Why is this day so different from other federal holidays?

Twenty-five years after the establishment of the MLK Jr. Holiday, so many people remain hostile to it, seeing it as a boon to “a special interest,” namely the millions of people of color, people of faith, people who believe in America. The last state to actually recognize the day was New Hampshire – in 1999. That was 16 years after President Reagan, the godfather of modern Republicanism, signed a bill creating the holiday.

In the latest display of this hostility and, frankly, ignorance Maine’s governor, who obviously does not see the Tea Party movement as one of special interests even when many of his fellow Republicans do, said that the NAACP could “kiss my butt” when questioned about his intent to skip events marking the holiday. Only after a raft of criticism did Gov. Paul LePage attend a breakfast hosted by a Rotary Club chapter and a senior citizens group. I'm guessing that the NAACP did not accept his booty call.

Before giving a keynote address at the event he chose to grace, a black preacher, the Rev. Effie McClain, said: “Don’t beat the man continually for something that’s been said.” Maybe not “continually,” but he should not be let off the hook so easily, saying something offensive but meaningful for his core constituents and then having his press office issue statements that are less vitriolic and more civil.

Maine is not the most chocolate state in the Union, but the King holiday was never meant to be a federal version of such traditional black celebrations as Emancipation Day or Juneteenth. It was intended to focus attention on the principles King stood for – and that presumably the nation strives for. Even those Tea Baggers who probably drink coffee in the comfort of their homes and trucks. Reagan said: ”So each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the Commandments he believed in and sought to live every day: Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart, and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. And I just have to believe that all of us—if all of us, young and old, Republicans and Democrats, do all we can to live up to those Commandments, then we will see the day when Dr. King's dream comes true…”

To make the day palatable to some holdouts, including Arizona (which has flip-flopped over the years), it has become a day for renewing commitment to community service. In 1993, the federal government established the Corporation for National and Community Service to, among other things, coordinate King Day volunteerism opportunities across the country. The day is now the MLK Day of Service. Even the Obamas have taken a prominent role in promoting that aspect of the holiday. This year they volunteered to help fix up a public school building.

Now, I have no problem with that. King was not big on parties and accolades to mark his birthdate, which is actually January 15 but is observed as a federal holiday the third Monday in January. But this is my question, especially to the LePages of this country: Why aren’t Americans expected to volunteer to do good on Presidents Day or Memorial Day or Labor Day or Columbus Day? Why is this day so different from other federal holidays?

August 28, 2010

“This is our day, and we ain’t giving it away,” Rev. Al Sharpton declared Saturday at a rally and march that his National Action Network sponsored in Washington. Also prominent were leaders of the NAACP, the National Urban League, labor unions, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Council of Negro Women, Martin Luther King III and many of the usual allies on these occasions.

I heard no oratory that came even close to that heard at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963 – 47 years ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., dissatisfied with the reception to his prepared speech, riffed the “I Have a Dream” portion for which he and the day are known.

Not far from Sharpton’s rally at the nation’s oldest public high school, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, or where the marchers ended up, at the site of the proposed King Memorial, the conservative, Tea Party, TV and radio huckster, Glen Beck, was making a fool of himself and, as I saw it, of the thousands who came to join him at the Lincoln Memorial to “restore” America. What they heard – if they listened – was a lot of hot air about God and love. As if his and Sarah Palin’s Christian followers (yes, she was a keynote speaker and, yes, they specifically made this a Christian event rather than an interfaith one) have a monopoly on that. Theirs was essentially an evangelical revival meeting without the communion sacrament and the passing of the collection baskets. “America today begins to turn back to God,” Beck declared. “God is not done with you yet, and He’s not done with man’s freedom yet.” In many ways his rambling, unfocused “sermon” at what also was clearly a politically-motivated power play, reminded me of Louis Farrakhan’s during the Million Man March – but Farrakhan did pass the collection baskets.

Before an overwhelmingly white gathering, blacks were featured as singers and prayer deliverers and – shamelessly – a niece of Dr. King gave her own “I have a Dream” speech, mixing her uncle’s cadences and various scriptural references. Alveda King, whom some apparently thought was King’s daughter, said: “I have a dream that one day soon God’s agape love will transcend skin color and economic status and cause us to turn from moral turpitude. I have a dream that America will repent of the sin of racism and return to honor. I have a dream that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God. I have a dream that America will pray and God will forgive us our sins and revive us our land. On that day we will all be able to lift every voice and sing of the love and honor that God desires for all his children.”

At his rally, Sharpton said of Beck’s gathering: “They may have the Mall, but we’ve got the message. They may have the platform, but we have the dream.” Actually Alveda King’s dream seems to differ mainly with that of Sharpton and others of the traditional civil rights coalition on abortion rights, gay marriage and prayer in schools. She’s against the first two; for the last.

While the Beckians were talking of taking back America, Tamika Mallory, the executive director of the National Action Network, was urging her audience to “take back our communities one by one.”

“We must not wait for others to do for us what we can absolutely do for ourselves,” she said. Tea Party supporters would not disagree with that.

In his last book, Dr. King asked: “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?” August 28, 2010, seems to answer: both. One group was “Restoring Honor”; the other’s aim was to “Reclaim the Dream.” Both groups were motivated to get off their butts and do something. But obviously, with leaders whose motives and messages can be questioned by people from all political spectrums, there is a great desire to build “community” – whether around God or a Tea Party movement or what’s left of the old civil rights coalition – but getting there without recognition of that fact is chaotic and probably doomed to failure.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I think the Kennedys have it right. Rather than dwelling on the anniversaries of assassinations, they mark the birthdates of JFK and RFK with family rituals.

Having said that, I will share with you here some of the remarks I made at the 2004 birthdate observation of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The place was The Central Synagogue in midtown Manhattan, New York City. The hosts were Jews and blackfolks.

“When he was 18 years old, in 1947, he became his father’s assistant at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was ordained Feb. 25, 1948, a few weeks after he turned 19 and a few months before he graduated from Morehouse College.

“Fifty years ago, when King was 25, the civil rights revolution began in earnest when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that separate was not equal in the nation’s public school system and declared segregation unconstitutional. We as a nation are still grappling with the import of that decision. Even when I went to the ‘white’ high school, months after King’s death, my hometown was just getting around to implementing the Supreme Court’s decision of so long before to integrate ‘with all deliberate speed.’

“1954 was not only momentous because of the Brown decision, but that is also the year when MLK became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama – 25 years old! 14 months later he was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was leading the bus boycott that began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus. For the remainder of his life he was blessed and burdened by a role that, by Aug. 28, 1963, had made him as A. Phillip Randolph said in introducing him to an audience of hundreds of thousands in Washington, ‘the moral leader of our nation'….

“I come today not to presume what a living 75-year-old MLK would be doing other than going to church and enjoying birthday cake with his family. But I come to encourage all of us – myself included – to do as King did in his short life, which saw landmark litigation, marches, sit-ins, pray-ins, wade-ins, freedom rides, anti-war demonstrations.

“To me, it’s irrelevant whether King was a saint or not. He was a doer. When called upon to work to change what was wrong with the world, beginning in Montgomery, he took on the job, despite the sacrifices that entailed….

“Around Easter we Christians often sing, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ Of course, we were not. That was thousands of years ago. But we can update that question to ask not just where we were during various stages in the struggles for justice and peace, but where we are and where we will be.”