One thing we always have to keep in mind in the study of history is to assess people by the standards of the times in which they lived. In a judgment-drunk society like teeveefied America, the shallowest form of interaction with historical characters is to point out that they weren't as modern as, say, modern people.
The Great Emancipator Lincoln held demonstrably racist views for almost all of his life. George Washington held slaves. Thomas Edison was a serial polluter. Moses didn't support universal suffrage for the working class. Albert Schweizer was a vivisectionist. And so forth...
So it shouldn't come as anything close as a shock when I read the little-quoted quote from Martin Luther King Jr. in Anna Holmes's blog at the Washington Post demonstrating that the good reverend's views on spousal abuse (when he wrote an advise column in the 1960s) would probably offend the most conservative of anti-feminists of the 21st century.
King’s response to a cheated-on wife was to suggest that she “study” her rival to learn what her husband wanted in a woman. (“Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag?” he asked.) He informed an unmarried woman grappling with whether to have sex that “real men still respect purity and virginity” and instructed an abused wife to determine whether there was anything within her personality to justify such treatment. “Are you sure that you have a radiating personality, a pleasant disposition, and that feminine charm which every man admires?” he asked a Miss Lonelyhearts. To a newlywed having troubles with her mother-in-law, he remarked, “There is an expression that no home is big enough to have two women at its head.”
But let's bear in mind that King was writing in Don Draper's America. Like the fictional Don Draper, Dr. King was a typical midcentury man, a high profile man on rise, a serial philanderer in an age when sexual conquests were a measure of a man's character, when women's suffrage was considered the culmination rather than the beginning of the women's equality movement.
Ouch. I say we shouldn't be shocked. And yet I have to, at least a little bit, do a spit take when I read this excusing of physical abuse from the American prophet of nonviolence. I'm not shocked as a student of history, of course. I'm not even surprised. But as a hero-worshiper, I don't want to read words like this from the guy I extoll as the best exemplar of the American Promise in the 20th century.
The meaning of Martin Luther King goes far beyond the midcentury Civil Rights Movement that led to his death. I don't see him as just a martyr, which I think most people in our sex-death-and-race obsessed society tend to cue in on. But King did more than just speak up for black people; he was more than just an eloquent spokesman. King distilled the essence of the great democratic political experiment of America into a coherent philosophy. His view of how to confront oppression, particularly popularly supported oppression, within the inherently non-violent context of democratic structures was in many ways the culmination of how a democracy, and really of how any civil society, could work once we reject the longstanding imperative of might makes right.
The upward progress of western society, the saving grace of western society, has been the slow moving moral arc coming to prove that right makes might. MLK put that beautiful and almost-naive principle into action and he made it work. He used nonviolent confrontation to hold a mirror up to American imperfection and forced a society to live by the purest intentions of the credos we expressed. He put muscle on the bones of "all men are created equal" in such a way that he fundamentally changed the way all Americans, and all citizens of democratic countries, think and speak today in the 21st century.
Planted in his "Freedom Now" philosophy and in the actions he led in standing up to institutions of power with only the moral high ground for armor were the seeds for the feminist movement and the anti-domestic-violence social aesthetic of today. By changing the language of liberty, equality, and human rights in America, MLK created the social awareness we need today to cringe at a preacher saying "If your husband is slapping you around, honey, maybe you oughta learn to treat him better."
But that's the historical fact we're left with. It's not fair to the man to make that the basis for judging him on the issue of spousal abuse. He was a man of his times, as all people are. He wanted to be known as "a drum major for justice"; he never claimed to have never sung out of key on occasion. It's not easy to think of our heroes as having feet of clay. Maybe it's better to think of them as only having feet of flesh.
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