The radical on the calendar

by Aaron Flicker

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is an unusual holiday, but one fitting for an unusual nation. Now that Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays effectively have been combined into the generic Presidents Day, America's only holiday devoted to a single person commemorates a private citizen. All the old politicians put together get the same treatment as a preacher from Atlanta.

But that preacher was a private citizen only in the narrowest sense of the term. Though never elected to office, he was a far more public figure than almost any politician, and did far more for the public good.

That is possible in America. Thus it is appropriate that our one holiday to remember a man commemorates an ostensibly private citizen, for it reminds us of the citizen's power to agitate, cajole and, ultimately, change, all without serving in government. And (in King's case) even with government actively working against him.

King was a citizen, not a saint. We know, among other things, that he was an adulterer. We know this because J. Edgar Hoover's FBI bugged his hotel rooms and leaked the tapes to reporters.

Those who think the lesson of the Jim Crow era is that "states' rights" are dangerous should remember that transgression and understand that the federal government has the same potential to violate human dignity.

But it would be too easy to explain the spying on King as the brutal excess of a depraved political appointee gone out of control. Hoover was that, but when he called King "the most dangerous Negro in America," he was not far out of touch with most white Americans of the time.

Consider what King did in 1955: He was a preacher in Montgomery, Ala., the rock bottom of the Deep South, when he told the white community: we are not out to end segregation. We don't even have to sit in the front of the bus if there are seats in the back. But it is stupid to make us stand when there are empty seats on the bus.

Many whites, and not just southern whites, reacted to this profoundly conservative message as though he was advocating a Bolshevik-like revolution. A bomb was thrown onto King's porch in 1956. Another was placed there in 1957, but did not explode.

So imagine the white reaction when federal agents escorted nine black students into Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., or when African-Americans conducted sit-ins at segregated lunch counters.

King was not the only civil rights leader of the time, or the first. But he was, then as now, the public face of the movement, and thus the greatest target of white resentment.

It was a role he occupied throughout his life. To white liberals, he was, as Michael Eric Tyson (a guest lecturer at OU tonight) wrote, the "poster boy for Safe Negro Leadership," at least compared to Malcolm X or Stoically Carmichael. But this "safe" leader, called an Uncle Tom by the likes of Malcolm X, was stoned in Chicago when he led demonstrations to open up the city's housing.

Safe? Tell it to the marchers who were beaten and tear-gassed on their way from Selma to Montgomery.

It was King who, long before protesting the Vietnam War, had a romance about it, who called the war racist, imperialist and immoral. And it was King who, inspired by democratic socialist ideas, tried to unite blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Appalachian whites for a Poor People's March on Washington.

King criticized capitalism, and in the last years of his life (which is to say, in his mid-to-late 30s), in Design's words "began to analyze politics and society in a demonstrably radical fashion."

That is true, but it is also true that he rose to prominence in a time and place where merely demanding fulfillment of the promises of the Constitution was "demonstrably radical." King may have journeyed to the political fringe, but it was a short trip in his America.

It seems less so now, but only because King, more than any other person, did the dirty work of dragging a nation toward fulfillment of its professed ideals. By moving to the political edge, King moved the middle at least far enough to make honoring a black civil rights leader with a holiday acceptable. Here is proof that we live in a great nation: we have a holiday to remember the Most Dangerous Negro in America.