68 - Martin's Death, and Ours?

Martin's Death, and Ours?

By Michael Eric Dyson

THE death of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, when I was nine years old, was the death of my innocence. Of all the events that have shaken my world, few have conspired so radically to alter the shape and content of my awareness as this event. Writ large on my mind, it came as a verdict: "You are no longer innocent, you are condemned to awareness."

I was sitting on the living room floor watching television, when suddenly a news bulletin interrupted the regular program. The newsman's voice, usually a lesson in impeccable cadence and inflection, now dragged in somber monotone. "Martin Luther King, Jr., has just been shot in Memphis, Tennessee," he managed. Behind me, sitting in his favorite chair, my father offered a seemingly involuntary response. His hurting "humh" summed up the whole matter in one word. Ejaculated in the midst of strained disbelief and shock, that "humh" became an unknowing utterance of eventual grief. My father's reaction gathered into its dismal tone the horror black America felt about the loss of this black prophet. King's mellifluous baritone voice was stilled by a piece of metal which travelled with ungodly speed and precision to explode its message of death inside his neck.

After a few words by the newsman suggesting that Martin was not dead, but seriously wounded, that he was shot on a hotel balcony (an unholy shrine to the senseless murder of our dreams and hopes), the television permitted us to hear what became Martin's last speech. "I just want to do God's will," King declared. "And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've se-e-en the promised land." The audience, now sensing the imminent climax of Martin's powerful speech, swelled its chorus of vocal support, perforating his oration with shouts of "yes sir, oh yes!, go ahead, yes doctor." "And I'm happy tonight," Martin continued, he and his audience now united in a spiritual, almost mystical bond. "I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.' "

The audience on film, and in my heart, responded with thunderous applause to this powerfully persuasive ebony seer whose words were crammed with the pathos and poetry of the black American experience. After showing the film, the television resumed its regular program, but my attention had been completely diverted. I had been electrified. Even

Michael Dyson, a Baptist minister, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion and assistant master of Mathey College, Princeton University.

69 - Martin's Death, and Ours?

then, the hair on my limbs stood at attention when that voice like a trumpet blew a clarion call for freedom. His charisma was intoxicating, and I immediately felt fraternal sympathy and instant allegiance to the cause he so eloquently articulated. But, in a matter of moments, the newsman again broke faith with the printed program to announce the final tragedy: "Martin Luther King, Jr., has been assassinated at thirty-nine years old."

Martin's death was the traumatic climax to a period of harsh history for black Americans, especially in my birthplace, the alternately famed and infamous "Motor City," Detroit. The riot of the summer of '67 undermined the fragile peace that had marked the relationship between the black and white communities, a microcosmic reflection of the Kerner Commission's incisive report on America's divided society, one black, one white. Already sensitive to the tension and turmoil of the riot, Martin's death brought into sharp focus the repulsive reality whose bare outline had taken form for me in the anarchy of the riot: race is explosive, volatile in America. My cocoon was assaulted, and the butterfly of consciousness yanked from its sleepy rest in innocence. It was a painful awakening, but I was not alone in it. The same thing is suffered by all black people at one time or another.

Painful awakening is being forced upon us again, now in 1988, exactly twenty years since Martin's assassination. In the interval between King's death and the current conspicuous reappearance of racism of the last few years (Howard Beach, the Citadel, Forsyth County), a subversive shift in the modus operandi of American racism has taken place. Often, no longer able to express racial hatred openly through barbaric deeds, racists have found more subtle and insidious forms of expression. What's more, in a cruelly ironic twist, the success of the civil rights movement has been turned in on itself. An unfortunate consequence of the civil rights movement's commitment to vanquish every visible sign of racism is that racism has gone underground. A subterranean network of slippery attitudes, ambiguous actions, and unfixed, equivocal meanings, which can accommodate racist intent and concomitantly permit the semblance of racial fairness, operates in most segments of American society. Implicit in this is a colossal effort to deny racism's existence. Incidents like Howard Beach are explained away, on the basis of statistical infrequency, as aberrations from the norm of racial tranquility. Since little "concrete" evidence can be evinced to substantiate its existence, racism is supposed to be gone. Out of sight, out of mind. The whole matter is now ensconced in an obfuscating demand to provide '60s style proof for '80s style racism.

In times like these, what can Martin's death mean for us? The brilliant and beautiful dream he articulated with intelligent fire was almost dead before he was, maimed by the intransigent refusal of America to see his vision and heed his voice. And while the King holiday is extremely important, one can almost hear Martin warning us from his grave not to be seduced by the display of unity that his birthday

70 - Martin's Death, and Ours?

celebration rallies, when for the rest of the year the acrimonious legacy of racial bigotry continues to pollute the air of common life in America. Martin understood that, often, the only reward for speaking the truth unadorned, for voicing the uncomfortable reality and painting the plain picture, is a bullet. But he also understood that his death could be redemptive only if it forced our nation to comprehend the idiocy of racial hatred, and only if it brought the liberation of Americans, black and white, one day nearer. Given our present circumstances, however, Martin's death is in danger of being banalized, flattened out by the forces of historical regression in regard to race.

The only way Martin's death can be rescued from the infamy of national neglect is for us to engage in the moral action of occupying our living, doing, and thinking with the goals and purposes for which he sacrificed his life. We must balance our quotidian quest for peace and sanity with the vibrant and persistent pursuit of cosmic love and justice. Otherwise, we subvert the redemptive meaning Martin believed could come with the loss of his life-and his death will become ours.