Of Birthdays, Despair, and Dreams

My birthday falls within two days of Dr. Martin Luther King’s. I didn’t know this until he was assassinated in 1968, and I don’t think the closeness of our birthdays began to influence me until years later during the public debate over establishing a national holiday in his honor.

Twice the holiday observance has fallen on my actual birthday. The first time, I was in a small boat floating down the Ganges River with a man named Moon. The second time I teased my little granddaughter, telling her that she had a school holiday because of me.

Our birthdays have became linked in my mind so that, as they approach, my thoughts expand beyond growing a year older, or how, or if, to celebrate, and into contemplations of both the past, and what progress had been made in the years since.

The night Dr. King was assassinated my husband and I were registering voters door to door in a black neighborhood in San Francisco. I was 19, he was 21; young married college students with an 11-month old daughter.

We’d been successfully door knocking for about an hour when the news of Dr. King’s murder came through. I remember some teen-aged boys angrily yelling the horrifying news as they ran down the middle of the street half a block ahead of us. One was carrying a gun, but while he was wildly waving it about, he wasn’t pointing it at anything. I don’t remember being afraid, and neither was Carlos. I sensed that he, being Chicano, felt some excitement at the display of defiance. I was just naïve.

We were too stunned to fully absorb what had happened enough to stop what we were doing. Looking back, it seems so idiotic that we kept going from house to house with clipboards and registration forms. At each house our knocking was now met with a face quickly peeking out through curtains, but no answer.

At one house our knock provoked the same scrutiny, this time through a small window in the door. Then the door flew open and a middle-aged black man confronted us with, “You kids get in here! What do you think you’re doing?” as he grabbed our arms and yanked us into his house.

He scolded us about danger and our lack of sense, then got our organizer Ben, a black man who lived in the same neighborhood, on the phone and arranged for him to pick us up and drive us back to our tiny student family apartment at San Francisco State.

I think we were both too dazed to think of thanking him, and too full of hubris and idealism to realize we should have.

Later that night the neighborhood, and most other black neighborhoods across the country, erupted in incidents of rioting, violence, arson, and looting. Anger boiled in the streets with cries of “Burn, baby burn!” and “Brothers, unite!” while the pall of sorrow and mourning descended inside the homes.

I still ache deep down in my belly as I remember that night. The pain of Dr. King’s murder is equaled by my anguish at how devastated I think he would have been by the reaction to it.

But at the time, I was angry too, and energized by the fury in the streets. I overlooked the destruction and lauded the public outcry with an “It’s about time!” response. It was an uprising of Black Power that we were absolutely sure would topple the repressive structure of The Man.

Now as I read Dr. King’s words, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.” I look back at what wasn’t toppled, but instead made stronger. Two months later Bobby Kennedy was gunned down, and it didn’t seem that much longer before the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for Children program collapsed, and Clarence Thomas rose to sit on the High Court.

In many ways our country feels even more divided now than it did then. Without the youthful naivety and idealism, it can be easy to fall into despair that it will never be mended, and difficult to challenge that despair with Dr. King’s Dream.

This morning I read the words of 12-year-old Patrice Asher, “I think he was a good man because of what he dreamed of. That was a good dream.” Her 12-year old wisdom sent me to the text of Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech, where his words, “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.” stood bold and bright on the page while the words around them blurred.

Next I remembered Rebecca Solnit’s words in this month’s Orion magazine, “Despair is a luxury. If I despair I can drive a Yukon and watch bad television. Despair makes no demand upon us; hope demands everything.”

Her words, his words, Patrice’s words, words from the past, words of the present, the words of the future woke me out of a stupor of hopelessness. I remember what I’ve learned about High Holy Dreams, about faith, and see that I’ve just been gifted with another lesson.

Yes, that was a good dream - a good dream that pulls me up out of despair to a place where I can see the progress that has been made. Tomorrow schools and government offices will close to commemorate a man who dreamed. Tomorrow Presidential candidates that include a woman and an African American will speak of progress that still needs to be made to honor this man’s dream. And I, a year older, will honor him too, without the luxury of despair, and with hope restored by the power of his dream.