2009-01-30
I just got back from a trip to Atlanta yesterday. Since we just celebrated the election of America's first black president and MLK's birthday, it seemed timely to head over to the neighborhood where he grew up, which is now a national historic sight. I took the MARTA (train) from the airport there, then walked a few blocks to the neighborhood. On the way, saw a window a few streets over with a nice PROGRESS (Shepard Fairey) poster in the window, a lot of empty lots and garbage, and a lot of urban core gone shabby. I felt right at home (I might have been walking in downtown Bridgeport, but the high-rises were much bigger in HOTlanta). I had intended to maybe see some other things in town, like the puppet museum and the museum of paper history, but I ended up spending the better part of 3 hours in the neighborhood where my fellow capricorn grew up (Go January! I love to hate you and hate to love you).
I am too much of a white lady to speak to anything about the power of this gentleman. I learned a few interesting things:
1. Martin was called "ML" when he was growing up.
2. His dad made the kids recite bible verses from memory before they sat down to dinner.
3. The sink in his childhood home is ingenious, with a lovely built in drainage board painted a nice shade of aqua. I would have taken a picture, but it was forbidden. I find it sort of hilarious how when doing historical re-imaginings, they leave the kids' favorite toys--jacks, monopoly, rollerskates, laying around the rooms. I imagine, given the nature of MLK's childhood, that not cleaning up after yourself would be grounds for more bible verse recitation.
4. One of his childhood chores was to bring coal up from the basement. He liked this because it was "a man's job" and was paid .25 cents a week to do it. I would like to point out at this juncture that my childhood allowance was .10 cents.
5. He graduated from high school at 15. The summer between college and his enrollment at Morehouse, he moved to Simsbury, Connecticut to work in the tobacco fields. It was 1944. At the time, there was a severe labor shortage in the industry, and the farm (Cullman Brothers) had worked out a deal with Morehouse College that meant their work would pay for tuition and board. At the museum, they seemed to suggest that his time in Connecticut made him aware of the power of the ministry, which was what he was to study in college. There is more interesting information on this here.
Including this: Saturdays were usually spent in Hartford where they could shop, attend live musical shows and eat in any restaurant they chose. “Yesterday we didn’s work so we went to Hardford we really had a nice time there. I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ...ate in one of the finest resturant in Hardford. And we went to the largest shows there. It is really a large city,” Dr. King wrote to his mother on June 18 1944. " and this: The journey was an eye opener for Dr. King. From Atlanta to Washington, D.C. the railroad cars were segregated and blacks were seated in the dining cars behind a curtain. From Washington north he could sit wherever he wished. In his autobiography he writes: “After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow [racially restricted] car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta.”
I was thinking about this when I flew home last night to Windsor Locks, which is 15 miles from Simsbury.
I was thinking also about the folks from Springfield who I met at the museum, and who I joked with about how tiny MLK was. They couldn't believe that he fit into his little suits, and I mentioned that in the video I'd seen at the visitor's center, Coretta Scott King talks about how the first time she saw him in Boston, she was struck by how tiny he was, and how he looked like a little boy. She said that feeling dissipated soon after she spoke with him.
I think what I liked best was this, his Nobel Prize Speech, which speaks to the power of the people who made him winning the award possible. It made me think of lots of recent events, the election of Barack Obama, the other people on the flight that landed in the Hudson River, and I wanted to share it because it made me happy.
From here.
"Today I come to Oslo as a trustee, inspired and with renewed dedication to humanity. I accept this prize on behalf of all men who love peace and brotherhood. I say I come as a trustee, for in the depths of my heart I am aware that this prize is much more than an honor to me personally.
Every time I take a flight I am always mindful of the man people who make a successful journey possible -- the known pilots and the unknown ground crew.
So you honor the dedicated pilots of our struggle who have sat at the controls as the freedom movement soared into orbit. You honor, once again, Chief (Albert) Luthuli of South Africa, whose struggles with and for his people, are still met with the most brutal expression of man's inhumanity to man.
You honor the ground crew without whose labor and sacrifices the jet flights to freedom could never have left the earth.
Most of these people will never make the headlines and their names will not appear in Who's Who. Yet when years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live -- men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization -- because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness' sake."