MLK Jr Is My Inspiration

Or How My Childhood Refusal to Go to Bed Informed My Adult Activism

I was nine years old.

Back when we had money, my Mom and Dad had a ritual with me. Every Easter, the three of us would head to Wanamaker’s in King of Prussia to pick out my outfit. (I miss Wanamaker’s - but I digress.) As the eldest of four kids, I didn’t get a lot of alone time with my parents so this was special - in no small part because we ended the evening with hot fudge sundaes in the store’s restaurant.

This particular year, we were on our way home when WFLN interrupted its standard classical music with breaking news.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot in Memphis.

I remember my mother’s sharp intake of breath. But mostly I remember the G-force as my father pushed the accelerator to the floor.

We got home. My Dad ran into the living room to turn on the TV. Mom followed. And I followed, too, having been forgotten in the crisis.

I was one of those children who was certain that all the best things happened after I was sent to bed. So I resisted. Most of the time, I had to be threatened with dire consequences before I would go to bed.

This night, my parents forgot to send me to bed. So I didn’t go. I stayed up and stayed quiet and watched the TV coverage.

I knew who Martin Luther King, Jr. was and why he was important - the benefits of growing up with well-educated, liberal-minded parents. But I learned much more that evening.

The next day, I began to read the newspaper on a regular basis.

That event - the assassination of Dr King - was the beginning of my political consciousness. It was unsophisticated, as one would expect from a nine-year-old child. But the seed had been planted.

Let’s move forward a few years to my junior year in high school.

It was spring, near the end of the school year. The final major assignment in my Humanities class was a critical analysis. The topic I was assigned was to compare and contrast Dr King with Saint Thomas Beckett in T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder In the Cathedral.

Short version - both men were thorns in the side of their nation’s leaders. Both got in major trouble for living their convictions. And both men knew they were going to die, almost to the hour.

At the time, Mom was working on her Master’s degree at Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey). She would drive to Trenton after school from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, once a week to attend class. I went with her one week to use the college’s library.

For several hours, I immersed myself in Dr. King’s writings. I already knew about the “I Have A Dream” speech. But it was his other works that captivated me. I was particularly taken with his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. It was there I found this quotation, would stopped me dead in my tracks.

“If a man has not found something he will die for, he is not fit to live.”

Damn.

That quotation has become part of me. I think of it daily and attempt to live my life by that philosophy.

And yes, I have found something I will die for - my country. More specifically, my country as a democracy - the democracy that is threatened by forces from the right that cannot abide the thought of a multi-racial society, aided and abetted by the former occupant of the White House and his acolytes in the US Senate and House of Representatives, and in state legislatures and state houses across the country.

Today, we honor Dr. King. Let us take his sacrifice as inspiration for our own. Let us all be “fit to live.”

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Postscript: Several years ago, a friend told me that I would not fully understand Dr. King if I didn’t read his final book, Where Do We Go from Here? He was right.