I’d like to teach the world to sing

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Our paper, like most others, focused on the symbolic and the trivial — literally trivial — in covering the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

The holiday seems to be all about King's "dream" — or about the part of that vision that he described in the final paragraphs of the "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963. That final hortatory section is good stuff, of course, but if that's all we remember then it's hard to imagine why King was labeled a troublemaker and marked for assassination. Little children holding hands and joining in one voice singing isn't particularly controversial. Take away the passion and the moral force with which King delivered these words and you have what almost seems the sentiments of a beauty pageant interview or a Coca Cola commercial. And that's exactly how we seem to treat King's dream with our bland, inoffensive holiday commemorations.

The overall impression one gets from the holiday reports of King's life and mission is oddly truncated. It's like reading a history of World War II that ends on D-Day. King led a bus boycott, and then a march on Washington which culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That's all true, but the official holiday version just sort of stops there.

None of the reports that I watched or read over the holidays mentioned things like the Poor People's Campaign or any of the goals or concerns that occupied the final five years of King's life as he worked for what he called the "second phase" of the civil rights movement. Some of these reports mentioned that King spoke out for "peace," but who isn't, at least nominally, vaguely in favor of "peace"? I didn't hear much about the particulars of King's commitment to peace, such as his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

If you didn't know better, if all you knew about Martin Luther King Jr. came from these holiday reports, you'd think that King retired in 1964, his mission complete, his dream fully realized.

But he didn't retire, he was gunned down. And when that didn't work, he was beatified. That's always much more effective than assassination, or crucifixion.