MLK What A Man
January 16, 2006
I have to admit that I'm really pretty unfamiliar with Martin Luther King Jr's. life. Other than the things everyone knows, you know… the "I have a dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; that he was assassinated in Montgomery at the age of 39, that he was a civil rights leader, I don't know that much about him. Scott Johnson at Powerline has a really nice post excerpting some of MLK's speeches which really give a good sense of the courage and greatness of the man. Here's an excerpt from his letter from the Birmingham Jail responding to the white preachers of Birmingham who had counseled a slower approach:
I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people…
It's easy to look back on his life and assure ourselves that if we would have been there we would have been standing by his side. But I'm pretty sure it was hard even for him to stand there. That's what makes it courageous. Most of us are like the guys who missed the fight in the Henry V St. Crispins day speech:
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Marting Luther King Jr. wow what a man!