Fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and I am fascinated by the work implied in that distance. Fifty years is not long ago, since there are still living witnesses, but it is also a long time ago. We struggle to remember things from ten years ago, or from last week.
When we say the man was shot fifty years ago, we mean that it was a tragic event and it is now in the past. Some might point out that things have improved only a little, or not at all, since then. But what I’m thinking about is something else.
What I’m thinking about is not what his death ended but what his death began. It was precisely the murder that made the subsequent pieties possible. Deeply unpopular by the time he was killed, he steadily became more popular afterward, ascending to secular sainthood, and then into a symbolism both absurd and obscene. For example, the FBI is fond of quoting him.
In his final years, he had given up the binaries of black and white which had a Manichean clarity so consoling to the well-meaning whites. He had turned his focus, confusingly to them, to poverty and militarism, and in so doing had lost them back to their whiteness. It is easier for the well-meaning whites to repudiate their racist cousins—which action, in any case, lends a glow of self-regard—than it is for them to repudiate the military, which is the knife that butters their bread.
He lost them. They only began to forgive him after their kin killed him. Alive, he was too much. Dead and perfected, he was just what they needed.
Of that night, his father said: “My first son, whose birth had brought me such joy that I jumped up in the hall outside the room where he was born and touched the ceiling—the child, the scholar, the preacher, the boy singing and smiling, the son—all of it was gone.”
In Memphis, my tears flowed as though this were my own son, or my own father. Fifty years pass, then comes a day for reflecting on the past, a past so fully occluded by the present that it is impossible to reflect on it.