Posted by
flagwaver on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 10:34:27 PM
With the King holiday just past, and Black History Month looming I started to think about some of the illusions that we hold of historical figures. Too often we look back at our forebears and see them with a halo and wings ensemble that we all know is not justified. That doesn't mean that the people were not good people, or that their accomplishments should be diminished; it simply means that they are more than the saintly veneer we put on them.
Likewise, there are those that we look back on and immediately apply the devil's horns to, whether or not they deserve it. We take the word of "experts", "historians", or common knowledge about them and judge them falsely. We do not take the time to take a real look at what the people really stood for, who they truly were, or give them any credit for evolving over time.
For example, take Martin Luther King Jr. According to our rosy historical lenses, Dr. King was all sweetness and light and damn near deserving of sainthood. After all, he was the leader of the civil rights movement and he was assassinated while advocating for racial justice. While all of that is true, it does not mean that King was a saint...not by a long shot!
Now, I may lose my ghetto pass for saying this out loud (so to speak), but Dr. King was...shall we say...less than saintly. He was a known adulterer, had some serious leftist ideas about the role of the central government, is on record as saying that capitalism would fall and be replaced by communism, and had his doubts about the reality of Christ's second coming. Now, I know the familiar refrain when it comes to his being taped cavorting with his concubines is that the FBI should not have done it, and of course you would be right in saying so. But the fact remains that if he had simply been faithful to his wife there would have been nothing to tape!
My point here is not to destroy the reputation of King, but to point out that he was just a man with human foibles like everyone else. His personal shortcomings do not diminish the great work he did in the Civil Rights Era; in fact they magnify them in a real way. It takes something special for a man, who makes mistakes just like all of us, to be willing to take a leadership role in a movement that was fraught with such danger. I think that makes King all the more special because he was able to overcome his own problems and help lead the way to America beginning to live up to her ideals of justice and equality. Maybe he was just a little more Moses than Jesus.
Then there is the flip side that is personified by Malcolm X. Most people hear the name and immediately conjure images of an angry, white hating, antisemetic Muslim bent on destroying American society...an American Bin Laden, if you will. The brief mentions he gets in textbooks reinforces that image and the conventional wisdom does as well. But is that all there is to the man, or is there more?
While Malcolm as a member of the Nation of Islam did embody the most hateful aspects of NOI "theology", he was much more than the caricature that is usually painted of him. Even during his time with the NOI, Malcolm counted as one of his closest personal friends Mike Wallace...yes, that Mike Wallace; intrepid reporter, father of Chris, and a well known Jew. So how antisemetic could Malcolm have really been to hold Mike Wallace as a dear friend?
And does anyone know that after being expelled from the NOI after the assasination of JFK, Malcolm became an orthodox Muslim and it was through his faith that he came to see the unity of mankind? His hajj to Mecca with people from the world over, of all different skin tones, languages, ethnicities, and nationalities woke him up to the fact that all people have the same basic needs...food, shelter, and a relationship with their God to nourish their spirits.
Surprised? I bet some of you are, because you have never had anyone offer this type of information to you. You have all just gone along with the flow and not stopped to think about whether the whole story was being told or not.
All of us need to lose our illusions about our historical heroes and villains. We need to look harder and deeper at what is true and what is not. We need to embrace the whole story as opposed to embracing only that which we want to believe. That way we can make honest judgements on our history and not be held at the mercy of those that tell us just what they want us to know.
Let's all lose our illusions so that we can step into the sunlight and see what's really going on!