It’s that time of year again. You’ve already received the credit card bills from all your Christmas spending; by now your New Year’s resolutions have already been broken, and now it’s time to dust off our dashikis to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, and in a few weeks Black History Month.
The King Holiday was officially authorized by the federal government in 1983, but it wasn’t until the year 2000 that all 50 states began recognizing the third Monday in January as the official King celebration. Almost since that time, churches and organizations and businesses have “honored” King with some form of recognition.
But some in the King family, and others think that while the local King celebrations are well-intentioned, they don’t’ do nearly enough to support the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change based in Atlanta, Ga. The King Center, in recent years, has hit upon hard times, with some of King’s children at one point considering the sale of their father’s Bible and his Nobel Peace Prize to raise money.
It would be nearly impossible to speculate on the total number of King memorial events that will take place nationwide in the coming days – prayer breakfasts, recitals and programs of every kind. One long-time civil rights leader says it’s a shame that more revenue from these events doesn’t find its way to the struggling King Center.
“We haven’t learned to give back yet,” said NAACP national board member Ophelia Averitt of Akron. “Some of these national events pay speakers $10,000 or more, and never send anything to the (King) foundation.”
Averitt’s ire comes against the notion that Black people can’t sustain our own institutions, and that we’ve allowed the white media to oversimplify the King narrative and overlook the highly strategic nature of the Movement.
In the years since King’s assassination mainstream media and ill-informed white folk like to attribute the entire Civil Rights Movement to the spontaneous refusal of a lone seamstress, Rosa Parks, to give up her seat on a segregated bus.
While Mother Parks has been and should continue to be commended for her courage on that first day of December 1955, her resistance was hardly the first time anyone had challenged the segregated system on Montgomery’s buses. A 15-year-old Black girl, Claudette Colvin, had been arrested that same year for refusing to comply with the Jim Crow bus laws.
The Montgomery branch of the NAACP had been looking for a test case to challenge the segregated laws on city buses. While Colvin had been arrested for defying the segregated bus laws, her case wasn’t suited to challenge the laws in court. Former Montgomery NAACP president E. D. Nixon was giddy when he heard Rosa Parks had been arrested.
Rosa Parks was secretary of the local NAACP. Her reputation was impeccable. And even the segregated law itself was on her side. People forget that Parks was lawfully seated in the “Colored Section” of the bus, but when more whites boarded, the bus driver began forcing Black people to give up their previously assigned seats to make room for white passengers.
Also lost in the narrative is the fact that Blacks who made up 70% of bus ridership, had to board at the front of the bus, put their money in the farebox, then get off the bus and use the bus’s back door to find their seats. These were humiliating conditions.
Not to mention that just four months earlier. Chicago teenager Emmett Till had been lynched by whites in Mississippi, and a lot of Black folks nationwide were sick and tired of racism and discrimination. It was a time when Black folk were rife with rebellion.
”Rosa Parks was the fourth person to be arrested that month for not complying with the bus company’s Jim Crow laws of segregation,” said Peter Flemister, former president of the suburban Chicago NAACP. “(Nixon) knew when he heard about Mrs. Parks being involved that this was a special kind of person. She was courageous.”
Nixon had been a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of African American train workers who were inspired to become civil rights activists by their leader A. Philip Randolph. Nixon arranged for Mrs. Parks’ bail and hired an attorney to take her case. He also began calling a list of 20 local ministers to get them involved in a boycott of the bus line that would eventually last 381 days. Caller number 19 was the recently installed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So, the movement wasn’t born of spontaneous combustion. It had been planned and orchestrated to fight segregation laws through the court system and not just on the streets. For more than a year, Black folk refused to ride the buses and instead walked to work or carpooled to demonstrate their demand for dignity.
Rosa Parks wasn’t tired from her work as a seamstress; she was tired of being humiliated as a second-class citizen. And the community behind her was just as tired as she was.
History teaches us that we can sustain and protect our own institutions; we can fight for them as well. Let’s make sure, however, that we do it on more than just a single day.
6 responses to “King for a Day”
First time I was able to download. Thanks for the the history lesson. Always new things to learn.
Wow! You always drop special history nuggets in your writing. Thank you for giving us a broader context for Dr. Martin Luther King Day!
Thanks you for sharing this history lesson. I know the meaning,understand and have lived the very
humiliation of segregation.However,was raised by my parents to respect the segregated laws.
I hope your blog will reach many African American Families and that they will become
serious about the Movement and Celebrate
MLK DAY with donations to the center.
Thank you for sharing, Reba. You lived on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement in Prattville, Alabama and other places. Your parents knew that if you all didn’t obey the laws of segregation, that your lives would be at risk. We, who are the children of the Movement, stand on the shoulders of so many like you, who paved a way for us. Without you, there would be no us. Thank you!
This is a very timely message and should be read by everyone. Like my sister Reba, I experienced some of the segregated laws while growing up. My younger brother and sister participated in sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters inside businesses. Thanks for refreshing our memory about the history behind MLK Day.
If you’d like to donate to the King Center for Non-Violent Social Change, you can do so here:
https://thekingcenter.org/donate-now/#donate_now
Or, you can send your donation to this address:
King Center for Non-Violent Social Change
449 Auburn Avenue, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30312