Thoughts on the power of one person's influence: reflections on Dr. King's life

A brief homage to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

As an elder millennial, born in 1980, I enjoyed many of the cool “don’t see color” campaigns of the 1990’s. I loved the song by En Vogue, with the lyric, “free your mind, and the rest will follow, be color blind, don’t be so shallow” and another lyric by Janet Jackson from the song, “Rhythm Nation” on her album of the same name (which I had on cassette tape!) which opens with a spoken word pledge that goes,

We are a nation with no geographic boundaries
Bound together through our beliefs
We are like-minded individuals
Sharing a common vision
Pushing toward a world rid of color lines
Music, poetry, dance, unity
Music, poetry, dance, unity
Five, four, three, two, one...

The theme is a united United States of America — it was so awesome and so unprecedented. And of course Michael’s “Black or White” was an amazing song to listen to on repeat too (and by that time I had a c.d. player and could press a button and the song would magically play over and over, by itself!!). This song too was all about unity! There was never so not-racist a generation as kids in the 90’s. I know this because I had black friends, sold Girl Scout cookies with black (and brown) fellow troop members, and attended birthday parties and sleepovers with many of them. And hosted them.

From kindergarten through the 6th grade, I attended a public school in St. Paul, and my class had lots of white kids, black kids and Hmong kids (after the Vietnam war, Hmong people who had helped the CIA and US military with their "vote with your feet” campaign or just general recon, were resettled in St. Paul and today there is a thriving Hmong business community on University Ave in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul). Every February was Black History Month going as far back as, I want to say, 4th grade (?) and in the 6th grade, I did my history report on Sojourner Truth. She was an incredibly amazing woman who wanted not only equal rights for blacks but equal rights for women. (You may have heard of her famous, “Ain’t I Woman?” speech.)

Then in 1993, I started the 7th grade at an all girls Catholic school. It was in the suburbs and it was a huge adjustment — wearing a uniform every day, running on the cross country team, getting home to St. Paul well after dark on the “Activity bus” that picked up at 5:30 pm after practice was over, and just generally feeling plunged into a different socioeconomic world as the scholarship kid (though I tried to hide this for a while, it soon became obvious that I was not quite the same as the other girls, what with my dad-free household and my Merit Ultra Light smoking mom who drove an ’83 Dodge K-car and had a “boyfriend” who lived with us). Fast forward to January of that schoolyear. Mrs. Mork, my social studies teacher, played the “I have a dream speech” for us — just audio, which made it somehow more eerie and sad, the way the vibrato of his voice filled all the empty space in the room, causing the despair of his assassination to pour itself into all its nooks and crannies, winding itself in and out of each row of desks, forcing each school girl’s extraneous thoughts about hair and makeup and boys and calories to fall silent in reverence. Mrs. Mork sat at her desk and wept inaudibly. The melody of his voice, and I say this as someone who used to sing in choir and perform in musical theater, was stunning. But there is something else, maybe something ineffable, about his cadence. It’s mesmerizing. The recording ended: now the classroom was too quiet. And Mrs. Mork’s grief washed over me. It made me feel so sad for our country, for the world, that this earth had lost such an epic human being. As you might expect, our teacher then asked us to share what we thought our world would be like if no one were judged by their skin color, and only by the content of their character? Did we think we were getting closer to that day of Dr. King’s dream coming true?

I had known since the beginning of the year that we were not getting Martin Luther King, Jr. Day off of school because school mails out the days-off calendar every summer, prior to the first day. But it was still surprising to me, having had that day off every year while at public school. I thought, now is as good a time as any to lodge a complaint and protest this odd discrepancy, so I raised my hand and asked Mrs. Mork why we don’t get that day off school, considering other schools I knew were off on that day. She let there be a very long pause while she (I suspect) did the real life version of “let that sink in” before slowly answering, “I don’t know. It seems strange, doesn’t it? You’d have to ask the Dean.” Hmmm … the Dean. But to get a change like this, I knew I would need to go to the top — the real top, Sister Katherine, the head of admissions. I knew if the nuns decided the student body should have a particular day off, they/we would get it. And all I’d have to say was, “Don’t you think God would want us to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr’s contributions to our country?” (The nuns have all passed away now and the Convent attached to the school has since been converted into other uses. Also, my mom told me afterward that that was super manipulative, and well done, Sarah Louise. She was proud of me; however, I do want to clarify here and posit that when we use our power of influence to get people to do something they are glad they did, that we have motivated them. That only when we get them to do something they regret, or by using deception, have we manipulated them. My own moral compass flags deceptive or manipulative acts. I’m certainly capable of manipulation but avoid engaging in it in order to avoid the regret that follows.) So that’s what I did. Sr. Katherine regularly visited students in the dining room during our lunch hour; it took a few days to be able to approach her without interruption but once I did, I mentioned that we had listened to the “I have a dream” speech in Mrs. Mork’s class, and that it was really an inspirational speech. Now Sr. Katherine was probably about 60 years old at that time, so she had lived through the civil rights movement as an adult, and I knew for a fact that they had a TV in the Convent and that the sisters all watched the news, in order to know who and what to pray for. This was not a contemplative order she was a part of. She kind of diffidently said, “oh, that’s good. I’m glad your studies are going well” (something along those lines, of course my memory is imperfect), when I said, “I was wondering why we don’t have Martin Luther King day off school? When most schools have that day off and it’s a federal holiday?” Now, this woman of the cloth totally lacked guile: when I tell you she looked at me as if I were suggesting each student receive a free subscription to Mechanics Weekly, I am only slightly exaggerating. She was baffled. “Um, why would we do that?” is what her face said. What she said aloud was, “Well, Sarah, I’ve never thought about it before. We just never have.” I said, “I think God would want us to celebrate this great man, and what he did for the Civil Rights movement. We would literally still have separate drinking fountains if not for this one man.” She thought about it. I could see in her eyes that what I was saying was starting to make sense, and after a moment, she asked, “Is it that important to you?” And I said, “It should be important to everyone! But yes, it’s that important to me.” (It occurred to me that she was thinking I might just want a day off school but then I thought, if she thinks that, we have bigger problems.)

The following January (January of 1995 when I was in the 8th grade), we were given the day off of school for MLK Day.

We’ve got a lot of problems in this world, and the identity politics and “everyone is racist” divide and conquer propaganda is working: it’s undoing all of the amazing good that Dr. King did when inspiring millions and millions of people to see beyond color, beyond race, to what is in a person’s heart, and what actions they take to make the world a better place.

Dr. King is so personally inspiring to me because he never gave up. l don’t think for a second he thought he was going to make the difference that he did (because he literally said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope"). Yes, an entire cohort of voters had to demand that Congress pass the Civil Rights Act, but one man inspired them to! Of course he was part of a larger movement (and let’s agree here that this essay is not supposed to be the “historical analysis on the impact of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr on the successes of the Civil Rights movement”) but consider this: one of my closest friends in grade school was black (we were in the same grade at the same school and in the same girl scout troop) and her mom was a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. You know why her mom was even considered for that job? Martin Luther King Jr. At the last 3 companies I’ve worked for since moving to Washington, DC, my immediate supervisors have been black women. You know why? Martin Luther King, Jr. A good work friend I made at a job in St Paul, a white woman, is married to a black man. You know why? Martin Luther King, Jr. You say Loving vs Virginia, I say the hearts of the Supreme Court Justices in that case had been unlocked by the kindness, the strength, and the virtue of one way-maker, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This man was a walking talking living breathing hearts-and-minds campaign. No wonder the deep state had him assassinated. And he was flawed too, making him all the more relatable!

I have been blogging and writing and being a part time “content creator” for many years, since 2011, and for just as many, I have asked myself, “do you really think it’s worth the time you spend writing just to reach five hundred or a thousand people?” This quote from Dr. King inspires me.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

As mentioned in a recent post, I was raised to be someone who objected to abuse of power by authority, not only because I have the Constitutional right to, but because by staying silent, I am indicating that I am unthankful for freedom itself. In a complementary fashion, I have a spiritual belief that when we don’t speak up or take action, the silence or inaction is weighted: it becomes a prayer for everything to stay the same. So I write and take action to answer my own prayer for justice, freedom from tyranny, and for not just world peace, but for world joy. Speaking up matters — speaking up led to one suburban Catholic school in Minnesota starting to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy, in the mid ‘90’s. You know what? Better late than never.

Thank you, Dr. King, for making a difference in my life.

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