Thoughts on MLK Day

It has been an odd experience reading Ta Nehisi Coates's manifesto, "Between the World and Me," over this Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. Coates is a Malcolm X guy, son of a Black Panther organizer, survivor of countless acts of routine violence growing up in the mean streets of West Baltimore. He was the dear friend of an exemplary born-again Christian classmate senselessly murdered by police, and is the father of a teen-aged son about whom he shares his wholly understandable anxieties. The legacy of King's nonviolent, turn-the-other-cheek movement holds little appeal for this street-toughened polemicist. And as I read his unblinking historical appraisal of enslavement's legacy, relive his anecdotes of a community bereft of resources, still struggling under the lash of incarceration, violence both criminal and official, and of more subtle forms of racism alongside the grotesqueries of Obama-hatred and the revival of blackface stereotypes--I see his point.

And yet, unlike Coates, I am unwilling to surrender the patrimony of King's achievements, limited as they may now seem. Because our world did change as a result of the marches, beatings, murders, indignities of all sorts heaped on King and his followers. King's extraordinary dignity in the face of such brutalities changed forever the way white Americans thought about African-Americans, while the formal recognitions encoded in the Civil Rights laws built the platform on which Coates and many others, including King himself, have stood to issue their demands for a more complete justice. But I would go a step further.

Coates is a self-identified atheist whose god is history. Under the tutelage of his father, a research librarian, archivist, and publisher of African diaspora literature, Coates has mastered a vast canon of sources. He knows both the sordid and triumphant dimensions of the struggle African-descended peoples have engaged in for over 400 years. And that history is both his signpost and the domain in which he locates his goal, his Promised Land.

King's vision, though hardly uninformed by history, was in its essence a religious one. The gospel anthems that accompanied his movement were not decorative--they expressed the theory that informed the praxis of sit-ins and protest marches. King was more inspired by the Hebrew prophets than by Garvey or DuBois, Toussaint Louverture or Denmark Vesey. His vision of liberation is colored from start to finish by the transcendence of salvation, an overcoming that is part Hegelian Aufhebung but more immediately drawn from the Christian gospel of death and resurrection. This vision, both worldly and otherworldly, is most poignant in King's last speech in Memphis, where he speaks of having "been to the mountain and seen the Promised Land," speaks as Moses, knowing he may not cross over the Jordan but believing his people will. Without that prophetic, luminous, and God-inspired vision, King would still have been a political leader, a great one, but not the visionary  we honor today.

The older I get, the more I see the wisdom of his example. Liberation is the goal, but neither Coates nor I will live to reach that Promised Land. We can work toward it in whatever ways we can, and that working-toward is our salvation. It's the Prize Dr. King tells us to keep our eyes on. It's where we discover God.