King Day

It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. 

In discussions with my students, I like to emphasize that memorials and holidays always represent three moments in time. The first is when the deed, or act, was done. The second is when the memorial or holiday was created. The third is now, when we look at the memorial or celebrate the day and, hopefully, look back on the act or deed. 

Dr. King's life began on January 15, 1929. This means he was a year and a half older than my dad. His pastoral life began two decades later, and his civil rights activism first drew attention with his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956. For a dozen years he was the most recognizable face of the Civil Rights Movement, which drew him good and ill will. He remains synonymous with the movement to most students. He was murdered in 1968. 

The fight over creating a holiday honoring him was waged in the 1980s. Congressional action to create the holiday met with significant resistance in Congress. The White House opposed it, too, though that same administration signed it into law and made the first proclamations about the day. Many states were reluctant to make the holiday a state holiday: New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina, apparently were the most significant holdouts. Since 2000 every state has recognized the day. 

Though that recognition looks different depending where one goes in the country. In my career in suburban Philadelphia, it's always been a holiday. A true day off. I know of many teachers, however, where today is a soft day off: students at home, teachers in inservice. By the way, Columbus Day has never been a holiday in my career. 

King is a challenging figure to teach in a high school classroom. Three events loom largest in his career or activism, and those three events rob the room of oxygen. It's hard to go beyond Montgomery, Birmingham, and March on Washington with King, which is a shame. In an advanced classroom, one might be able to get into the failure King met during the Albany campaign, but not always. Most classrooms don't have time to get into the challenging relationship King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference had with movements such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Also, teachers often don't have time to get into the difficulties King faced as he pivoted toward anti-poverty activism after the high water mark of the "I Have a Dream Speech." The nuances of King's approach, and the nuances of where and when he met with setbacks rather than successes, are easy to gloss over. And that's a shame, for we lose something significant when we have time only for the prominent moments. 

If King were alive today, he would be turning 92. Again, just a bit older than my father. This means that contemporaries of King are increasingly hard to find. I admittedly struggled when I was younger to take the holiday seriously: it was simply a break from school during a stressful time of year. As his times walking this earth recede into the past, it would seem appropriate for me to look for ways to teach the substantive nuance beneath the powerful symbolic surface of this man and his legacy. After all, the nuanced obstacles facing King in the 1950s and 1960s bear remarkable similarity to the terrain facing those who wish to make progress on racial justice today.