Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King – a whitewash can be right

Question: what do Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and Martin Luther King Jr have in common? Answer: both are suspected of having plagiarised their PhD theses. A 1980s committee of investigation went further, in the case of MLK, and put on record that his doctorate was undeserved. Had young Martin's examiners failed his thesis, as they should have done, and drummed him out of Boston University in disgrace, he could have gone on to dream all he wanted – and posterity would, for the larger part, never have heard of him.

King died, by a still-mysterious assassin's hand, 43 years ago today. And the dream he proclaimed on 28 August 1963 has gone some way to being realised, with an African American in the White House. It should be a time of rejoicing.

It isn't. It's a time of ignominious squabbling. Paul Greengrass, the British film director, has been rudely decommissioned by Universal Studios from doing a big budget biopic of King after protest from the family. The Kings' objections have been made public by Andrew Young – a black city mayor and comrade of King in the 1960s. Having pored over the script, these defenders of "the legacy" determined that Greengrass was intending to concentrate overly on "trivia".

The PhD jiggery-pokery is one such trivial thing. Weightier, probably, is the evidence of the microphones the odious J Edgar Hoover had the FBI put under MLK's bedsprings as he lodged in motels in his civil rights marches across America. There were, as the biographer David Garrow has established, flagrant infidelities. Hoover, one is told, circulated recordings of the black leader's "catting around" in his bizarre quest to prove that he was a communist stooge.

The family would rather Greengrass had followed the line of Coretta King's wifely My Life With Martin Luther King Jr. Or, as Young put it, they wanted "someone to do with Martin Luther King what Sir Richard Attenborough did with Gandhi". Steven Spielberg is said to be willing to be that someone.

Meanwhile the latest biography of Gandhi, by Joseph Lelyveld, has been denounced in India and banned in Gujarat (Gandhi's home state) for delving into his sexual tastes. And the History Channel had commissioned a mini-series, The Kennedys, due to start this week; but at the last minute it has caved into pressure on grounds of too much attention to "trivia' – sex, drugs, mafiosi. The series was, it has said, "not fit for the History Channel" (not history?).

This nervousness about how to square biography with hagiography focuses attention on the primary problem in all commemoration of the great and the good. On one side are those like Thomas Carlyle, who was convinced that humans needed icons to hold them together as communities. In a godless age the iconic slot is filled by biography of great men – and, if necessary, bucketfuls of whitewash.

There is an alternative doctrine more popular today – what one might call the blackwash biography. It takes as its premise the belief that only after death, when libel no longer threatens, can the truth be told. Blackwash justifies itself in ways that can be worthy or prurient. The worthy justification is that the public does not have to be deluded to make correct judgments. There are, however, occasional practical considerations that justify pussy-footing, even suppression. During the Monica Lewinsky feeding frenzy Bill Clinton was neutered, incapable of carrying out the duties of office with the kerfuffle about stains on blue dresses and the exact configuration of the presidential penis.

It might have been disastrously distracting if, during the Cuban missile crisis, it had been known the Kennedy brothers were passing Marilyn Monroe round between them. The great affairs of the world are more important than such trivia. MLK's vision has not yet been entirely fulfilled. Until it is his legacy must be protected, as was the Kennedys' public reputation. If that requires a bucketful of whitewash, so be it. The continuing struggle for civil rights is non-trivial.

Nonetheless, I would much rather see Greengrass's film than Spielberg's. Wouldn't you?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/04/martin-luther-king-film-whitewash


The Root: After King's Death, His Work Still Goes On

Seventeen years ago, I was an organizer in Mississippi. And I was scared.

We were planning a march to stop the governor from turning a public, historically black university, Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, into a prison. Byron De La Beckwith had just been put in prison for killing Medgar Evers — the NAACP's field secretary in Mississippi. It was 30 years too late, but the Ku Klux Klan was still enraged that one of their own had been sentenced to prison for killing a black man. They threatened to kill me or one of the other organizers in retaliation.

As the march approached, the threats became more numerous and specific. One night, in the cauldron of that long moment, I remembered something my parents often told me as a child: "We all get scared. The question, son, is how you respond. If you act in response to your fears, you are a coward. If you act in spite of your fears, you are courageous."

I took their words to heart. I got re-focused, and I felt re-energized. The march went forward — much larger than planned. And, ultimately, the school was saved.

Many of us go through life believing America's age of martyrs ended when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The reality, as the shooting massacre that killed U.S. District Judge John Roll and injured Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords reminded us, is there is a reason we still take the threat of politically motivated violence seriously. The pace may have slowed, but assassinations still happen in America.

On the 17th of January, a little more than a week after the tragedies in Arizona, police in Spokane, Wash., stopped a similarly heinous plot to kill those marching with the NAACP to commemorate the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As police would later determine, 36-year-old Kevin Harpham allegedly dropped a backpack on a bench in downtown Spokane. The pack contained a sophisticated homemade bomb filled with shrapnel dipped in cyanide. It was set to explode just as hundreds of marchers would be going by.

Thankfully, a sharp-eyed cleanup-crew member spotted the bomb just moments before the crowds reached the bench, and a bomb squad acted quickly to defuse it.

The attempted bombing was one of several threats targeted at civil and human rights activists in the past 12 months. These include dozens of threats received by NAACP staff and volunteers in the days after we called on the Tea Party to police racist rhetoric at their rallies. In one such incident a caller threatened to make "the streets run red" with our blood. It came less than a month after police shot an armor-clad gunman on his way to attack the ACLU and the Tides Foundation.

At bottom, while the location and the tactics change, the intent of these threats and attacks is always the same: to intimidate, to quell, to silence, to scare.

For 102 years, the parents and elders in the NAACP have responded to numerous threats against and assassinations of our leaders by quietly teaching our young people how to identify their fear, name it and keep on in spite of it.

It is a history that reaches all the way back to the freedmen and freedwomen who got us going during the early, blood-soaked days of Jim Crow. It is the tradition of cultivating young leaders in which Dr. King was raised. And it is this tradition, perhaps more than anything else, that allows us to keep bending the moral arc of this country toward justice.

Today is the anniversary of King's assassination, and the NAACP is leading more than 40 actions across the country. Each is part of the "We Are One" effort to draw attention to the spate of attacks on basic civil rights being committed by Tea Party-backed politicians in dozens of states.

These include attacks on everything from the right to organize to equal opportunity in education to a woman's right to choose to the rights of immigrants to be treated with basic dignity and respect. And while the Tea Party has become more inclusive in recent months, their rhetoric still often encourages the worst in those who aim to see our country move backward, not forward.

We stand up today. We will not be intimidated, we will not be silenced, and we will fight anyone who attempts to strip away the rights of our fellow Americans until we win. It is this tradition of actively defending the rights and freedoms of all Americans that our tradition of raising courageous children ultimately protects.

And that is why yesterday, I went to Spokane to join local NAACP leaders as they held their first march since the averted bombing.

This time there was one difference: We were not there to commemorate the legacy of Dr. King. We were there to continue it.

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/04/135109941/the-root-after-kings-death-his-work-still-goes-on

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