To honor Martin Luther King Jr., fight injustice with love
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Version 0 of 1. BEFORE THE Internet, there was the almanac. Every home seemed to have one of those yearly publications packed with all the wondrous data you could ever want to peruse: baseball standings, biographies of all the presidents, principal products of Portugal. And there, on one page (perhaps you’d never noticed it before), a column of numbers titled simply “Lynchings.” To many kids growing up in the 1940s, it was chilling to come across that word. Lynching was what sometimes happened to cattle rustlers in Hollywood Westerns, right? Was it still happening in America? That was something a lot of parents didn’t want to talk about. In fact, much of the country didn’t want to talk about lynching, or poll taxes, or segregated buses and schools, or any of the many other instruments of exclusion and repression that characterized life for people of color in the United States. Racism was understood by some as an active, aggressive form of persecution, but many minimized it as just a casual disdain for certain people or simply an acquiescence in some of the cruel but fenced-off racial customs of the American South — as with, say, the shunning of a black cadet at a national institution such as West Point by the entire corps. But lynching was there in the bottom circle of the racial inferno, and every once in a while, a reporter would witness one of these spectacles and write the story in hideous detail, and the country would turn away revolted, and then the U.S. Senate would refuse to do anything about it because the Senate was dominated by Southerners. And so it went. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did not come on this scene and suddenly end all the injustice. There were many martyrs before him, and powerful voices for justice — some of the bravest people in the country. And their work remains unfinished. But he took the lead in his day — partly because he came to national prominence at the right time but also because he had an essential insight. He knew that what caused human beings to behave like beasts could be best described in two words: fear and hate. And in opposition to these four-letter words, he offered one of his own: love. It was not a weak and yielding love. It was the sort preached by Dr. King’s comrades in the cause, especially John Lewis, who could proclaim his love for the policeman who was beating him for asserting his rights as an American. It was a willingness to agitate and to counter one’s enemies with the only force that provided any hope of converting them into friends, and thus give the country a greater understanding of our common humanity, which would one day be the true basis for justice and equality. But still . . . last week, three alleged members of a white-supremacist group were arrested on firearms and other charges amid fears that such extremists might provoke violence at a gun-rights rally scheduled to be held in Richmond on Monday. “For still our ancient foe, doth seek to work us woe,” Dr. King’s namesake wrote nearly five centuries ago, “His craft and pow’r are great, and, armed with cruel hate,/On earth is not his equal.” Martin Luther’s words in that hymn described satanic evil, unconquerable by humanity alone. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life was given over to his faith that people of all kinds and beliefs could one day match and defeat that power. Read more: Colbert I. King: The values preached by Martin Luther King Jr. need rediscovering in 2020 Michael Gerson: Can hate drive out hate? MLK Jr. would disagree. The Post’s View: We need Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic vision even more now David Von Drehle: We honor Martin Luther King Jr. not for his victories but for his vision Colbert I. King: Martin Luther King Jr. would be outraged Jonathan Capehart: MLK at 90: An urgent call to action |