Imechangiwa na Kaleema Hasan Sumarey wa Detroit, USA.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, 42 Years Later.
I was sixteen years old the day Dr. King was murdered, sixteen years old. I was deeply involved in the radical black student movement and thus considered Dr. King's message of non-violence as wrong headed and too deeply embedded in religious rhetoric. I respected Dr. King very much, just did not at the time agree with his tactics. This was a condition of my political education, to love him, but not “follow him.” To defend him and join him, but not “follow him.” We live and learn.
You have to remember it was the sixties, I was sixteen and the urgency for black liberation was hot in my heart and blood. I wanted to be a free woman in all ways and did not want to feel like I was begging some benevolent white person for my freedom and the freedom of my people. It appeared to me that Dr. King’s message carried that signification.
On that April 1968 day I fully understood the signification of his message. I had been ill and stayed home from school and "organizing the student masses." When the report came on my little clock-radio, that Dr. King was dead, I cried for a long time. I had no inner power to stop my tears; it was if my own brother or father had been killed. I spoke these words aloud to myself, "if they will kill Dr. King, they will kill anybody." This was the one thought I had about his murder. I was sixteen and understood that “freedom wasn’t free.” And that if I was serious, I had to be willing if called upon, to give what all our great freedom fighters had given, their lives, personal safety, freedom and aspirations for fame, fortune and recognition.
It was at that moment I appreciated the importance of critical thinking or Malcolm’s revolution of the mind. This lesson, I might add, had also been drilled into me by my two Mississippi parents. "Always think for yourself." "Don't be an educated or any other type of fool." "Do what's right." "Watch the crowd you follow, same as you watch the ones you think you are better than."
It was at Dr. King’s death, that moment in 1968 that I knew I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by continuing to be as revolutionary as I could be. Given what I have learned over the years about my own personal shortcomings, failures and periods of deep sleep and disenchantment I continue to experience the realization that this ain't a friendly place, but that, that ain't not the point.
To struggle is the point. While there has been much demonizing of the sixties, for me, it was the best time to be a black teen-age girl/woman. It was the best time because everything and everyone was subject to examination, unlike today, where most things are to be accepted on face value or simply dismissed based on some infactual (I know its not a word) mind twisting wordology designed to invoid meaning through obtained through close inspection of concepts, ideological origins, purpose and usage, ownership, reality construction, meaning manufacturing, disinformation construction, knowledge for whom and what purpose. . .
The sixties and being sixteen taught me the value of struggle. I learn everyday the value of living for more than your own ambitions and ideas. Dr. King’s death on my generations watch, taught me the honor of taking the bullet (death, poverty, any number of assassin's tactics) that can cause a silent resurrection of people of good will all over the world to make sacrifices in order to make the world better, more equitable, more just, more compassionate, more safe, and more peaceful for the people now suffering from the greed, inhumanity and opportunism of the few. That bullet Dr. King took (and Malcolm and so many others) woke me up. And each time I doze off to sleep, I think of, dream of, and dream about Dr. King. And each time I wake from my sleeping I am refreshed, I am sixteen again, only these times, I pray 42years wiser.
Posted by kaleema hasan at 2:26 PM 1 comments
Labels: Remembering Dr. King and April 4 1968
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