In Virginia, we had to grow up in the 1980s with the awkward sounding Lee-Jackson-King Day, a mismash that I still haven’t quite shaken when I come to describe what this day is — and the legacy and consequence of growing up in a Virginia still struggling with the inheritance of Massive Resistance and the Triangle Trade.
Of course, as schoolchildren we all learned about the “I Have A Dream” speech as one of the most iconic of the 20th century, difficult as it was for us to digest. As students in the chairs, we didn’t grow up with institutionalized racism… it was a ghost, something that haunted our parents and grandparents. The very idea of a “whites only” water fountain was preposterous.
…but we were taught about that ghost anyway.
It was in college where I got to grapple most directly with Martin Luther King Jr.’s work, specifically his magisterial (and relatively brief) Letters From a Birmingham Jail.
One of the first lines that we as Catholics were introduced to? Was the following… because what MLK Jr. believed was something that Catholics intrinsically believed — and it clicked:
How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.
A threat to injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Freedom is never given by the oppressor but taken by the oppressed. An unjust law is no law. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. An oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. Everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and so forth.
These are lines that spring from memory.
It’s very easy for those who do not experience a certain form of oppression to ignore its existence. These things simply do not concern us, and though we empathize with the other, we have our own struggles, desires, hopes, dreams, achievements and setbacks.
What MLK Jr. asked us to do was to reach beyond the idea of oppression as a merely racial construct, though King was painfully aware of this form of oppression and fought it his entire life. Rather, this idea of the Body of Christ — injustice contra justice, of unjust laws contra just laws — that compelled all of society and not its fractious parts to admit and confess that suffering could be monopolized when expressed as a people; that if kept siloed such pain festered into something dangerous and violent.
This tension that MLK Jr. talks about in his Letters was a sort of societal acedia that only found its full expression in catharsis — not violence. What MLK Jr. asked of us was not an accession of power or a mere transition of power relations, but rather a recognition. Not a demand that everyone approach the table with authentic pain or a cheap imitation of empathy (how could this ever be?), but with a sincerity that approaches the Other and listens, comprehends, sympathizes… and shares in a solution.
This will seem like a strange juxtaposition of thoughts, but Victor Hugo — author of Les Miserables — was no stranger to grief and oppression, his being that of circumstance rather than of social architecture. In a 1843 letter to a friend who experienced a similar loss, Hugo writes:
We have both received a blow almost at the same time, — you in the loss of your brother, I in that of my daughter. What can you say to me, and what can I say to you? Let us weep together, let us hope together. Death has its revelations, — the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter has a soul; I saw this soul; I touched it, so to speak. It was with me for eighteen years; my eyes are still full of its radiance; even in this world she visibly belonged to the life above. I suffer as you do; hope as I do.
…and let the hope be married to action. That is the great lesson of Dr. King.