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THE SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY of Martin Luther King Jr. is ironically anti-kingly. It may be said to have formally begun in 1215 when a host of English barons stormed London and forced King John, in a meadow at Runnymede, to sign the Magna Carta, renouncing his absolute sovereignty and recognizing the rights of "freemen" (non-serfs).
Notable ancestors in MLK's spiritual lineage later would include Thomas Jefferson, who in the Declaration of Independence made the remarkable, war-tested assertion that "all men are created equal," a principle programmed into a new nation's soul. But not its laws. It would require another war--America's worst, because our enemy was our brother--to accomplish that, or to begin to. Systemic racial discrimination, enforced by terror in the American South, lingered for decades after the Civil War until a movement in which King was pre-eminent brought Runnymede to Selma and Tupelo and Richmond.
King had not only ancestors but also progeny. After his assassination, a women's movement went a long way in freeing half the American population from social subordination and rigid role expectation. Today, homosexuals (leaving aside the merits of their case) demand equal legal standing with the heterosexual majority, and in a few states have achieved it.
LONG JOURNEY
So in celebrating MLK's life, we are really celebrating a long quest, a centuries-old and unfinished journey that he in his time brilliantly led, practically and poetically ("I have a dream "). The quest is for Justice, and it calls irresistibly to the American soul, haunting our dreams when we deny it, compelling our allegiance sometimes almost in spite of ourselves.
The Justice idea is powerful and informative of our culture, both formal and popular. Over all our laws and their enforcement looms the Justice Department; the first team of comic-book superheroes, formed as Hitler was inflicting bloody injustice on Europe, and Imperial Japan on Asia, was the Justice Society of America. From old parchments to funny books, the most potent appeal to an American is to his sense of Justice--"That's not fair!"
The Justice whose magic MLK deftly tapped has many American variants, of course, not simply a "liberal" one, and rare is the hand through whose fingers some of this gold dust doesn't slip. "Frontier justice," the chivalrous desire to give the brutalizer of the innocent "what's coming to him," lives on in the capital-punishment laws of most states. Foes of abortion argue that feminism's call for Justice is unjustly inconsistent when it dehumanizes the unborn. Even a heart as large as MLK's can contain a blocked Justice chamber: His heart was painfully cold toward South Vietnamese menaced by that obscene parody of Justice, communism, whose depredations surpassed anything Bull Connor ever inflicted on Freedom Riders.
Finally, Justice is terrible--"dread," as King John might have said--and not only for those whose prerogatives it trims. It is also a dread thing for its recipients, because it carries a mandate, almost a hereditary curse. And that is--"Pass it on."
Heartbreakingly, many of those for whom Martin Luther King directly struggled, African-Americans, two generations after his martyrdom perpetrate a gross injustice, one that thwarts his dream of equality as effectively as Jim Crow, as insidiously as a nightrider. For while millions of black Americans have seized the promise of King's legacy, federal data show that an astounding 72 percent of births to African-American women are out of wedlock.
When black fathers fail to become a part of their children's lives, they are unjustly sentencing those children to probable misery, manifested by scholastic underachievement, low income, and a greater risk of criminality, to merely begin the roster of dysfunctions. When black mothers perfunctorily become pregnant without thought to marriage, they also deny justice to the babies in their arms, whatever their intent. Of course the same is true for whites, Asians, etc.--but it is Black America whose children disproportionately suffer from this particular want of Justice.
Many good people understand that the normality of fatherless black families wastes the King patrimony, and so oppose this human destruction. God speed their labors. Because it is an all- too-human habit for those gifted with Justice to then fail to share it in a practical and personal way, standing instead in the bad company of kings, colonizers, and kleagles.
