Dear Martin

Woodie W. White, retired United Methodist Bishop and MLK, Jr.’s contemporary and friend, has been writing an annual “Dear Martin” letter since 1976 during King’s birthday anniversary. Martin the man was born Jan. 15, 1929 (originally named Michael and later changed to Martin) and was felled on a motel balcony on April 4, 1968. This year, Martin the iconic hero is remembered and his civil rights legacy celebrated on Monday, Jan. 19.

I choose to remember Martin the man just so my recollections remain in the authentic plane. When he spoke to our group one February morning in 1968 less than a couple of months before the tragic April evening in Memphis, at Abe Lincoln’s historic New York Ave. Presbyterian Church on 13th St., 10 blocks away from the White House, he was just another regular guy. Of course, he had received his Nobel Prize award for Peace by then, but like the rest of us in his captive audience, he got up that morning pulling his trousers up one leg at a time.

The pictures I had taken of him locked in arms with people like his anti-war colleague Abraham Herschel during the march to Arlington Cemetery across the Potomac, was the look of a determined but apprehensive man who was, after all, in the unenviable posture of pronouncing “truth to power” in the war on poverty and civil rights administration of President Johnson’s Washington, D.C. A modest man of deep humility, he was not yet the invincible man portrayed in post-I’ve-been-to-the-mountaintop prophet that proliferates today.

In reports about one of MLK’s heroes, Gandhi, it was reported that Vince Walker of The New York Times while interviewing Gandhi in South Africa at his first ashram, remarked: “You’re an ambitious man, Mr. Gandhi.” Gandhi replied: “I hope not.” Gandhi was another modest man of deep humility who pulled his trousers up in the morning one leg at a time.

An earlier first-among-many-brothers of Woodie and Martin (and Gandhi), as narrated in the synoptic gospel narratives of Matthew, Mark and Luke, found the man Yeshua (Iesous in Greek, Jesus in English) from Nazareth standing in a posture of transfiguration with Hebrew ancestors Moses and Elijah. A disciple named Peter, the excitable and quick-to-the-draw one, proposed to his companions James and John that they build three tents of remembrance to commemorate the mystical appearance of the three revered figures together. Jesus elicited a vow of silence from his disciples instead.

In a well-known quote from the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell summarized the monomyth he posited as normative to many myths around the world: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

The Jesus hero has since had numerous reincarnations in many cultures around the world, the most recent in the world of celluloid being Clark Kent and Superman, and variations of the same theme up to the most recent one called Iron Man.

In all, to use the metaphor of the synoptic gospels, the guy of our common identity suddenly becomes transfigured into a tent! As a recent commentator on Saipan said, when a finger is pointed to the rainbow on Tinian, there are those who witness the rainbow, and in their aesthetics of aesthetics, they are richly blessed. Then there are those who look at the finger and never get to see the rainbow, for they are too fixated on the finger, obsessively determined to make a figure out of the finger, build it an altar, venerate it as an object of epiphany, or at least, a profitable handicraft for commerce and trade.

Our dear Martin has become such as well, I am afraid. Our friends, and I am sure they mean well, orchestrating this Monday’s celebration titled their essay contest in response to the Barack Obama presidential election with: “What would Martin say?” Not too many years ago, some of our earnest Christian leaders came up with the question of “What would Jesus do?” as an ethical guideline. Of course, every Tom, Dick and Harry, not to mention Pam, Kate and Mary, who had any strong religious conviction and/or moralistic compulsion, took advantage of the Jesus-cover and promoted their brand of sectarian ideology and morality. The same dynamic could very well apply here, with our youth stuffing Martin’s mouth with their own frustrations and hopes of 2009.

It is doubly ironic that the man who would dream that someday his “children would be judged not by the color of their skin but with the content of their character” will now have a day celebrated in his name, not by the content of his character but by the color of his skin!

To be sure, Obama’s election is significant to the cause of “colored” people. A year ago, the junior senator from Illinois announced his candidacy in front of the State Assembly where a hundred years before, mobs of white people in two days of rioting, burned black people’s homes in Springfield. As a direct consequence of the incident, a group of people gathered in New York and organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the En Double Aye Sea Pea!

The United States seems to operate in centennial cycles. Almost a century would last from the declaration of independence to the civil war, another century from the Lincoln assassination to that of John F. Kennedy, the latter dampening the high note of hope and anticipation generated by the August March to Washington in ‘63 that Kennedy eventually supported for as long as it enhanced the chances of the civil rights legislation he was pushing in Congress.

MLK Jr. would join the executive committee of the NAACP, which celebrates its 100th year anniversary this year a couple of weeks after the inauguration of Obama’s presidency. But the challenge to the new President goes beyond the dialectical contradiction inherent in racism. Already, the broad spectrum represented by the religious right in Rick Warren and the progressive left with Joe Lowery, respectively giving the invocation and benediction at the Inauguration, is indicative of the style President Obama intends to run his administration.

Can we create an umbrella big enough for everyone to engage in creative dialogue and constructive conversations? This question has been asked of America before. The difference this time has to do with the competing proponents, globally and locally. Instead of sharpening their casket of wits or honing their musket of wisdom to staff both sides of just another sweltering debate, they are rolling up their sleeves and asking what part of their agenda they can begin working on, allowing the other side to proceed with their own without getting on each other’s way. The crisis situation and worldwide catastrophe that has descended upon us in a shattered global economy, and rapidly deteriorating and blatantly dysfunctional political context, may just very well allow us to discover how much we have in common, and who knows, We Shall Overcome might actually and finally become more than just the title of a song.