the hall Dr. King was to speak at, we met the leader of my YMCA youth group, John Cunningham. Cunningham was a New Jersey historian and asked if we’d like to join him backstage. At the conclusion of his speech, Dr. King came up to Cunningham, who he knew, and we were introduced. I still vividly recall shaking his hand. To this day, he remains in my ultimate pantheon of heroes and my choice as the greatest American of the second half of the 20th Century.
Years later, in early 1972, I traveled to Mississippi to register voters for the Democratic Party and the ill-fated campaign of George McGovern, who would get trounced by the soon to be greater ill-fated presidency of Richard Nixon.
I recall canvassing a construction site three miles outside of Oxford at the end of the day. I turned to walk to my car, only to walk right into the business end of a 2x4. As I lay doubled up on the ground, my blood mixing with the gravel, I looked up for a second to see a young white guy, probably around 25 or so, his face turned burning red as he struggled to spit out, “You f…... Yankee n….. lover.” It was hard not to see the rage-contorted face of that other young man eight years earlier.
As he stomped away, and I pushed myself up on all fours, pressing my shirt to the gash over my right eye, I can still recall my stifled grin, as I muttered to myself, “Yeah, seems to run in the family.”
The following night, nursing that nine-stitch gash over my right eye, I accompanied some fellow campaign workers to Oxford for a concert. It was the first time I ever saw John Prine and the only time I ever saw his best pal from Chicago, Steve Goodman, who was riding the coattails of his recently released song-which Arlo Guthrie is still living off of, “The City of New Orleans.” We ended up at the university promoter’s after party, a beautiful, yet fading, antebellum home, rented out to seven or eight other long-haired, starry-eyed idealists who believed we were going to save the world.
I still recall talking to Steve that night, him offering his premature condolences for a campaign that had less of a chance than his beloved Chicago Cubs winning the series. We talked of things we believed in, things that mattered, despite the odds or cost. To this day, I cannot read or think of Atticus’ comment to Scout, “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason not to try to win…,” without thinking of Goodman, Thomas Paine or Dr. King.
And so, to this Monday, the day we celebrate Dr. King’s legacy of equality and the judgment of persons, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Indeed, this Monday, as the harsh echoes of knee-jerk reaction and racial partisanship continue to reverberate and fester from places like Charlottesville where neo-Nazis marched in a “Unite the Right” parade chanting the old Nazi slogan of “blood and soil.”
But even more illustrative, these past weeks, the recent torrent surrounding Rep. Steve King, the nine-term Congressman from Iowa’s 4th Congressional District and former co-chairman of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Several weeks ago, in an interview with the New York Times, King stated on the record, consistent with many other statements he has uttered during his time in Congress, “White nationalist, white supremacist…how did that language become offensive?”
There is no way you can legitimize the phrase “white supremacist” without acknowledging it’s acceptance of one race being superior and supreme to others — and the fact that that’s racist. And yet, when several NBC commentators referred to King’s comments legitimizing “white supremacy” as racist, NBC News standards division sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to avoid characterizing King as such. Exacerbating their cowardice, after an immediate national journalist and media response condemning NBC for their spineless pusillanimity, NBC News standards then revised their directive to allow reference to King’s remarks as racist as long as it was in the context that “others hold that view.”
Maybe it’s just me but when did we get so damned timid? Once upon a time we fought wars and promoted policies for moral reasons. When the bullies tried to rule the block, we stood up and spoke out and yeah, took some lickins’ for the effort. We valued our neighbors and allies. We called a spade a spade, as my old man used to say, and we had some concept of this thing called democracy and a Constitution that extended equally to the folks in shotgun shacks and the ones living in the mansions up on the hill.
Shakespeare had it right all along — the fault lies not in our stars but ourselves. Indeed, how many of us remain silent, refusing to call out the bullies, the tyrants and the racists for who and what they are.
All that said, I return to that cold and blustery Wednesday night in 1964 and the man I met that evening that later led men and women into the angry maw of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday outside Selma, Alabama. And a slight, Iowa farm girl who bridled and courageously spoke her truth that same evening.
Yes, I recall. And I continue to have hope, if only because I know our mothers raised us better.
Dedicated to the Honorable Steven L. Perk, judge of the Superior Court, Orange County. (May 24, 1951-January 16, 2019). A man of uncommon wisdom, compassion and kindness. His never-ending pursuit of justice left the bench and the community he served far better from having been there.
Jon Alexander lives in Crescent City.