Martin Luther King Day

I know it's MLK, Jr. but it has always irked me that such a great figure in our history has that little verbal tic at the end of his name, even if, of course, it is true that his father was a powerful figure and deserves whatever attention is rightfully his by having a son named after him.  Be that as it may, I cannot stand the "Jr."  Yesterday was the holiday, and in Sarasota I only really became conscious of it, when I wanted to get some books at the public library and found it closed.  This edifice is in what passes for the center of downtown Sarasota, and suddenly I realized that it was damn quiet around there.  And still my mind was blank as I wheeled away off toward the University to the north where I wanted to do some paperwork in connection with the course I teach.  Halfway there I remembered that the University was going to be closed that day, and so turned back and went, as I so often do, on a small side street to avoid the fast moving packed lanes of the main drag.  Too much quick reflex action for me!  The area through which I was about to drive was home to most of Sarasota's African-American population; if it were not for the fact that a number of white persons live around there as well I might be tempted to call it a ghetto.  When I first moved here, I was surprised that one never saw a black person in our neighborhood  super market, neither a customer nor an employee, check out clerk, bagger, whatever, although in fact these positions in supermarkets down here are taken by superannuated white people who probably all have pensions from something else and this is an add-on.  As I drove yesterday I came to a smallish park and it was jammed; across the street a parking lot was filled.  Everyone there was black.  There was a kind of platform erected and I could see speeches were being given.  Yes, so this was the Martin Luther King Day celebration, a species of the apartheid he tried so valiantly and eloquently to destroy.  When I was teaching back in the day, so many of my white students were so proud of how they were offending their parents with their so-called radicalism.  I bought into it, do doubt about it, if only in growing my hair down to between my shoulder blades.  But the real radicals back then were the African American students who sat at the counter in that lunchroom in Greensboro North Carolina on February 1st 1960, a historic date that started a revolution, a first step toward a major integration, still so sadly incomplete over a half century later.  It obviously hasn't gone all that far if America's most famous and distinguished black man has a holiday named after him which nobody is going to observe except his own people.  Students read "Letter from a Birmingham Jail, " or the "I Have a Dream Speech," and then go back to their lives.  I do the same.  On Martin Luther King day maybe things are different elsewhere in this country.  The south, after all, is the south.  But I was ashamed as I drove past this park.