By: Vincent L. Hall
MLK Day is near, and nothing renders me more verbally deficient than that. What do you say about a man whose whole life has been splattered over billions of pages and terabytes of FBI evidence files? It’s hard, but something must be said.
Almost 30 years ago, Dr Michael Eric Dyson, behind the lectern usually occupied by the legendary Rev. Zan Wesley Holmes Jr., delivered a sermon that most can never forget. The title was “Enough to make God Cry.”
And while the theological ride was a suspenseful exegete on the shortest verse in the Bible, he made a moving case for what moved Jesus to tears. Jesus’ spiritual overflow was a result of watching the pain of an oppressed friend.
Recalling Dyson’s sermon made me wonder. We know that Dr King cried. When you read what so many writers have said about him, you know that crying was a mere offshoot of the depression he suffered.
J. Edgar Hoover made it clear that King was not always faithful to his wife. Other writers reveal that he was no “winebibber” but he “sipped from the vine” from time to time.
So, my next question was, did King curse? Some accounts mention that he used a little foul language, but no one elaborated or gave an example of what he might have said. This effort to say something new about my hero was going nowhere.
And then…viola!
In an article by National Public Radio in 2019, titled. “The power of Martin Luther King’s anger, I gleaned a new factoid that was sparked an ifea supply .
“When Martin Luther King, Jr. was in high school, he won an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks. He and a beloved teacher were returning home in triumph, riding a bus, when some white passengers boarded. The white bus driver ordered King and his teacher to give up their seats and cursed them.
King wanted to stay seated, but his teacher urged him to obey the law. They had to stand in the aisle for the 90 miles back to Atlanta, Ga.
Though King became an icon of non-violence and peace, he also inwardly wrestled with anger and, at times, would snap at those he loved.
“That night will never leave my memory,” King told an interviewer decades later. “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”
Not only did King not succumb to openly cursing, but he also used a curse against him as fuel for what is possibly the longest and most successful protest that Black people have undertaken.
There is no way that this tragic personal accounting supplied courage to his day-to-day command and guidance of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
King showed real courage. Not that conjured up, manufactured kind of machismo that lives in our White House right now. Any feckless soul can order a military to drop “Bombs over Baghdad” or violate the sovereign vectors of Venezuela.
Unlike 47, MLK’s, courage was not collateralized, commercialized, or conjured up for monetary gain. Authentic courage doesn’t fly under the cloak of night or kidnap heads of state as a means of stealing national oil reserves.
It doesn’t take courage to capitalize on the demise of the Gaza Strip or any of the other countries that Donald wants to bully and exploit.
Donald Trump has perverted the words of Patrick Henry, who said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Trump’s remix sounds more like “Give me tyranny and give me wealth.”
Dr King had that rare kind of courage that never had to be monetized. He laid down his life without any thought of personal gain or self-aggrandizement.
The courage of MLK was raw, rare and revolutionary!
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
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