by Robert B. Carey, Ph.D.
Every celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day makes me wonder about the quality of American memory.
I served as an assistant pastor in Ebenezer Baptist Church from 1963 to the summer of 1965, when I left, first , to get married to Ms. Patricia Morris and then for the both of us to return to New York City where I finished the senior year of my M.Div. program and began working in East Harlem with the City Society of the United Methodist Church. We are still married and we still live in East Harlem.
Part of the difficulty in talking about Dr. King and those times is conveying to someone what that time felt like; what it meant to work in the South, to be arrested, to be held in a holding tank, to be surrounded by people with guns who could "loose" you and not be held accountable. That was the shadow side of the dream, but it was also an incredibly hopeful time, a time of awakening into a thinkable future. Dr. King's speech gave new meaning and luster--since considerably diminished--to the idea of the city on the hill, to America as a beloved community.
I first experienced the problem of remembering him when our children were growing up and had to do a report for school, so they interviewed my wife and me about our lives. Their great organizing question was:” When you were alive.......... " We have always treasured that moment, but it made very vivid the difference between the history that I had experienced and can conjure up even now--dinner at the King house just around the corner from where I lived, talking with Daddy and Mrs. King about programs for the young people at Ebenezer, prayer meetings, paying visits at Grady Hospital and on and on--and the history our children had to get at through texts, pictures, television news clips. All very vivid but just a tad distant. Someone else's history and historical moment.
And accompanying that and shadowing that growing sense of distance is the shaping of Dr. King into a "comfortable saint," the preacher of love and reconciliation. But what could be wrong with that?, someone says. The difficulty with that is what falls away in the American haste to "move on" to come to "closure" over things. What falls away was remembering that he was going deeper and farther at the time he was killed. He was beginning to link racial and economic justice, getting down to the deep disenfranchisement that haunts this country.
We get comfortable in our discussions of diversity at our peril and we bend, fatally, the trajectory of his thought If we settle for simply celebrating the fact that you look like you look and I look like I look--rather an acid way of thinking about diversity. But, alas, it can come to that and no more—everyone comfortably encased in agreed upon labels. But the deep question of Who Gets What? of Who is not at this table? gets too easily swept away when we settle for a group photo reading of diversity.
That is where the permanent radicalism of Dr. King's idea of reconciling love insists that we go. Everyday. All days. Not just his day.
Every celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day makes me wonder about the quality of American memory.
I served as an assistant pastor in Ebenezer Baptist Church from 1963 to the summer of 1965, when I left, first , to get married to Ms. Patricia Morris and then for the both of us to return to New York City where I finished the senior year of my M.Div. program and began working in East Harlem with the City Society of the United Methodist Church. We are still married and we still live in East Harlem.
Part of the difficulty in talking about Dr. King and those times is conveying to someone what that time felt like; what it meant to work in the South, to be arrested, to be held in a holding tank, to be surrounded by people with guns who could "loose" you and not be held accountable. That was the shadow side of the dream, but it was also an incredibly hopeful time, a time of awakening into a thinkable future. Dr. King's speech gave new meaning and luster--since considerably diminished--to the idea of the city on the hill, to America as a beloved community.
I first experienced the problem of remembering him when our children were growing up and had to do a report for school, so they interviewed my wife and me about our lives. Their great organizing question was:” When you were alive.......... " We have always treasured that moment, but it made very vivid the difference between the history that I had experienced and can conjure up even now--dinner at the King house just around the corner from where I lived, talking with Daddy and Mrs. King about programs for the young people at Ebenezer, prayer meetings, paying visits at Grady Hospital and on and on--and the history our children had to get at through texts, pictures, television news clips. All very vivid but just a tad distant. Someone else's history and historical moment.
And accompanying that and shadowing that growing sense of distance is the shaping of Dr. King into a "comfortable saint," the preacher of love and reconciliation. But what could be wrong with that?, someone says. The difficulty with that is what falls away in the American haste to "move on" to come to "closure" over things. What falls away was remembering that he was going deeper and farther at the time he was killed. He was beginning to link racial and economic justice, getting down to the deep disenfranchisement that haunts this country.
We get comfortable in our discussions of diversity at our peril and we bend, fatally, the trajectory of his thought If we settle for simply celebrating the fact that you look like you look and I look like I look--rather an acid way of thinking about diversity. But, alas, it can come to that and no more—everyone comfortably encased in agreed upon labels. But the deep question of Who Gets What? of Who is not at this table? gets too easily swept away when we settle for a group photo reading of diversity.
That is where the permanent radicalism of Dr. King's idea of reconciling love insists that we go. Everyday. All days. Not just his day.
Email: wardens@saintsaviour.org
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