It seems to me that a debate over where a nation’s flags should be positioned today should be about the national holiday’s namesake rather than two others who are not, the national holiday’s namesake that is.
To be fair, one of the two obviously did not invite the debate. In fact, just over forty-six years ago (January 14, 1979) President Jimmy Carter became the first president to propose a national holiday honoring Reverend King even though thirty such bills had been proposed and defeated in Congress in the decade following the assassination, with the first proposal coming just a few days after the national tragedy in 1968.
President Carter’s proposal was unsuccessful, too. There were repeated financial arguments against the holiday over the years (e.g., President Ronald Reagan cited cost concerns; i.e., it will cost too much money to give federal workers another day off), and there were repeated personal attacks (e.g., Senator Jesse Helms called Reverend King a “Marxist” — and even President Reagan, again, who eventually signed the 1983 national holiday bill that finally made it through Congress into law, dodged a question about Senator Helms’s accusations with a thinly-veiled slap, “We’ll know in thirty-five years, won’t we,” referring to the scheduled release of FBI surveillance recordings). Today’s youth are presumably ignorant of the long road to the national celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Key to generating the public pressure necessary to turn the tide on a national holiday, including a petition with an incredible six million signatures, was the extraordinary effort of musical legend, Stevie Wonder, who wrote and released his MLK-holiday-inspired version of the song, “Happy Birthday,” in 1981. “Happy Birthday” became one of his signature songs and has endured in beautiful ways. At the first official national MLK Day celebration in 1986, Stevie was the headline performer.
Still, even with the eventual declaration of a federal holiday, many states were reluctant to participate. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that every state officially came on board, although I am sad to report that both Alabama and Mississippi, in a breathtaking and ongoing insult, still combine the holiday to recognize both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general that led the fight to preserve Black slavery.
And if the fight for a day to recognize Reverend King wasn’t hard enough, we add a presidential inauguration today. Given the Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution’s specification for presidential inaugurations (January 20) and the designated date for MLK Day (third Monday in January, instead of his actual birthday, January 15), this will happen periodically. It happened with both President Bill Clinton’s second inauguration in 1997 and President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, and it won’t happen again until 2053, but it is happening today.
I listened to Stevie Wonder’s signature song, and given the persistent reluctance to fully celebrate the holiday and the bitter divisions in our nation, certain of his lyrics struck me with special force:
- “the way to truth is love and unity to all God’s children”
- “the whole day should be spent in full remembrance of those who lived and died for the oneness of all people”
- “we know that love can win”
- “the key to unity of all people is in the dream that you had so long ago that lives in all of the hearts of people that believe in unity”
I wish that those sentiments — sentiments that happen to reflect Reverend King’s understanding of Christian values — could be the full focus of a day like today.
Today, I do get to be a part of a lengthy reading to commemorate the holiday. We will gather in the “MLK Room” on the Ripon College campus and read aloud sections of the last book that Reverend King published prior to his assassination, titled, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” That question — Reverend King’s question — reverberates today. Which will we choose?
Sometime between today’s presidential inauguration and tonight’s college football championship, I propose finding a few minutes to reflect on Stevie Wonder’s lyrical call to the world as set forth in his birthday song for Reverend King and truly consider the question: Where will we go from here — chaos, or the beloved community of which Reverend King so famously dreamed?
Starting to Look Up 