MLK’s Lessons Elude Letter-writer

by Damon Krane

 

Recently, we observed a day in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave his life struggling for social justice and left behind many valuable lessons.  Apparently, these lessons have been lost on the writer of “Culture pushes too hard for acceptance” in last Wednesday’s newspaper.

Drawing a connection between the recent beatings of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Athens and attempts to force the Boy Scouts to admit homosexuals, he writes, “Change happens slowly. If the gay community cannot understand this, more people will get hurt.”

I am not sure whether the writer is a well-meaning moderate who simply fails to recognize the suffering of people devalued because of their sexuality, or whether he is an avid bigot expressing thinly veiled threats against those in the LGBT community who aren’t content to be “good Negroes,” so to speak. In either case, he would do well to revisit King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

“Frankly,” King wrote, “I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation ... But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

Similarly, those who are vulnerable to beatings and lynching because of their sexuality; who are told they are unnatural and filthy; who are consequently plagued by disproportionately high suicide rates; who are by law forbidden to marry their partner and by custom the subject of endless ridicule and abuse... they too find it difficult to wait.

To King, those who have not had to endure the oppression in question have no right to “set the timetable for another [person’s] freedom.”  “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over,” he wrote.  And besides, “the time is always ripe to do right.”

Perhaps even more fundamental, King pointed out that change does not simply take time.  “Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively ...  Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability, it comes through tireless effort.”

King understood quite well what an ex-slave and prominent Abolitionist expressed a hundred years earlier.  “If there is no struggle,” observed Frederick Douglass, “there is no progress.  Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men [and women] who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.  This struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one… But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did, and it never will.”

Like the writer, King’s critics argued that his “actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence.”

King rightly dismissed this argument as simple victim blaming.  Because people struggling for freedom are met with the violence of those who wish to keep them oppressed, does that mean that they should instead accept the violence they often face no matter what they are doing?  I hate to break the news to you, Brian, but LGBT people were being regularly beaten (and worse) long before they tried to integrate the Boy Scouts.

In closing his letter, King made another crucial point.  Because our lives are intertwined in “an inescapable network of mutuality... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  Or, in the words of the labor movement, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

King’s words are still relevant today for African Americans, but they are just as relevant to other oppressed people.  In his letter, King drew connections between the Civil Rights movement and people struggling against colonial domination in the Third World.  Later, he would draw a parallel between African Americans and workers of every color who struggle against their exploitation at the hands of those who own the means of production.

While King’s words were remarkably eloquent, his ideas were far from original.  You can find variants of his most famous quotes expressed by workers, women, homosexual people and people of color who have participated in every movement for social justice that we know of, before and after King’s time.  That is because these struggles all teach some of the same key lessons:  Time itself heals no wounds.  Our hope lies in making the suffering of anyone the concern of everyone, and in the militant struggle for a better world.

In light of recent and past hate crimes in this community (and let’s not forget that rape is also a hate crime), LGBT people struggling to change the heterosexist culture that breeds physical assault deserve the active support of everyone in Athens.  Thirty-four years after King’s death, the time to struggle for a better world is still right now.

 

—Damon Krane

dk338199@ohio.edu