MLK Day Reflections
Monday, Peter and I joined a couple hundred people from the San Marcos area at the LBJ MLK Crossroads Memorial for the start of the annual MLK walk. According to the city website, this is the only place in the United States that streets honoring these two leaders of the Civil Rights movement form an intersection. We bundled up in multiple layers since we don’t have much true winter weather gear. (Hey, it was cold for this part of the world with quite the wind chill. We even got snow on Monday night. Highly unusual for us!)
After the presentation of wreaths at the memorial by local civic groups and organizations, we began our walk to the Dunbar Recreation Center. Located in what is now known as the Dunbar Neighborhood, which was the home of the Black population of San Marcos from the end of the Civil War through the 1960s and 70s. It is now a historic district designed to protect this heritage in a growing city. https://endofaustin.com/2020/11/21/reclaiming-dunbar-black-history-anti-gentrification-and-community-engaged-research-in-san-marcos-texas/
The day was cold but the energy was high and it was a lovely moment to be with people who care about the history of our country and about making a future that includes everyone there and the diverse communities they represented.
I’ve been to numerous MLK events over the years. The first I remember was walking with students, faculty and staff from Trinity University through San Antonio. This march has been taking place since 1986 and is billed as the largest in the U.S. I don’t know how many people were there that day, but the walk is three miles long and it takes a commitment to be part of it no matter the weather. Like this week’s walk, it’s one of those times and places where diversity is visible and real. It’s an opportunity to remember why the day is a holiday and to acknowledge just how rare it is still for people of all backgrounds to join together for greater purpose yes, but also to walk in community. It’s also a reminder that we need to be part of a community to create lasting change
In that spirit, today, I want to share some words and ideas that inspire me and give me hope. Perhaps they will do the same for you.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inauguration is famous for his call to action “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” But I think these words resonate today as well:
“Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are– but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.
“Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?” https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address
Naomi Shihab Nye is a wonderful poet who lives in San Antonio. There’s a picture of her in my high school yearbook when she came to campus as part of some all-day event or another. Her prose poem, reconfigured at this link, about being stuck in an airport is well known, but worth remembering. It tells the story of being stuck in the airport and serving as a translator for a distraught Palestinian woman who thought her flight had been canceled rather than merely delayed.
After they sorted that out, they called the person who was to meet her, then they called Nye’s father and the two talked in Arabic. The no-longer distraught woman handed out homemade cookies covered in powdered sugar and every woman at the gate took one. The story/poem, “Gate 4-A” ends this way:
“And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
“And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.” https://poets.org/poem/gate-4
I’ve written before about Marge Piercy’s poem “Seven of Pentacles”. It’s a poem about doing the work of growing things and trusting that in time, they will bear fruit. Here are the final stanzas:
“Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.”
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/marge_piercy/poems/19240
And I found this one from Maya Angelou I saw on social media somewhere: “Courage is the most important of all virtues because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.”
Last, but certainly not least, a different quote from Martin Luther King, Junior than I usually see from his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. It reminds me that we’re only too busy if we allow ourselves to be. We only give up if we forget that change takes a long time, but can chose to have the time to make a difference.
“We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.”
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
Take care of yourself as you care for others,
Gage