In my last post, I raised a question that has been asked of me many times over, “Why are we learning this?” It’s a question that I’ve had a hard time answering myself, leading me to ask why we study anything at all. After pondering this for many years, I was led to an answer well worth the journey. But this discovery of course led to more questions, specifically why do we learn this or that? Why study the particular subjects that we often do? One I’d like to tackle now is:  Why learn stories? Specifically, old true stories. History. Oh, you know the adage: Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. But then wouldn’t we just learn all the horrible things? We learn stories of the past that move us, that reveal truths about humanity that sometimes horrify us and other times inspire us, rousing us to great acts of courage, kindness, and sacrifice. In other words, we learn history so that we don’t repeat it, and so that we do. If a story has that kind of power, the power to make history, it doesn’t need any embellishments or help from us to carry it along; it will practically tell itself. I’d like to share one such story with you now, if you don’t mind.

Several years ago, I went to lunch with a good friend of mine and fellow teacher, Stu Wexler. Stu is a historian and author of several groundbreaking books, including four on Martin Luther King’s assassination.  He has gone to great lengths to conduct his research, including countless trips down-south, endless hours sifting through public government files, dangerous interviews, and even the passing of a new federal bill to release cold-case materials to the public, which he astoundingly accomplished with his high school AP Government class. It should be intimidating for someone like me to have lunch and talk history with someone like Stu, but it’s not. Stu’s so humble that you can just sit, ask questions, and get pleasantly lost in the information. It feels a lot like spending an afternoon leafing through a stack of books at the public library. This is the comfortable state I was in when Stu told me about an interview he had with Dr. King, not the Dr. King, but MLK’s minister friend with the same name. 

Reverend Ed King, who is still alive today, was a Southern minister, senior leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a formidable grassroots organization, and like MLK, he was a nonviolence activist. As a white man, he was considered a race traitor and had been jailed, beaten, and tortured for his alliances. He was also an admirer of Martin Luther King and friendly with him. However, in ‘65 when King crossed the bridge at Selma for a second time and turned around, Ed King no longer trusted him as he once did. In the realm of 1960’s nonviolence activism, this act was quite controversial. One can easily understand MLK’s compassion and desire to protect his followers after Bloody Sunday, but to the devout nonviolence activists at the time, this was capitulation. The philosophy of nonviolence, which both Kings adopted from India, Ed King having traveled there to do so, specifically called for steadfastness when faced with violence from the opposition. Such persistence wasn’t just in spite of an incident of violence, but especially then.  It is then that the fraudulence of the opposition will be exposed in plain sight. They lose their following. To Ed and some others in the community, King lost his chance to gain some real ground.  Could he be trusted to take this movement all the way?

A couple years later, MLK organized his Poor People’s Campaign. Perhaps not commonly understood today, King wasn’t just fighting for civil rights of the black community but for equal rights among people, period. This campaign was a multi-racial coalition of poor people themselves, including every kind of poor one could imagine, from the poor whites of Appalachia to the Latinos in the fields of California. Their big act was a planned march from Mississippi to DC where they would confront politicians to address the problem of poverty and camp out so the public could really see what poverty looks like in this country. The problem was that MLK was losing popularity at this time. The polls were not looking good and mass rioting was growing. There was a pull away from the belief in nonviolence, his fundamental principle. He needed Ed King’s help and the weight of his political affiliations to make the march happen. Ed was not convinced this wouldn’t be Selma part two.

A week before his death, Martin Luther King sat down for an honest talk with Ed King. King told Ed that he acknowledged and understood his skepticism. He said he truthfully didn’t know if he did the right thing turning around at Selma. He said he knew that at some point his involvement in the movement would likely cost him his life, and he seemed to have peace about that. What did distress him was losing his good name, having his reputation destroyed even within his own community. For anyone whose reputation has been dragged through the mud, you know that your name is priceless, perhaps even more valuable than life, since it will outlast you. Martin told Ed he knew that J. Edgar Hoover would unleash stories to the media as he approached Washington. Some of those would be true, some embellished, some completely fabricated, but, regardless, the true stories would brand him and appear to corroborate the lies. He was an adulterer and a heavy drinker, both of which could cause him to lose friends, followers, and even his legacy. Already, he and his wife had received recordings of him with another woman and a letter from the FBI encouraging him to commit suicide over his “filthy” ways.  He knew what would hit newspapers all over the country if he walked. He shared as much with Ed King. And yet, he looked at Ed directly and said, “But, if I have to walk up the steps of the White House and hand Johnson our demands myself, I will do it.” Ed King told Stu that at that moment he felt he was “in the company of a saint.”

Martin Luther King never did take that long walk from Mississippi to D.C. but not because he wasn’t willing. He was killed before he had the chance. Nevertheless, the American poor had their march months later in the summer of ‘68. They were committed to the nonviolence movement. Since then, King’s name has been dragged through a swamp of ugly truths and lies several times over. He was a man of many mistakes, which we know about because he was willing to do what the average man wouldn’t, stick his neck out.

I quietly ate my soup while Stu told me this story as he had heard it from Ed King. When he had finished, I said, “Tell me again.”

[Photo Credit: Rowland Scherman, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]