Reflections on MLK

Every year, MLK Day for most students and faculty comes as a welcome respite from the first hectic weeks of Spring semester classes and an extra day for catching up. For me, it's always been the time every year when I listen to Dr. King’s 1963 speech during the march on Washington.

When I finished graduate school almost a decade ago, for a “graduation” gift I asked for a complete set of recordings of Dr. King’s speeches. My mom granted me this wish, and since then every January I would play the cassette that plays in its entirety the speech that he made in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln on August 28, 1963. Also, during times I feel down and defeated, I find myself putting this cassette in my old walkman, and listening to the stirring words of a man so full of longing for his beloved country.

1,686 words. 23 minutes.

Every time, it’s the same: By the 1000th word, I’m already in tears. Somewhere between words carefully crafted by an accomplished intellectual, and the musical cadence of a preacher’s voice, I feel the depth of my own personal longings and hopes for the future.

I remember my own experiences of prejudice – the sneers and looks I got in a high school in the Midwest, the taunts and jeering I used to get while walking down fraternity row, …

There was even this one time, here in the town where I live now. We were parked next to a children's play park, and I was loading the kids in the van, and a young man in his car almost ran over my children going at almost 40 miles per hour, and proceeded to cuss me out about my children being all over the road. Never mind that we were in a 15 mph zone with a high concentration of children. I just looked at his face and etched it in my memory, and not a day goes by without me wondering where he is now, and what he is doing, and who he’s doing it to. Often I would fantasize that he had since regretted the episode, and is now doing some kind of charity work somewhere, or maybe lecturing young men on how to respect everyone around them.

As an immigrant and a person of color, I learned to accept that these things will always happen. The sordid and scarred past is something I have to accept if I genuinely love this country – much in the same way you commit your life to your spouse, embracing warts and all – and I do love this country. So did MLK. You could sense his deep love between the lines of every speech he made, and I shared this love with him. But he expressed this love better than I ever could.

In the end, however, it’s not really about race. There is a deeper reason I am moved by the speech I play every year on MLK day. Race represents something deeper : it is whatever makes you feel helpless, or trapped, or cursed. It is something that is so intrinsic to you that you do not think you can ever escape it, or the consequences of it. After graduate school, I returned to the third world, inspired by Dr. King's own decision to live in the South instead of staying up north where he could live more comfortably. Ironically, however I would then listen to the speech when I found myself wondering how I could ever put my growing family through school on a salary that is smaller than that of a minimum-wager in the States. And when I was back in the States, there were times I would be reflecting on the future that I had set for myself and my family, wondering if I had bitten more than I could swallow, and fearing the worst… and I would find myself listening to the speech once again.

So, to me, MLK Day is really all about yearning to be free, free at last. Free from the things you think are chaining you down but really are not. Free to inspire needed changes in the world around you and in you. Free to lay down your life for what is right and true.

Free to dream.