A DECISION TO CARE, Bob Hansman's MLK Commemoration Speech

If you were in attendance at last night's Annual MLK Commemorative in Graham Chapel last night, I'm sure you felt a plethora of emotions as students and faculty performed and spoke in the honor of the legendary Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. However, no one can deny that the moment the touched our hearts and minds most emphatically was when we got to listen to renown WashU professor and St. Louis trailblazer, Robert "Bob" Hansman share his reflections on the legacy of Dr. King. Today I received emails and messages from peers, staff, and professors alike still remarking on the raw passion and truth with which Bob spoke, and I was utterly elated to receive an email from friend and Catalyst, Danielle Hayes sharing the manuscript from Bob's speech. It is posted below and is definitely worth cherishing and rereading over and over, for the fieriness and blatancy of his words touch the heart even with out the sound of his dynamism and zeal in speech. Please read it, and share it with others. Let's continue to cherish Bob and the amazing contributions that he has made to the WashU, St. Louis, and national community. Moreso, accept the challenges that he makes in his speech, and live life being a warrior for justice.

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This speech can also be viewed at http://www.slepton.com/slepton/viewcontent.pl?id=3030

A DECISION TO CARE

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. CELEBRATION, MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010, GRAHAM CHAPEL

I never got to meet Martin Luther King, Jr. But I did get to meet Coretta King while Martin was still alive.

I got to hear a young Stokely Carmichael and spend some time with a young Julian Bond at his cousin’s apartment.

I managed to get attacked and beaten up by the Ku Klux Klan.

And when I decided to press charges against the head of the local Klan, my lawyer’s office got bombed.

I marched to make this day a holiday, and I can tell you, because I remember, that Martin Luther King, Jr. had a lot more going on than just that dream that shows up in holiday cards this time of year.

Because remembering can also be a way of forgetting. It’s how we simultaneously worship and erase real and complex people. It’s a kind of…second assassination. And selective memory is also a way of letting ourselves off the hook.

In his last book, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY, you may be surprised to find that King had this to say: “Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook…. The outraged white citizen had been sincere when he snatched the whips from the Southern sheriffs and forbade them more cruelties. But when this was to a degree accomplished, the emotions that had momentarily inflamed him melted away. White America left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro. When Negroes looked for…the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.”

You won’t find that in many holiday cards.

Apparently the mythical King bore as little resemblance to King in his own mind as it bears to him in many of our minds. “I am conscious of two Martin Luther Kings,” he said. “I am a wonder to myself.…

I am mystified at my own career. The Martin Luther King that the people talk about seems to be somebody foreign to me.”

The real King saw connections among things: poverty, race and the casualties of war; military imperialism abroad and the gutting of civil rights at home. He explicitly advocated for affirmative action and a guaranteed annual income, and—as if anticipating current social and sustainable concerns—delivered scorching critiques of the way we live: materially, spatially, hence, morally.

Listen to this: “…Affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? ….Many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers tranquility to equality….The suburbs are white nooses around the black neck of the cities….(They) expand with little regard for what happens to the rest of America….It is not enough to say, ‘We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.’ They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one would have for a pet.”

Or this: “America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. The black revolution…is exposing…systemic rather than superficial flaws.…For the last twelve years we have been a reform movement….But…we(’ve) moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution….This means a revolution of values….The whole structure of American life must be changed.”

This is strong stuff. There’s a lot of it, too, and a lot stronger stuff that I won’t read because, ironically, it would sound pretty harsh at a Martin Luther King celebration. But when you get past the Dream, the Drum Major, the Mountaintop, and the Sneeze, he often sounds a lot more like Malcolm X than he does our holiday image of Martin Luther King.

No wonder that, at the time of his death, the man we celebrate today was one of the most hated men in America. FBI paranoia notwithstanding, perhaps in some weird and twisted way the FBI had a better appreciation of King’s radical nature than we do today.

People get upset with King’s tougher words even now. We like to think that maybe he didn’t mean them, that he was still the Dreamer that we think he was in 1963. We don’t want Martin Luther King to …be Martin Luther King. We don’t want King to change, or to want that much change; at least not from us, not still now. How dare he suggest that the life that I choose to live affects the life that you have to live? How dare he challenge my sense of my own innocence and virtue? Look at all we’ve done. What more does he want? I thought he wanted other people to change, not me.

A large part of what King said is apparently still at odds with our selectively airbrushed portrait of him; and yet here he is—radical, challenging, fierce—in his own words. So who was Martin Luther King, Jr.? Who—and what—are we celebrating today? And how do we follow in his footsteps?

Because who we think he was determines what we will do in his name. Are we celebrating an eloquent but ultimately safe and reassuring Dreamer? Or are we celebrating a demanding, radical prophet and teacher who was engaged in what he himself called “a dangerous unselfishness?”

His friend Stanley Levison tells us, “Martin found it very difficult to live comfortably….Martin was always very aware that he was privileged….One of the reasons that he was so determined to be of service was to justify the privileged position he’d been born into.”

“I think I’d rise up in my grave,” King said, “if I died leaving two or three hundred thousand dollars….If I have any weaknesses, they are not in the area of coveting wealth.”

In his sermon WHAT ARE YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS? he speaks of telling his children:

“I’m going to…do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. (But) I don’t ever want you to forget that there are millions of God’s children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don’t want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be.”

Students are often told nowadays, especially since the latest presidential election, that we live in a post-racial, post-civil rights era now; that clearly anyone can be anything they want to be if they just make good choices and work hard. They usually hear this from a white teacher, while sitting among mostly white classmates, in a mostly segregated suburban school—and they don’t detect a trace of irony in any of it. Sometimes they make it all the way to college still believing this.

I try to imagine that same teacher going down to Peabody School, next to the projects where I spend the other part of my life, and explaining to those kids that segregation is over now, that we live in a post-racial society now, that we should all be color-blind now. I would pay good money to see that.

Of course we all should aspire. Of course we all make choices. But some of us have different choices to choose from than others. And while some of us get to work hard choosing which school to go to or which laptop to buy, others of us have to work hard, choosing between diapers and dinner, and never get to make the other choices.

But there is one choice we all can make, and that is to tell the truth.

The perfect King that we think we can’t possibly be like is a King that King himself could not identify with. The good news is that this puts him within reach: If he was more like us, then we can be more like him. Following in his footsteps is both easier and harder than we make it out to be: easier, because he was not a god, he was human, flawed, conflicted—just like us…and harder, because he wasn’t the beatific Dreamer that we have created in his stead—someone who can easily be emulated merely by adopting a color-blind posture toward those people with whom we happen to come in contact.

People argue about whether the problem, hence the solution, is personal, institutional, structural, systemic, cultural, social, political, legal, economic, educational; it’s all of the above; they’re all related, and they’re all just big words for us—which means there’s plenty for us to do. But make no mistake: we must work, because wherever else the responsibility falls, it also falls squarely on us.

The test is not just the acts we commit, either, but the acts we omit: not just how we are with each other, but how we aren’t.

What does King’s Dream mean when, right now, people are dying in North St. Louis of conditions that get easily treated in West County?

What does King’s Dream mean when the killings of some innocents are cause for national hand-wringing and searching for reasons, while the killings of “my kids” in the projects barely make a ripple, or only cause people to blame the kids themselves, and stay as far away from them as possible?

What does King’s Dream mean when we move far away from “my kids” and then study the speeches of Martin Luther King in school? When we talk about colorblindness where there’s no other color around to be blind to? When one of the very reasons why we live where we do is color-consciousness—and we all know it.

What does King’s Dream mean when we would rather live in a safe neighborhood –safe, because it is removed, exclusive, fortified, gated, fearful of what is beyond—than in a safe society? –safe, because it is open, inclusive, compassionate, equitable, with no reason for fortification or fear.

What does King’s Dream mean when we arrive at Wash U hearing, “Don’t go north of Delmar.” “Don’t go east of Skinker.” “Wellston is a ghetto.” “If you go there, you’ll get shot.”

What does King’s Dream mean when we are told to be afraid—or have to be afraid—to drive through Kinloch, to drive through Ladue, to go to Meacham Park, to go to the Galleria, to go off campus….

What does King’s Dream mean when a little 6-year-old girl in the projects knocks on the door of my studio, sees me eating a sandwich, and asks me, “Do you eat every day?”

That’s not a dream, that’s a nightmare—of our own making. We’re not living King’s Dream—or any dream—when we move out, ignore or blame the people we leave behind, destroy everything from the school system to the environment in the process, and then…talk nice to each other…?

King’s Dream isn’t about the way we talk; it’s about the way we live. It’s not about our own internal transformation; it’s about justice for others. It’s not just about the one person at the top, in the White House; it’s about the millions of people at the bottom, in the projects. It’s not just about being able to climb the Fortune 500 corporate ladder; it’s about being able to play jump rope and not get shot.

It’s not enough to just talk and dream and have these yearly celebrations and pursue our own dreams of security and growth at the expense of “my kids’” dreams of security and growth rather than with them, and then hope that somehow in another generation or two the problems we’re perpetuating will just die out. King didn’t die for such pathetic dreams, such “anemic democracy.”

“(We) fear each other because (we) don’t know each other; (we) don’t know each other because (we) cannot communicate; (we) cannot communicate because (we) are separate.” Maybe Kings’s Dream and the American Dream aren’t even compatible.

In truth, anyone can have a dream. That’s easy. And anyone can say they have values. The question is what are we going to do? I can claim to have the finest values on earth, but if I don’t do anything with them, they don’t do you a bit of good. It’s just me talking. Values are nothing if they’re just words. We’re all “colorblind” until it’s 10 o’clock at night and my son is walking toward you. (Praise god.)

Of course it’s good to treat people equally, within our small sphere of influence, but it isn’t the same as working for justice. It’s too easy to just talk, and our words become merely a soundtrack to a life lived in a very different direction—a life that ultimately exacerbates the very problems our words purport to be solving. Because, collectively, when it came time for us to change, a lot of us dropped the ball and ran, and we’ve been denying or rationalizing it ever since.

Around millions of kitchen tables, we made millions of personal decisions that turned our backs on “the rest of America”—and then we wonder what happened to the Dream.

“In the end,” said King, “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

In a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, less than a year before he was killed, King said: “You may be thirty-eight years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid….You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity….So you refuse to take a stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at thirty-eight as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice….”

King’s was a “militant nonviolence,” not a passive one. For King, “Justice is love in calculation.”

Some people say that it’s hard to care about anything that doesn’t affect us personally—when we’re raised in ignorance, when we live at a distance from other people and their problems—even ones we’ve helped create. It’s true there are some things we can learn only by making it personal, but it’s also true that we don’t have to wait for it all to affect us personally in order to care; we can just look in our hearts, grow up, and make a decision to care.

So here’s a test: If we couldn’t talk, if we couldn’t tell people what our values are…could people tell what they are from just our actions? When we walk out those doors in a while, when we wake up tomorrow, or years from now, what will our actions say about our values? What will the arc of our lives look like?

Because the other thing about King being like us is that it takes away our own excuses for doing so little. King was us writ large: passionate, uncertain, despondent, determined, funny, furious, hopeful, humble—in a word: imperfect. He worked hard to be Martin Luther King; being Martin Luther King didn’t come easy, even for Martin Luther King.

Tellingly, the dedication to his last book ends with the phrase “that brotherhood will be the condition of man, not the dream of man.”

This is the man I love, this Martin Luther King—who loved us enough to nail us to the wall with truth, not just with dreams.

This is the man who set me on a path that led eventually to the projects of St. Louis. And the message was unmistakable: if I had stayed where life put me, if I had just accepted my gifts as if I deserved them, if I had just said, “Well, my privilege worked for me, and I want nothing more than for my son to have the same,” I would never have found my way down to the projects; I would never have found my son.

If it weren’t for Martin Luther King, Jr., I would never have gotten beaten up by the Klan; but I would never have found my son, either.

Meanwhile, a couple miles northeast of here, St. Louis’ statue of Martin Luther King sits up in Fountain Park, surrounded by a fence, in a part of the City where few of us will ever venture, even today.

The man I’ve told you about this evening is the Martin Luther King I love, the man I owe so much to, the man I owe my life to, really. Sometimes I wish I could just see him, just hold him in my arms and tell him, “Thank you. Thank you for my life. Thank you for my son. Thank you for making me work hard, not for making things easy for me. You were a great teacher, and we are all still your students, with so much still to learn.”

As much as I celebrate his life tonight, I still grieve his passing, as if it had happened just this evening, just…a little while ago….

As those of us who actually remember Martin Luther King become fewer and eventually die out, it will become harder and harder for young people to discern the truth about the man. But it wouldn’t take a great man, it wouldn’t take a prophet to espouse the “bland euphemisms” that “fall pleasantly on the ear” on a day like today. So don’t you fall for it. Martin was made of tougher stuff than that.

I’ll leave you with some of his last words, delivered at Mason Temple in Memphis the day before he was killed: “We are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinished.…Life is a continual story of shattered dreams. (But) God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives.…I want to be a good man, and I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, ‘I take you in and I bless you because you tried….You are a recipient of my grace because it was in your heart….It is well that it was within thine heart.’”

Thank you.