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Martin Luther King Jr.

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from: Ted Widmer
to: Debra Dickerson

Courting Disaster

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2002, at 12:26 PM ET

Who are these people?

This week's reading.

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Dear Debra,

I enjoyed your first line. I guess I am a racist and an ageist—I don't like old white people telling me what to think. Not that Frady's that old or I'm that young. Some people might find us dead ringers, except that I haven't worn suspenders since my brief, ill-advised stint as a Chippendale dancer. But let's not talk about that.

Unfortunately for our editor and readers, I agree with just about every point you made. I try not to have too many heroes, but if you've got to choose one, this guy is about as close as you can get.

To be honest, I'm getting more interested in King the more I learn about him. I grew up with a healthy respect, and one of my earlier childhood memories is April 5, 1968—the day a newspaper brought desolation into our house. My simplistic respect started to deepen and spread the more I investigated his speeches, which I did when suddenly I had to write speeches on my own, in the White House of all places. Like you, I became more and more transfixed the more I waded into his stuff, and I read a lot—sermons, obscure speeches in foreign lands, and various writings for publication.

Where did his genius come from? It's hard to pinpoint. It's a highly personal combination of old-school evangelical patterns (repetition, call and response) and modern philosophical thinking of the midcentury—existentialism, Niebuhr, Tillich, and so forth. It's like half of him is saying, "Let's go!" and the other half is saying, "Slow down, I want to talk about the futility of the human condition for a while." No wonder he got into Gandhi.

I would argue something well beyond what we take for granted nowadays—that he was a great political and spiritual leader. I think he's one of the supreme stylists of the 20th century—that his speeches and writings are on a plane that very few Americans have attained. They're not all great—as you point out, he was a little too quick to borrow and some of his efforts fall flat. But that Letter From Birmingham Jail kicks me in the rear end every time I see it. It's awesome, in both the Wayne's World and the biblical senses of the word.

I was reading Taylor Branch's work as a comparison for the last couple of days, and there's a blurb from Garry Wills that I liked: "already, in this chronicle, there is the material of Iliad after Iliad." Homer knew that it's boring to achieve importance simply because you score some easy victory. What's interesting, in life and literature, is overcoming extraordinary adversity, time and time again. It's the nearness to disaster that we find compelling—and King was sitting on top of it his entire life. There's his Oedipal relationship with his father (sorry, I'm going a little nuts with the Greek thing), his melancholia as a child (yes, I thought the early suicide attempts were very weird), his obsession with his own death, and his strong urge to destroy everything he had built with his reckless personal behavior, even after being warned that the feds were listening in. You mention the sex, so I might as well offer my one thought on the matter, though I'd much rather not deal with it at all. But I find it striking—even pathological—that he was not content with the occasional affair or two—but seemed to be shacking up all the time, often several times in one night—as if he wanted to get caught. What's with that?

I'm glad you liked Frady's work on Jesse, which I have not read. Love him or hate him, Jesse has said a lot of important things since 1968, and I've always been impressed by his desire to move beyond the '60s issues and get into new areas like promoting diversity within Wall Street and the Fortune 500. King would have obviously approved, despite his distrust of Jesse (while we're on the subject, how strange was that assassination scene when Jesse immersed his hands in King's blood?).

For all the improvements in our civic life since 1968, King's late-career excoriation of corporate America still stings, especially this past week. Then, he was talking about the business engine behind the Vietnam War, but many of his more pointed observations still reverberate across a landscape of downsized factories and bankrupt Enron stockholders. To him (and Niebuhr too), it was plain commonsense that large structures that remove individual responsibility (i.e., governments and corporations) will not act as honorably as individuals unless they are compelled to by the right pressures. Thoreau couldn't have put it better.

You make a good point about feminism and civil rights. I don't think there's any disputing it, except to say that they were fighting one revolution at a time, and the feminist movement would not have happened without the earlier breakthroughs.

And I empathize with your survivor's guilt, except that I have an even worse predicament—just imagine growing up helplessly honky. But as Dr. King taught us, we all have to make our way in a lonely world, and I'm doing the best I can.

Best,
Ted

the book club
entries
1234
from: Ted Widmer
to: Debra Dickerson

Courting Disaster

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2002, at 12:26 PM ET
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Debra Dickerson is the author of The End of Blackness and An American Story. Ted Widmer is the author of Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City, a former White House speechwriter, and director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.
Photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. on the Slate home page by Flip Schulkel/Corbis.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:


Fenbeast had this to say: "Debra Dickerson, the eloquence of your last six or seven lines took my breath away. I'm going to print it up and paste it on my wall." Locdog's and BML's comments, both below, provoked good threads.

Kassandra starts a great thread here, inspired by Ted Widmer, featuring more unlikely biographers and victims. We particularly like Princess Diana by Noam Chomsky, and Johann Sebastian Bach by the Spice Girls. Add your idea to the thread…


Reader Comments From The Fray:


MLK advocated civil rights because he believed that God was on his side. He understood that it wasn't blind chance that made all men equal, that he needn't rely on coincidence, or depend on men to ignore overwhelming probabilities to the contrary, to assert equality. He knew that God had created men equal. That, whatever biological process He'd used, man's nature was all the same: a reflection of God's own.

How could an existentialist make such a claim?

--locdog

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


I wondered for a long time why portraits of Martin Luther King joking, laughing, or even smiling seemed in such short supply--a man who attempts suicide twice isn't likely to have the most positive demeanor.

The sexist attitude of the civil rights movement was also found on college campuses--Mario Savio relegated (or tried to relegate) female protestors at Berkley into secretarial work. It's a funny thing about the 60s--you study an admirable movement and there's always something under the rock that will disabuse you slightly, whether it's the outdated data used in The Other America or the homophobic passages of The Feminine Mystique.

That, I would argue, is an advantage--someone totally prescient, someone whose step marches in time with a distant future, is useless in their own time and more useless after their death. William Lloyd Garrison believed in women's rights, Indian rights, civil rights, etc., but seems quite odd and was remembered--unfairly--as a self-righteous man determined to have his way. Frederick Douglass, if not for his driving and at times hyperactive ambition, would be statuary. They saw clearly into the future, but seem cold and haughty, like a Platonic form come to Earth. Lincoln was probably a moderate white supremacist, but we know his attitudes changed through interacting with men like Douglass.

We'd all wish that King would tell women to roar, but I can still like the guy for his outdated views on domesticity--the people he needed to convince shared them and could relate to him. Had he stood up for independent women and waited for history's justification, it's doubtful anyone would have listened to him at all.

--BML

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


You've neglected how well he delivered his speeches. "I Have A Dream" can never be delivered any better than he delivered it. In general, the public experienced Dr. King through the media and not through his documents. The media allowed all of us to hear Dr. King and to hear all the passion and compassion he evinced, all the power behind the wonderful words and priceless insights.

Perhaps the unanswerable question is this: Would Dr. King be so much loved/hated if he had been the unseen speechwriter, the philosophizer, the planner and organizer who accomplished all the same things and had let someone else play the public role?

--Code Wizard

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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