Humans tend to do a funny thing with history. They forget how bad it was, look at how bad they think it is and convince themselves that they were better off before. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of recent history.
People forget that just 50 years ago, this country was a completely different place. We think of the 1950s and think of “Happy Days,” the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and cars with tail fins.
We don’t think about armed soldiers from the 101st Airborne escorting nine students to an American public high school because the local authorities simply refuse to protect them from a violent mob. We don’t think about the founding of a state-sponsored spy agency called the Sovereignty Commission. We don’t think about a tired seamstress being arrested for not giving up her bus seat for no reason other than she wasn’t the preferred race. Bear in mind, these things didn’t happen in Iraq or North Korea. They happened in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. Right here in the good old U.S. of A.
We don’t think about these things because they’re not pleasant to think about. They don’t make us feel good about ourselves. But the object of history is not to make you feel good about yourself. That is the object of therapy.
Into this unpleasant state of affairs stepped a young preacher who believed that this country should be what it advertised itself to be. If we were going to claim to be the defender of democracy abroad, then we should practice it at home. If the United States claimed to be a nation founded upon the principle “that all men are created equal,” then it should not be a nation with second class citizens.
According to King, an American should not be denied the right to vote because of his or her race. An American should not be denied admission to a public university because of his or her race. An American should not have to search high and low for a “Colored Only” motel when he or she travels.
An American should not, as Dr. Martin Luther King put it, have to “go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are ‘less than;’ you are not ‘equal to.'” This was the reality facing thousands of people in this country less than a lifetime ago.
King did not single-handedly end legal segregation in this country. The contributions of thousands of people of all races and backgrounds accomplished that. But King’s leadership and articulation nurtured a revolution, and also prevented a bloodbath.
It would have been very easy for Dr. King and others to suggest an armed revolt. King could have said “Let us arm ourselves, take by force what the white man denies us, fight fire with fire and repay blood for blood.” And in doing so, he would have sparked a nightmare we might still be in the middle of.
King instead chose to heed the advice of a young preacher/carpenter who once said, “Love your enemies; bless them that curse you.”
So we now come to the question why a holiday honoring King is necessary. We do not simply celebrate a “black” holiday-we celebrate being Americans. We celebrate a man who said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and went out to do something about it.
More than that, though, we celebrate people who cared enough about this country to try and right what was wrong with it without trying to destroy it in the process. We celebrate the courage of those who stood up and said, “I am an American; this is my country too. I helped build it. I helped defend it. I count. I will be heard. I will no longer tolerate the denial of God-given and constitutional rights to myself, my family or my countrymen.”
Last but not least, we celebrate what is possible when we dare to “have a dream.”
Tony Odom is a graduate student in the history department.