Carol Fisher-Linn
MLK – a simple man – a legend. Or was he?
Greatness of persons can be subjective. This past week, America had the sad duty of burying James Earl Carter, “Jimmy,” our 39th President of the United States. He was a great man … in many eyes. Yet, there are those who thought his presidency was lacking, perhaps even disastrous.
career as a civil rights leader when Emmett Till was brutally murdered in rural
Mississippi on Aug. 28, 1955.Like most Americans, King was appalled by the
news that Till, a Northern Black teenager visiting relatives in the Deep South,
was killed by two white men who accused him of making blatant advances on
a white woman at work in a grocery store.” Till was 14 (right).
Another controversial man, whom we honor nationally on the third Monday of each January (this year falling on this coming Monday, January 20), is Martin Luther King, Jr. Born in 1929, in the deep south five years after and 158 miles away from Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, MLK too, was a great man … in many eyes. Unlike Carter, he was not born into poverty, even though he was a black child raised in the segregated Jim Crow south. Please, allow me to explain as simply as I can what Jim Crow in the south means.
The system was established, practiced, and adhered to faithfully by all persons and authorities after the Civil War through about 1968 under the belief that white people were superior in all ways including intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior. Any sexual relations between the races would create a mongrel race which would destroy America. Rules concerning drinking out of water fountains, seating in public, looking at a white woman “disrespectfully” or who has the right of way at intersections (whites), etc., were punished, generally with violence. Violence was acceptable to keep the blacks at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Any rules disregarded or broken could lead to incarceration, beatings, or lynching, which were cheap entertainment for the whites while defending white domination. https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/what.htm
Born to educated parents with a long history of family pastors of the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, Martin attended segregated public schools, graduated at 15, and received various degrees including a theological degree by 1951 and his doctorate from Boston University by 1955 where he met his future wife, Coretta Scott. Together, they raised two sons and two daughters. Growing up in the segregated south, he learned from a young age about the plight of his people. He was taught about the 1919 Red Summer where race riots were carried on in city after city across mainly the American South where 77 people were lynched and fourteen publicly burned, eleven of them burned alive. He learned about the 1921 Tulsa Massacre where white armed attackers, unprovoked, killed 38 residents and burned more than 35 blocks of homes and businesses, rendering unrecoverable one of the wealthiest black neighborhoods in the US at the time, known as “Black Wall Street.”
“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a 26-year-old Baptist minister at the cusp of his career as a civil rights leader when Emmett Till was brutally murdered in rural Mississippi on Aug. 28, 1955. Like most Americans, King was appalled by the news that Till, a Northern Black teenager visiting relatives in the Deep South, was killed by two white men who accused him of making blatant advances on a white woman at work in a grocery store.” (Valencia County News Bulletin, May 2018- Look for Emmett Till – Wikipedia.) He was 14.
Is it any wonder that this peace-loving human being, who along with others like him, must have been stretched beyond all human endurance … yet, he still had the hope and audacity to have a dream? The Till murder had an enormous impact on Dr. King and the civil rights movement. Did he seek vengeance and retribution? He believed that wasn’t the answer even though hundreds of lynchings of blacks took place in the south for all the years of his life. Both “morally and practically” committed to nonviolence, King believed that “the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” (King, Stride, 79; Papers 5:422).
In March 2022, 67 years after the death of Emmett Till, The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which makes lynching a federal hate crime, was enacted. Here’s the sad news – Two hundred (200!) anti-lynching laws had been proposed before this act finally became law. What a sad testimonial to American democracy.
From the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Our Founding Fathers also had a dream. Let’s all pay homage to those words as we celebrate this undeniably great man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.