A King's Holiday: A Personal Reminiscence of Dr. Martin Luther King | Antioch Review - Fall 2002

A King's Holiday: A Personal Reminiscence of Dr. Martin Luther King - Kenneth A. McClane

Many people in the United States, and the world over, tend to think in saintly terms when discussing Dr. King.  A strong minority exists that believe he is a total fraud; someone who cheated on his dissertation, plagiarized the speeches and sermons of others, and couldn't keep his fly zipped.

Kenneth McClane thinks this argument is senseless.  Dr. King was a man.  Men (and women) are not saints.  One has to wonder if saints really exist or could exist in recent times.  To be a saint requires a true separation from the working world.  Dr. King worked in the world.  He spoke nearly non-stop in efforts to raise money for the freedom and equality (in civil rights) for all Americans, and specifically Americans of color.  Dr. King made mistakes and committed sins.  So, let's stop all of this sainthood talk.

Mr. McClane relates a story that takes place when he was about eight years old.  His parents, well-to-do, comfortably middle class, if uncomfortably not white, routinely sheltered exhausted and battered Freedom Riders in their homes.  To see these young people, cut and bruised, telling stories of abuse and hatred, when you are only a early primary grade aged child must have been confusing and scary and left an everlasting memory.

The McClanes met Dr. King on a train ride in New England.  A friendship developed (not being cynical here, but one would think it was important for Dr. King to network with wealth wherever he could find it) and Dr. King was invited to the McClane's home on Martha's Vineyard.  Mr. McClane tells of that visit, an abbreviated one of only 36 hours, to explain why Dr. King was what he was, not saintly, but a good human being.

As Mr. McClane admits, this isn't "earth shattering" but it is real.  We too often treat Dr. King as a mythical being, some glowing saint of racial equality who could do no wrong, who never had a misstep, whose feet never trod on the same mundane getting by earth that ours do.  And almost as often, we overreact to this near deification of the man by cataloging and magnifying his shortcomings, his flaws, in order to destroy his legacy and diminish the message he brought.

Neither of these positions are correct.  Dr. King was out there working to bring in money to help people fight the good fight for such simple things: to be able to sit in the same room with whites while waiting for a train, to drink from a public water fountain, to sit at a lunch counter, to enter a restaurant through the front door, to sit in any open seat on a bus, to buy a house in any neighborhood, to vote, to work, to attend a school of one's choosing, and so many other things that we all take for granted today.

This is what today is all about.  Dr. Martin Luther King Day is about not forgetting that we must struggle to be free.  Our tendency is to give up our freedom for security or comfort.  We have Independence Day in July to remind us that as a country we have fought for freedom.  We have this day in January to remind us that freedom is for everyone, not just a select few, and we must continue to be vigilant in keeping that promise as a nation.

You don't have to celebrate the man if you don't want to, but we should be celebrating his work, what he ultimately stood for, and, as Mr. McClane points out, his many simple examples of "human-centered love."  We can, indeed, count ourselves lucky if we may find it.