This article is published as part of a media partnership between Madison365 and Middleton Cross Plains Area School District.
“I remember vividly the night that Dr. King was slain because I was actually involved in an Alpha Kappa Alpha event. I remember somebody coming into the event and telling us that Dr. King had been shot,” says Gloria Ladson-Billings, who was a student at Morgan State, a Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) in Baltimore, at the time. “We stopped that event. I remember the most visceral response from the campus and the city of Baltimore with the rioting and the anger. It was a really tough time.
“There were so many things going on at the time in our history – Vietnam protests, the rise of second-wave feminism, as well as civil rights. I was on a campus that was involved in all of those protests,” she adds.
Ladson-Billings is a retired UW–Madison’s Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and an award-winning scholar. She is also former president of the American Educational Research Association. But back in the late ‘60s, she was a young student at Morgan State enduring some very turbulent times.
“These were extremely tense times. I remember when Muhammad Ali was denied the right to box and he was speaking at a lot of campuses. H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, who later became Kwame Ture, there were all of these great leaders and there was some tension within the civil rights movement at the time that made Dr. King seem a little bit mild versus the fire and rhetoric of Malcolm X,” she remembers. “So I think that there were those of us in our young lives who were trying to figure out where we fell; whether non-violence was the way or whether it was time to be more, quote, ‘militant,’”
Many of us know what we know about Dr. Martin Luther King through history books and TV specials. Ladson-Billings experienced Dr. King firsthand and will relate some of those stories at the first annual MLK Forum for Social Action on Saturday, Jan. 19 at 4 p.m. at the Middleton Performing Arts Center at Middleton High School. The event, sponsored by a number of school districts around Dane County, including Madison, Middleton, Mt. Horeb and Oregon, as well as Edgewood College, will delve deep into MLK’s teachings and legacy. Madison365 is the media sponsor of the event.
Americans too often honor and praise Martin Luther King Jr. while ignoring some of his most important words and messages. For some, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy has been watered-down and appropriated. Saturday’s forum will be an opportunity to reframe the narrative of MLK and his legacy.
“The distortions that exist around Dr. King are real and that is one of the things that intrigued me about this forum. Dr. King has really has become co-opted and sanitized to be much more palatable to certain audiences,” Ladson-Billings says. “I can remember being in Ghana years ago and Dr. King had been depicted as the darling of everyone. But we know that he was hated. Literally, our the FBI – our own government – was spying on him.”
The real Dr. Martin Luther King, especially in speeches before his death on April 4, 1968, was radical and militant. Ladson-Billing says that her favorite speech is the one Dr. King gave at Stanford University in 1967.
“I do recall the backlash that Dr. King received when he moved in that direction. The direction was not just from whites, but from blacks [who were saying] ‘No, no, no. That’s a distraction.’ But Dr. King’s argument was ‘No. Economic issues of war … Those impact us, too,” Ladson-Billings says.
The mainstream narrative always seems to be fixated on King’s “I Have a Dream speech” in 1963, not the powerful speeches from the later years, when he had really evolved.
“He still remains one of the greatest orators this nation has ever produced. I don’t even think that’s up for debate,” Ladson-Billings says. “The ‘I Have A Dream” speech, in particular, is considered one of the best American speeches ever. The problem is that once again it’s a speech taken out of context and you have to read the first part – the whole issue of the promissory note that America has written to black folks.
“The “I Have a Dream’ speech is the most popular because it is about hope and you can map it well onto American creed and rhetoric, but the promissory note part of it – the fact that we refuse to believe that the bank of justice will return a check marked ‘insufficient funds’ – is important,” she continues. “I think its a beautiful metaphorical image that suggests that you need to stop talking about this zero-sum game that if you give to us, you’re taking from somebody else.
“Dr. King is saying, ‘No. There’s enough justice to go around,'” she adds. “I think it’s important to remember that he’s a learned man so he really has a philosophical basis for what he’s saying. He’s studied Gandhi and theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That he had all of this in his head, people don’t talk about that too much.”
It’s also important that we re-establish him as a Christian minister of the Gospel. “So that essentially what he’s doing is consummate with his faith,” Ladson-Billings says. “He’s more than a public figure; he’s a religious figure.”
The MLK Forum for Social Action will also present an opportunity to reframe the narrative and experience for black Americans in Dane County. Along withi Ladson-Billings, the event will feature Percy Brown, Director of Equity and Student Achievement at Middle Cross Plains Area School District and Charles Brown, who was an activist during the Civil Rights era, will speak on the desegregation of the Mississippi Delta and his experiences in the south in the 1960s and Tamera Stanley.
Ladson-Billings says that it’s important to talk about facets of Dr. King that go unheralded so that it can open up the conversation.
“Historians do this all the time. I have friends who are historians who say, ‘We’re willing to go back and look at and examine icons – warts and all.’ Some people don’t like that,” she says. “Some people don’t want you to go back and look at Thomas Jefferson’s writings. But his writings are his writings. He said those things.
“History will always peel off the layers of people. Dr. King is not someone without his flaws,” she adds. “But the real question is: Do we have an accurate picture of his public life? And I think we tend to distort it because if we tell the whole story than we have to be complicit in the stuff that is wrong. For example, we talk about the Civil Rights Era as if it was everybody except a few bad people who were involved in it. I think that the data suggests that only 12 percent of us were involved in this work. That means that 88 percent of us were not and would have been fine with the status quo.”
The forum will also be a chance to talk about the state of public education today, an area that is Ladson-Billings’ expertise.
“It will be interesting to talk about to what degree that we deal with all of the things that are indicators of quality education for our children,” Ladson-Billings says. “It’s particularly interesting to talk about education in Wisconsin where we have documented the largest disparities between African-American and white students in the nation. I think that that ongoing disparity is what I really want to talk about at the forum.”
The MLK Forum for Social Action will take place Saturday, Jan. 19 at 4 p.m. at the Middleton Performing Arts Center at Middleton High School.
