This week, as we do every year around the celebration of Dr. King’s birthday, we had at my university a well attended breakfast of remembrance for this great man. It is a joyful celebration where his memory is punctuated by stories about his brief but fruitful thirty-nine-year long life. There have been many beings traveling through this planet at various times of our recorded history that were beacons of hope and understanding in an otherwise bleak and dark ocean of hate and confusion. Those beings stood clearly and openly in our human development chronicle as spiritual milestones.

Some of those figures had the nature of philosophical or religious beliefs we call now deity or its variations. Whether we are believers or not, for Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Confucians, amongst others, the names of Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha or Confucius stand clearly as pillars of change for the betterment of humankind and many of us go through life happy to follow their philosophies. The name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was certainly one of those added to the list, if not as deity, at least as one of their greatest and most faithful followers.

History has proven that those of us who are called great are not truly recognized universally as so while those of their generations are alive and well. Dr King is no exception. It is easy for many of us to fall into the trap of looking at his memory strictly as a black prophet, a civic leader or a politician. One does not stop wondering the number of books, speeches and interviews from many who knew him or claim to have known him and appear on the stage around his traditional January tributes trying to get light in the obscurity of “their lives of quiet desperation” described by Henry David Thoreau. And in many occasions, it is his humanity, foibles and all, which appear to be the comments of the day.

There are the usual insensitive gossips about his private life, the so-called investigations by the FBI about his political inclinations, issues without historic consequences that also died. It seems that his image shines under the spot light of those who knew or thought knew him or chronicled him, but not his soul and his conscience. We limit ourselves though, if we look at this man solely as a black civil rights fighter. In the long thread of history, the prejudices, discriminations and abuses visited and imposed on the descendants of slaves in this country we now call African Americans were real and he would not let us forget it; so he knew better and went beyond. He knew that human discrimination against a group of people is evidence of human prejudice against all peoples.

It was up to this black man to stand up and say! Enough! As white men or women, our voices would not have been credible because we would not have suffered the immensity of the violations in our own flesh; intellectually we would have sounded virtuous; emotionally we would have been a fake. Dr. King’s cause was bigger than that battle and was about a war for universal principles that are as eternal as the fight between good and evil.

If you were dispossessed, he was there for you. If you were white or black, man or woman, straight or gay he would stand on your side in a rainbow of equality emanating from the respect he had for us as members of the human race. Dr. King could have been a reincarnation of one of the rebelling soldiers or Founding Fathers who were raising their voices against England during our War of Independence, or a Mahatma Gandhi who wanted to free his Indian land from the British bondage. He could have witnessed and opposed the pain of the victims of the holocaust in Europe during World War II. He could have been knocking at our doors and consciences rallying against our own apathy about poverty and ignorance. The difference would have been only a matter of the historical times when his heart had beaten.

In all of those cases, he would not have had a skin of any color or a voice of any specific accent because he would have had a skin of many colors and a voice of many inflections: yours and mine. So today, we must avoid misreading him, when we remember a life dedicated to others until it evolved into a mixture of heroism and a display of martyrdom he neither looked for nor avoided.

As time goes by and so do the lives of those who, like us, witnessed his work or, like others, knew him personally, his figure will grow. He will be left alone on the grounds of History. Lone gone will be his interpreters: family, friends, sympathizers, enemies, all mixed together in the world of the forgotten or, at best, the quoted. He will stand on his own in the same sacred halls where others long gone stand now as well. It is then that his contribution will be recognized, perhaps by our grandchildren and his own, maybe by a world that will ignore the mundane routines of his life and will concentrate on the greatness of his legacy and will listen to the true meaning of his words.

That is possibly when the rest of humanity will have realized the vision he had of the other side of the mountain we have failed to see yet. As he said, longevity had its place, but we know that eternity was his alternative. Let us remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the man of all times who happened to live with us when we needed it and left us a message of hope to live by we still require. But most of all, that there will be others who follow his principles and his example with deeds and not with words for breakfasts or banquets. The outside appearance may distract some of us now, but it is the inside form of his soul that counts, and that has and will never have any color. And that is my point of view today.

Dr. Montesino, solely responsible for this article, is the Editor of LatinoWorldOnline.com and Senior Lecturer in the Computer Information Systems Department at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts.
 

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