I'm not in the business of telling people how to honor heroes or celebrate holidays, but for what it's worth I'll let you know how I will honor Martin Luther King's legacy this Monday. I don't mean to be flippant when I say that I honor King by diverting attention to other people. Don't get me wrong--it would be hard to overrate King as an inspiring person who helped create transformational change in this country. He was the natural recipient of praise and adulation for many people in his generation, in generations that followed, and will be for many generations to come--and deservingly so. But I find it more useful to celebrate his most important ideas than to simply eulogize the man himself.
Perhaps the most salient, time-tested point King has ever made was that people should not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (It is time-tested in that to this day we struggle to live up to this aspirational utterance.) In this spirit, we should take a look back at some of the transformational figures in King's age whose character may have been misjudged. An example that sticks out in my mind is that of
Bayard Rustin, who was a driving force for the March on Washington but who took a back seat to King on the national stage. This was no mistake. Of course, someone had to be the face of the movement, and it was only natural that Rustin--instead of trying to push himself into the forefront--worked to strengthen King's position in the movement. But why did Rustin have to operate in the shadows of more prominent leaders? It didn't have to do with the color of his skin, but I
assume that it had everything to do with the fact that he was gay and socialist, which were associations that in his time (and, sadly, ours too)
did reflect on the content of your character. As a result, Rustin, a guru of nonviolent resistance who cut his teeth working in Ghandi's movement in India, although still prominent in his own respect, was met with suspicion from people inside and outside the movement for his sexual orientation and his rather moderate socialist views. (After all, he was openly critical of Communism and avoided the big-C label for himself.)
In short, I feel that we fall short of living up to the high-minded ideas that King professed when we succumb to the same stereotypes that made certain heroes seem less consequential during the Civil Rights Movement. I submit that a Bayard Rustin was every bit as important to the movement, whether people knew it back then or not. I believe we can, without conceit or delusion, attribute King-like credit retroactively to Rustin and perhaps others like him. I'd be willing to bet that Rustin never gets his own holiday, but I'd consider it a victory in my mind if I hear his name on Monday, whether uttered in the same breath as King's name or not.
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