Honoring a Man and His Dream

As the nation grieves over those lives lost in an assassination attempt on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, we will honor on Monday the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose dreams were left unrealized when a gunman’s bullet felled him in the prime of his life.

He would have been eighty-two years old.

We cannot know how he would have counseled his compatriots had he lived to see us, with a populace still diversifying at a dizzying rate, who elected a black President as Dr. King imagined we one day would, and yet with a disturbing feeling that meanwhile we have backpedaled in our sense of unity. Recent political history has seen us fighting not only two devastating military wars abroad but also a war much closer to home. It is, as these pages have noted before, a war in which the enemy is our own terrible capacity to fixate on the accidental, incidental differences that divide us and cause us to forget our deeper brotherhood. The tragedy in Tucson has made raw these divisions, whether the shooter was influenced by them or not.

The shooting that left six dead, fourteen wounded and Representative Giffords fighting for her life has sadly prompted an increase in sales of high-capacity ammunition clips; Dr. King’s weapons were profound truths and a compelling faith. The most we seem to be asking of ourselves is civility; Dr. King’s legacy is that of a courageous man who advanced the cause of freedom by inspiring our better natures to act. His words remain a call to us to join him in the easily-derided, often-exploited belief that we can overcome the dark side of the human spirit. “Hatred paralyzes life,” Dr. King said, “love releases it.”

In his day, as now, debilitating, grinding poverty kept too many Americans chained to the bottom of the economic ladder, and the system, this society that declares all are created equal, worked to keep it that way, then as it does now. Many Americans in the past few years have tasted struggle and felt the frustration of injustice and are grasping for an effective way to respond. In Dr. King’s day, he noted, those Americans pressing for social justice were met with tear gas, fire hoses, snarling dogs and death.

He was a man with every cause to be bitter, every cause to rage rather than urge reconciliation. But he would not. To his oppressors he said, “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering.” To those who wanted a different kind of fight, Dr. King preached “the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

The King Center for Nonviolence calls the holiday an occasion for young people to learn about the power of unconditional love even for one’s adversaries as a way to fight injustice and defuse violent disputes. It is a time to show them the power of forgiveness in the healing process at the interpersonal as well as international levels.

A personal note signed by Dr. King’s hand rests in the Gazette files, noting how one summer seven years before his assassination, “I spent the whole month of August working on a manuscript . . . this made it impossible for me to accept many of the invitations that came to me during my month on the Island.”

Vineyarders are rightly proud of our own history as a place apart from mainland people’s views, a place where African Americans were welcomed when they were not elsewhere, a place of community where all we rely upon is each other. But this cohesion is a fragile thing. Technology allows us to becomes faceless, shouting haters just like people in the city, something our close-knit, face-to-face living never before readily allowed. What standards now will each of us allow ourselves, or expect of ourselves, to preserve that which always has set the Vineyard apart? Dr. King once said that we all have to decide whether we “will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness.” Life’s most persistent and nagging question, he said, is, “What are you doing for others?”

On Monday the Vineyard chapter of the NAACP will honor Dr. King and Islanders whose lives reflect his legacy: W. Leo Frame Jr., a regional high school teacher who founded Young Brothers to Men among his many acts of community service; E. Jacqueline Hunt, the longtime chapter president who was the first black woman candidate for a PhD at MIT; and Donald Mayhew, who has served the town of Tisbury and the NAACP for decades. Summer resident and author of the NAACP history Lift Every Voice, Dr. Patricia Sullivan, will address this annual celebration, a highlight of the Island’s winter calendar.

It will take place this year amid another test in this American experiment in human diversity. It is a moment to remember words also written here before:

“Viewed through the long lens of history, this nation will not be remembered for its wealth or its might. After all, mighty nations have come before ours, and others will follow. Finally, America will be remembered as a great laboratory of diversity, a nation in which people of every creed and color either taught the world an urgently needed lesson in living together or failed to surmount their differences, splintering into myriad shards of hatred.”