By Eric Easter
This year, way too many people wanted to honor MLK.
In a morning meeting of parents from the elite private Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, Arun Gupta, an investment banker, gives his report on the response to the school’s sign-up for Martin Luther King Day activities, which Gupta coordinates. With only some variation in numbers, it’s the same report he’s given for the last seven years: “Once again, we are over-subscribed.”
That means demand for the school’s coveted100 slots to volunteer with the organization City Year is higher than can be accommodated, leaving at least 40 students and their parents unable to join a volunteer project.
On the holiday, the lucky 100, and more than 800 others, mostly from wealthy sections of Washington, D.C. and its even wealthier suburbs, descended on Ballou Senior High, located in southeast D.C., one of the District’s poorest neighborhoods. There, they got an earful of speeches from local officials, ate bagels, drew pictures and packed bags for the homeless or performed minor cosmetic improvements to neighboring schools and playgrounds. Ballou itself was not part of this effort. It recently re-opened after an $85-million renovation and now rivals the facilities of many of the private schools the volunteers attend.
This scene was duplicated in cities across America, with millions of volunteers participating in “A Day On, Not a Day Off” celebrations to mark the King holiday. This year, President Barack Obama and his family chose the same City Year event in Washington as their project, boosting its popularity.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service grew out of a bill sponsored by Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Senator Harris Wofford, D-Pa., and later signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Obama further popularized the day by making it an official program of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Yet despite this event’s connection to Obama and its origins with the iconic John Lewis, a King associate and civil rights legend in his own right, a small but growing number of observers see this focus on service as “off the mark” from the way King should be remembered.
For Traci Miller, a Maryland real-estate developer who spent the holiday attending forums on justice, the focus on painting schools, planting gardens and traveling to poor neighborhoods without an extended commitment is “an erosion of the King potency to make people feel better.”
“Men don’t get assassinated because they dream and advocate for service,” says Miller. “King was pushing for wealth transference at the end of his life and an end to the [Vietnam] War just prior to that. Actual equality based on the whole human person (not just race or social status) was his purpose. That is a dangerous and obviously deadly position on which to stand in the United States. He wanted to topple and transform the power, wealth, poverty, injustice paradigm.”
Georgetown University law professor Christopher Alan Chambers, who spent the day with his own family in quiet reflection, agrees that while service is laudable, it should not evolve into the holiday’s central theme.
“His legacy was about challenging a terrible status quo, leadership and sacrifice. That’s what all Americans should be thinking about. But my kid and other kids, even college students, are told — often by black teachers and leaders, but mostly by whites — that service must be the component, and learning about the man and his struggles is secondary. [People] seem to be motivated about the service thing and are fed the Saint Martin mythology, rather than the truth about protests and the daunting sacrifices and compromises he had to make. I’m no revolutionary. I just want to pay homage in the most appropriate way.”
Vince Brown, a Washington, D.C. DJ and music critic, thinks the day should be one of direct protest. “How about an occupation of D.C. and demand for food and housing for all, re-distribution of wealth and an end to war?” he said. “That was what Dr. King was about to lead the week he was assassinated. Anything less is falling short of the vision he had.”
These opinions reflect a growing concern in both scholarly discussion and dinner table conversation in the black community that the further Americans get from the age of the civil rights movement, King’s history of radical opposition to injustice is being lost to more benign talk about hope and “a dream.” For these critics, the focus on service on the King holiday contributes to that loss.
Andrea Pringle, a political organizer who has worked with many of the leaders of the early civil rights movement, sees passing on the King legacy as a family obligation.
“We have to take responsibility to educate the generations behind us of our history as black people in this country and give context to Dr. King’s life, his mission and his death,” Pringle said. “A day of service is honorable, but helping our children understand is on us.”
The debate in some way mirrors the complicated nature of King’s writings and actions that, at various times during his public life, appeared conciliatory, while others seemed highly confrontational.
Famous King quotes such as “Everyone can be great because anybody can serve” stand beside the same legacy as “the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” People selectively pick the King that suits their own beliefs. But no singular quotation or speech reveals the full man, whose popularity waned in his later years in favor of movements seen as more relevant, even as his words become much more radical.
Barry Hudson, a Prince George’s County government official, who as a Howard University student participated with thousands in the 1981 march led by Stevie Wonder to win the King holiday designation, sees the volunteerism as a proper form of reflection.
“I get the concern … but I think it is absolutely the most substantive national holiday on the calendar. When we marched back in the ’80s and stood in the cold trying to convince the nation this day was important, we started setting the stage for the way this day is celebrated. This is the 30th anniversary, and we have successfully minimized the commercialization of it. This is still largely a very serious day. We should be proud of that.”
“It also makes the world look back on race in America at least once a year. I agree focusing on service is not the best way to remember King, but I can’t think of a day that we celebrate that gets this much respect from Americans.”
