I didn’t meet Martin Luther King, but I met Moses once.
Actually, I met Charlton Heston, who was frequently identified with his portrayal of the biblical firebrand. At the time, I was working as an editorial assistant at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill, where the actor appeared for a fundraiser.
I was so excited for days about meeting the giant of a man with the booming voice who not only parted the Red Sea and painted the Sistine Chapel as Michelangelo, but also won a wild chariot race in “Ben Hur.” I put on my Sunday best.
Oh, how my heart sank when Mr. Heston walked through the door wearing a gray suit, white shirt and tie. He was so much older and shorter than I’d imagined that I had to do a double take. I nearly stammered when he reached out to shake my hand during a cursory introduction.
I’ve since learned — after meeting so many celebrities and public figures up close and personal — that they are only human, after all. Some more flawed and frail than others.
Like Mr. Heston, who died Saturday at the age of 84, Martin Luther King was another man of short stature who has been transformed into a larger-than-life icon.
Once ridiculed and marginalized, by whites and blacks, King’s life and words are now sacred symbols of American justice, racial tolerance, nonviolence and peace.
But if you read history — instead of listening to or watching history revised — you know that King was a complex and conflicted man. He was much more than the leader of the “Kumbaya” glee club singing “We Shall Overcome.”
Often I am troubled by what we make of mere mortals as we seek to honor and memorialize them. I have a strange sense that even they wouldn’t wish the hype heaped upon them posthumously.
Most great people possess a necessary egotism and arrogance to achieve their goals and prominence, but the truly gifted ones also exhibit a modicum of humility and decorum. Surely, the more humanitarian would not want to be canonized.
We do more to honor larger-than-life figures, not by making saints of them, but by following in their footsteps through continuing their work.
Marian Wright Edelman, founder and director of the Children’s Defense Fund, penned a “Child Watch” column on the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination titled “Honoring King Is Not Enough.”
If you were alive on April 4, 1968, you’ll never forget that dreadful day or what you are doing or who you were with or how you were feeling. I haven’t. Neither has my friend and former colleague at this newspaper, Vincent McCraw. How could we? We lived in and around the nation’s capital, where the chant “burn, baby, burn” was applied to shops, businesses and even homes around the city.
Vince, now an editor at the Detroit News, remembers that week was “just a blur.” A burning blur.
“I remember the assassination, the riots, James Brown coming down H Street, my father writing ’soul brother’ in soap on the windows of his white Pontiac Tempest, the National Guard camped in the field across from Spingarn High School, and then the Poor People’s Campaign,” he said. “But it all seemed like it happened in that week, as opposed to over a month’s time.”
In 1968, Vince was 9 years old living in Carver Terrace on Maryland Avenue and a fifth-grade student at Charles Young Elementary School.
In 1968, I was a senior at the newly integrated T.C. Williams High School, where, among other extracurricular activities, I was an officer in the Human Relations Council, along with my classmate, William Euille, now the mayor of Alexandria.
What I remember most after King’s assassination, besides my overwhelming grief, was the feeling that I was about to die. I started to cry and hyperventilate and have anxiety attacks caused by a sudden fear of mortality, a school nurse determined. Today, those scary bouts would be diagnosed as post-traumatic syndrome, I suppose.
I also became gravely concerned about what would happen to our school’s fledging attempts to forge better race relations between the students and the faculty. Of course, it didn’t help that I was worried for the safety of my mother, sisters, aunts and cousins who were caught in the riot zones.
I remember the burning, the looting, the smell and the destruction, but the Poor People’s Campaign left an even stronger impression on me. I didn’t realize until I researched it yesterday that Resurrection City, or “Tent City,” on the muddy National Mall had not been erected until a full month after King’s death.
Our young group was compelled to work through our grief, and we collected clothing and food to deliver to the hundreds of impoverished protesters — black, white and Hispanic — whom King had called to Washington to march for economic parity and justice.
It was this indelible and heart-wrenching scene of poverty and despair, coupled with an unbelievable sense of hope I felt in the spring of 1968, that was the seed of my lifelong affinity and advocacy for poor people.
Mrs. Edelman’s statement, which can be read on TheRoot.com, reminds us of King’s imperative to eradicate poverty, which still affects 36.5 million Americans — 13 million of them children.
King was a human being who demonstrated he was capable of Moses-like accomplishments for his people, which in the end, included more than his black brothers and sisters.
Each one of us, by our own good deeds, can pay better homage to his legacy than by making a martyr of one man.
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