On Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Presidential race brings a new spirit to the day

by Alan Jones

The celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day has a particular poignancy this presidential election year. There's been a lot of talk about our wanting "to believe in America" again. Some of us are experiencing a cautious optimism that politics doesn't have to be business as usual. With citizens like Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker and Barack Obama, the African American struggle for justice and freedom has, at last, become what it always was, a universal story. The cry for universal freedom heard through the particular stories of oppressed peoples was made evident in the recent movie "The Great Debaters." The movie brilliantly expressed, through the particulars of a specific struggle, the truth that freedom and dignity are part of the birthright of all human beings. Are we finally getting it into our heads and hearts that when one human being is in chains we are all diminished?

Martin Luther King was committed to nonviolence but he was not passive. He was subversive. His celebrated letter from the Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963) still challenges us. "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed ... For years now I have heard the word 'Wait.' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'"

Now there's a new form of resistance to change to add to the obscene request to "wait" for justice. The message is that nothing can be done because the laws of the market are inexorable - like the laws of nature and of God. The bottom line is the supreme deity. But here the African American experience gives us hope, provides us with a strategy for change. We can become subversives and even tricksters to turn the world of those who claim to have a handle on reality upside down. Think of Sophia Auld - a naive, well-meaning woman, who, in 1826, taught an 8-year-old slave boy to read. She was unwittingly subversive because she didn't know the "proper" way to treat him. That slave was Frederick Douglass, who wrote that Sophia "did not deem it impudent ... for a slave to look her in the face." Underneath Douglass's statement lies a brilliant strategy for change - the strategy of "stealing" back what had always been his by right.

Sophia did the unforgivable. She taught him to read. "Just at this point in my progress, Mr. Auld found what was going on and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read."

Douglass concludes, "It was a great achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom."

And here's the subversive joke. Douglass, in running away, was an admitted thief. What did he really steal? He "stole" himself! "All the education I possess, I may say, I have stolen as a slave. I did manage to steal a little knowledge of literature, but I am now in the eyes of the American law a thief and a robber, since I have not only stolen a little knowledge of literature, but have stolen my body also."

Was he right to escape, to learn to read? After all, according to law, he was owned by a Col. Lloyd? The question then and the question now is, "How do you change the rules?" How do the oppressed escape from a plantation culture and enter the true world that can see that slavery itself is a form of terrible theft? Author Lewis Hyde asks, "What do you do when you are born into a world where two distinct moral systems are in conflict?"

In the spirit of the Rev. King, isn't it our job to steal back what rightly belongs to all of us, without exception? Douglass, by simply writing and speaking, undercut plantation culture. The assumption was that such things belonged inherently and eternally to whites. So, let's ask ourselves, "What things do we think of as inherently ours and yet, in reality, belong to everyone?" Education, health care, security, a living wage, a safe environment? That's as much a question for today as it was a 150 years ago. It's also an essential question for this election year.

The Rev. Alan Jones is the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

This article appeared on page C - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle