In what surely was one of the highest quality King Day tributes in the land this weekend, yesterday’s birthday celebration at the Senior Center challengingly departed from the He’s a Jolly Good Fellow norm.
Whether by accident or design, the day-long program sought to probe deeper inside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., especially to the inner sanctum of his mind.
And it worked.
The intellectual stars of King Day were persons without major reputations.
They surprised and mesmerized with their oratory and thinking brilliantly — Dr. Scott Brown of UCLA, a history professor; Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, a writer and a professor at East Los Angeles College; Daniel Wayne Lee, activist, co-chair of Move to Amend, a coalition of national groups advocating a Constitutional amendment “limiting all of the rights to people and establishing separate rights for corporations,” and Mayor Mehaul O’Leary, of whom it was said he gave the speech of his life.
One Glowing Failure
The only glitch was a dandy — a spectacular gaffe by the King Day Committee, which forgot to promote its own program. The result: Sparse attendance.
Typically built around the familiar question, “Have We Achieved Dr. King’s Dream?,” and the conclusion was no.
Emphasizing the complexity Dr. King’s mission, Prof. Brown and Prof. Samad discouraged conventional thinking and took their audience on a longer, winding journey, that was an intricate blend of celebration, optimism and a cavalry call for far more commitment.
Dr. Brown, soberingly upbeat and scholarly, intrigued his listeners when he mentioned “the rewriting of Dr. King’s memory. We think about troubles that are going on in the street. There also is a companion struggle over history and memory,” he said in setting an esoteric tone.
“How we think about the past is as much a struggle over space as the spaces you are occupying today in a quest for social justice.”
An Authentic Advance
He said the carefully chosen placement of a Dr. King memorial on the Mall in Washington, “on a direct line between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, represents phenomenal progressive change.
“But I would like to complicate things. As Americans, we like to see progress as total and moving forward.
“I will argue here for a more complicated view here, one that opens the door for the principle of contradiction, that things can be progressive in some ways, but regressive in others.”
It is fine to live in the day and acknowledge powerful social and psychological improvements in American society, Prof. Brown said. But there is an analogous responsibility for those fighting for social justice.
He said that while it is “extremely important that national recognition embraces King” — he has had his own federal holiday the past three decades — “if we don’t continue to think about (and examine) the memory, some aspects of King’s history can get lost in the translation.”
Equally provocative in a different manner was Dr. Samad, who sat on a fascinating five-person panel that was to focus on progress in the 44 years since Dr. King’s assassination.
The five were as different in styles and content as the colors of their skin.
Drawing Distinctions
Dr. Samad, Mayor O’Leary and Mr. Lee went hard at their subjects, while former School Board member Saundra Davis was gentle and retired U.S. Rep. Diane Watson, artfully and thoroughly, given time constraints, recalled the significant touchstones of the Rosa Parks story. Predictably, she leveled a racism charge that threaded through her years in Congress, asserting that criticism of President Obama has been “unusually harsh” in the history of sitting Presidents.
However, she was not in the same realm of provocation as Dr. Samad, who started fast and never slowed.
Speaking second, after Ms. Watson, he promised that he would “try to bring a more realistic perspective.” Launching from the notion of Dr. King’s dream, Dr. Samad insisted that “King’s dream was not really a dream. He was trying to draw a context of what society was then and what it should be.”
Something Is Wrong
He said that “44 years after his death, it still pains Americans to have a conversation about King.”
Dr. Samad rebuked the many who have focused on what he suggested were lesser important 3_ minutes of Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speech, Aug. 28, 1963, instead of the other 14 minutes.
He said the Tea Party was the next racist movement in America.
“We have a tendency to romanticize King,” Dr. Samad said, “but he was neither a romantic or a dreamer.”
As the only non-black on the panel, Mayor O’Leary was confronted with the most delicate demand of the day — to be respectful, knowledgeable, sophisticated and most of all measured. He needed to choose an exact tone that was intellectually honest — neither too light nor too critical of anyone, entertaining and informative.
The Irishman who emigrated from Dublin a quarter-century ago in his early 20s opened with a touching story that won the audience for keeps. In New York not long after arriving in the country, he looked as if he were fishing for a chuckle when he said that on a day off from his job “I did what an Irish immigrant is supposed to do on his day off, look for an Irish pub.”
Lo, he appeared to have been foiled. Sign on the door said “Members Only.” When he entered, the drinking crowd was thrilled to hear his accent. They were spellbound for nearly an hour, until a new customer came in and took his seat at the bar. Instantly, the O’Leary crowd went silent, as if on a conductor’s command. The bartender approached the new customer quietly. He practically whispered in the hushed pub that it was for members only. Acceding to the bartender’s wishes, the black man stood and left without protest.
Whereupon Mayor O’Leary, who, these days, owns his own Irish pub, said, scoldingly to the bartender, “you didn’t ask me to leave, and I am not a member.”
He stood up, wheeled and walked out without uttering another word.
Although Mr. Lee was characterized as a college student, he is beyond the standard university student years in age, and proudly but modestly displayed the wisdom of an informed modern activist with the most left-wing talk of the afternoon.
To make a we-are-one type of statement, Mr. Lee declared that Dr. King’s dream “is intricately intertwined with the American dream, and no we have not achieved it.”
Richly involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement, he made several tart references to corporations and banks as the enemy of the majority of Americans. He said he was inspired when he went to Madison last year after a Republican legislature in Wisconsin enacted what he regarded as “anti-union” laws. He decried the recent government claim that “pretty nearly 50 percent of Americans live in poverty,” and he whacked the notion of voter IDs that a number of states have instituted because he fraudulent voting practices.
“We have tasted freedom, but we are not yet free,” Mr. Lee said.
Ms. Davis conceded that social progress has been made but charged that gender issues still plague the workplace, the focus of her professional life.
