Remembering Dr. King Today and Often
Abraham Lincoln warned of “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings”* opting instead to create a government of the people, for the people, by the people, a phrase so ordinary for us today that it no longer calls for quotation marks. Yet those kings of the material world are in seats of extraordinary power today. Their presence will be writ large in the extravagant and highly politicized presidential inauguration taking place in the United States. Yet, purely by the chance arrangement of the Gregorian calendar, that event, with all the hoopla surrounding it, happens to coincide with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. That’s my focus today. Another kind of King.
Nonviolent resistance isn’t exactly trendy these days but from the late 19th century to the mid-20th, it was a completely radical idea, to take on power with love, to conquer tyranny without resorting to arms. It came to be personified in the lives of two men on two continents, whose journeys never intersected in real time but if ever two lives appear retrospectively to be in conversation, it’s those two.
I wrote Threads of Peace because of other books I’d read: accounts of Dr. and Mrs. King’s visit to India, about Howard Thurman’s visit before that, about long historical connections between Black civil rights thinkers and the Indian independence movement. And because no one seemed to have explored that connection before in a way that might open it up for young readers. Because I have an autograph book from my mother’s youth with Mahatma Gandhi’s signature on the first page. Because the connections haunted me. Because the world seemed to be moving away from the idea that nonviolence can be strong, or that peace can equal justice, or that justice even matters. I’ve never felt more at risk from authoritarians and would-be-tyrants, from religious bigotry and intolerance. These are the trends I see manifesting in the US and in India, two countries I call my own, and perhaps also lurking beneath the fissures showing up now in the society and politics of my third country, Canada.
It’s never felt more important to me to remember both Gandhi and King, think about what they each represented in the world, and stand our ground for the principles we believe in, so we can hope to move beyond this time of dissonance and hatred. This time of oligarchs when businessmen (I use the gendered term with intent) are kings and like all kings, are doing their best to accrue as much power as they can, while they can.
*Abraham Lincoln, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
September 30, 1859
