The Writing on the Wall: Hero worship
MLK Day: We don’t have to deify the great men of our past to remember them in the present
By Brian Goodman, opinion editor
Posted on January 18, 2007

We in America pride ourselves on our liberal democratic (read: ancient Greek) traditions, among them a tenacious dedication to the concept of “separation of church and state.” But while we as a political body may be secular, we are by no means irreligious. As much as we may try, every man and woman must have something to worship, whether God, money, sex, other people, themselves and so on.

Politically, we do much the same thing. We have taken our “founding fathers” and turned them into our patriarchs, the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New. We have made the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution our scriptures, and Washington, D.C., our Mecca; only Disney World could rival D.C. for that title, a commentary on capitalism in and of itself. We even have our Stephens, Pauls and Peters who were martyred for the cause, men like Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These men from our history were undoubtedly great men, but they were men nonetheless; being giants among men is different than being a deity among men. King, as a preacher by trade and a Christian by faith, would assumedly take issue with the hero worship we submit to him every third Monday in January, well demonstrated at the celebration in Wilson Hall earlier this week. Among the proceedings was a “Litany of Commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” a back-and-forth interaction with the audience that was not just a little reminiscent of a Catholic Mass. It is not merely hero worship, nor can it be dismissed as such. There is a certain mythos surrounding our celebration of the Civil Rights Movement, an invented sacredness that must be protected; I submit that the strong aversion in many circles from discussing King’s sexual indiscretions stems from the veneer of infallibility that we have unjustifiably cast over his memory.

King, in life, made it very clear that his idea of victory in the struggle did not hinge upon the defeat of the white man, as though they were a declared enemy. Rather, it was “…to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority…The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” His was undoubtedly successful, as embodied by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in the holiday that bears his name. But, as did Germany following the fall of the Third Reich, the United States has been trying to wash its collective hands of the sins of slavery and Jim Crow. We have been shamed — into reconciliation, yes — but have in a way turned our history into a Lady Macbeth-like “damned spot” that will not come off. Celebrating MLK Day is almost like attending church on Easter and Christmas, as though a day or two of penance is sufficient to atone for a year’s worth of sins.

As self-destructive as this may seem, however, encapsulating the past, present and future of the Civil Rights Movement gives us one day of guilty memories in exchange for 364 days of unbridled acceptance of the status quo. Lighting our candles and sacrificing mail delivery soothes our national guilt and permits us to spend the rest of the year ignoring the urban gentrification, economic and educational disparities, cultural stereotypes and the color-sensitive justice system — the very problems onto which King and his movement were attempting to shift their focus at the time of his death.

By attending a liturgical service in mid-January in the name of King the god, we are then able to dismiss King the man and the things for which he stood, the things for which he died. Dr. Cornel West, for his part, refused in his speech to buy into such a definition. He painted King as a mere mortal, a mortal who nevertheless was able to dramatically change the world.

The deification of King serves at the very least to get us off the hook. If he was a man like the rest of us, we have no excuse for sitting back in a self-medicated and mass-mediated stupor as the world continues its slow crawl to hell. If instead we saw him as a man, imperfect as every man but bearing an impact that very few men can match. It does not disgrace the memory of King to celebrate the life and achievements of the man. For him, and for us, it may be the only way to remember and celebrate the man, and continue to live and achieve his dream.

Brian Goodman is a senior communications major.