There’s a lot our history textbooks leave out. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy is at the center of this issue. As Victoria Hodge from Personally Political covered this week, Dr. King was far more radical than he’s often portrayed. For example, he advocated for democratic socialism and staunchly opposed the Vietnam War, a stance that prompted 168 newspaper and editorial boards to denounce him, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. At the time he was killed, he had a disapproval rating of nearly 75%.
Reading Victoria’s newsletter got me thinking about the sources I’ve personally used to learn about Dr. King’s life, work, and legacy. What my high school history books lacked, my teachers tried to supplement with screenings of Selma and photocopies of A People’s History. In college, I had the opportunity to take more comprehensive classes, read more academic articles, and attend more lectures dedicated to Black history. But what I’ve noticed this year is that a lot of these narratives still frame Dr. King as the figurehead of a movement of the past.
As the Black Lives Matter movement has shown us, the fight is far from over. Stanford’s own King Institute, which houses the King Papers Project and other educational initiatives, is still notoriously underfunded, despite thousands of petition signatures and more than $10,000 in donations my graduating class collected the first day members launched #StandWithKing.
So this weekend, I wanted to find works of art, and specifically poetry, that keep Dr. King’s life and work alive, in conversation with where the world is now. I started my search online, and found a bunch of listicles already out there of poems about Dr. King, so I decided not to turn this newsletter into yet another one of them. But I do want to take a closer look at a poem a friend sent me, which she thought I would appreciate, and not just for its eerily similar title.
Harmony Holiday is a writer and dancer, who has published four poetry collections. She founded and runs Afrosonics, an archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics. Her poem “Microwave Popcorn” uses fragmented lyricism and a seemingly innocuous title to accentuate the public’s detachment and apathy, as brutalities simultaneously unfold in front of them. In a quote accompanying her piece, Holiday says:
“This poem addresses spectator culture, the so-called emancipated spectator, the baffled displacement that occurs when voyeurism is confused with freedom or empathy or comprehension, and the numbing auto-didacticism that in turn displaces interaction.”
Spectator culture: that’s what we can’t let happen. We can’t just sit back and watch law enforcement murder Black people. It isn’t our role to gawk just because we’re on the other side of the screen. Dr. King didn’t work towards a dream he didn’t know if he would see become a reality in his lifetime, for his work not to be continued. The apathetic bystander doesn’t get to be innocent. This doesn’t work unless we get enough people to be all in.
These are the thoughts I had as I drifted to sleep last night, and are what inspired my newsletter today. This work needs to be continued. Read some of the King Papers Project. Learn more about Dr. King’s beliefs. Create art that inspires, art that agitates, art that motivates us to fight onward. But most importantly, fight onward.