A MESSAGE DELIVERED AT TAUNTON'S MARTIN LUTHER KING SERVICE, JANUARY 17, 2011

It is a real honor to be asked to speak to you this evening. The last time I addressed a Martin Luther King celebration was one of the first ones that the city held at City Hall in 1988 when I was a freshman city councilor. I also feel something of a personal stake in this holiday because at the time I was born, my father was assistant director of libraries and assistant professor of history and bibliography at Boston University and part of his job was helping young “Luther” as he called him locate books to be used in the writing of his doctoral dissertation. Dad knew that “Daddy King” was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist mega church in Atlanta and he always assumed that the quiet and studious lad he was assisting would return to Georgia to eventually take over his father’s pastorate. He never dreamed that a year later Luther would gain world fame organizing the Montgomery bus boycott. I also see Martin Luther King Day as celebrating the triumph of African-Americans and I enjoy these celebrations because in my study of history, I did considerable work in the political history of African-Americans and voting rights, as well as African history and African-American literature. I am disappointed that after all these years, I have yet to hear a recitation of Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” with its haunting refrain “Spicy grove and banyan tree, what is Africa to me?” Incidentally, both “Heritage” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” were first published in the Harlem Renaissance anthology The New Negro, whose 90th anniversary of publication we celebrate this year.
However, as we celebrate Martin Luther King and the realization of some of his goals, I wonder if we have really heard his message. While race no longer poses the obstacles that it once did, we have not reached a point where we judge “not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. It bothers me that today race still matters as much as it does. The election of the first African-American President and the unreasoned intensity of both his supporters and his opponents has almost exacerbated the situation rather than curing it. We also learned a few days ago in Tuscon, Arizona that we have not rid our society of assassinating madmen. I also believe that Dr. King would prefer that a reform of health care deal with the cost and the delivery of care and not a game of musical chairs with insurance companies and businesses. I think he would prefer to expand the dignity of employment opportunities rather than to expand the welfare state. I think he would prefer an education system that offers opportunities for achievement for all and is not fraught with unfunded mandates or with the overlooking of standards to gain union support. I think that a man who never involved himself with political parties or election campaigns would not countenance the vitriol that has marked partisan politics over the last fifteen years, with the silly impeachment of Bill Clinton, the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the election of George W. Bush, and this moronic “birther” movement that doesn’t realize that even if President Obama were born in Kenya, his American citizen mother would make him a “natural born American citizen” no matter where he was born. (Ask his opponent, John McCain, for whom I voted, who was born in Panama).
We no longer have a society with Bull Connor turning a hose on people of color or literacy tests asking the number of bubbles in a bar of soap of people whose grandfathers were not voters, the horrific origins of the more benign term of legal exemption known as “grandfathering.” However, we are far from realizing the dream that Dr. King proclaimed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963 or from the “Promised Land” of which he preached the night before his death. It is not just a function of partisan politics and Alaskan moose hunters versus Chicago gang bangers. It is a function of human nature. You see, it is not Dr. King’s legal and political substance that matters. It is his personal example of universal love and peace as learned from the Mahatma Ghandi that we need to live and that seems to elude us. You people who have cared enough to attend a Martin Luther King service probably get it. However, it is the duty of all of us to leave here and teach that to the rest of the world.