Martin Luther King Jnr was an American Christian minister, activist and political philosopher. A force to reckon with in the fight against social injustice and oppression of the black race of his time. He was a man of impeccable character, brazen rigidity and sharp penchant for articulate eloquence. Not only that, he was also a dogged fighter who adopted a puritanical mechanism in his approaches to a course he believed in. He was an accomplished scholar of international erudition and repute.
Martin Luther King Jnr was a man of many parts. He was young, vocal, visionary and exemplary. He wasn’t the type that would engage his time, or intellectual resources and gift in pursuant of frivolities like we do have in our youths today. He was a social gadfly, a preacher of peace, seer and an orator. According to him, the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness, man has cosmic companionship. His belief was that, behind the harsh appearance of the world, there is a benign power.
If there was anything Martin Luther King Jnr had fought for in his life time, it was a peaceful revolution and liberation of the poor of his time, especially, the negroes. He came with a steering gospel of peaceful change, equality and justice, to a divided people. He was on a noble course to heal a ‘sick’ white- dominated society and to free its poor black people from their slavery. A man who had shaken the world in his own gentle way without carrying grenades, gun, or any of the war missiles, his spoken words, speeches, orations and philosophical eloquence contained many metaphorical allusions of life’s situations and challenges therein. His speeches were mostly aggressively peaceful, fiercely inspirational and sententiously motivational. He was a man with captivating and infectious oratorical felicity, who in his lifetime was aclaimed to have given the best speeches ever. “I have a dream”, is one of those great orations made by him as a public speech in August 28, in 1963. In it contained elements of hope, freedom, equality and justice. However, Martin Luther King Jnr was more than an orator. He was a gadfly! A seer! An emancipator! A man with a ton of potentials! He was a man who believed in his own philosophy. He had once quoted that “if a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo’s painted or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare’s poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well”! Above all, he was a peace-seeker!
Of course, Martin Luther King Jnr, was a dreamer with a big dream! He was a dreamer who was able to find his way by ‘moonlight’, and was able to see the dawn of a new day before the rest of the world, and who, for his punishment, must pay the Supreme price. In all of this, he had acted his role well without any ambiguilty. All he wanted was the black’s emancipation and freedom. According to him, “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. You must demand it, for it will not be given freely”. Because of this tenacity, his exit was quickened by his killers, but, he was one man in his time who had played many parts. He had spoken the truth and had exposed the lies of the white oppressors in America!
To Martin Luther King Jnr, truth crushed to the earth would, and must rise again! Although, he was in the course of this struggle for his dream cut short by the bullet of a snipper after he had at a particular occasion survived a knife stab from a demented woman.
I once came across a particular story that in a way, looks like a demystification of inevitability of death, and I think I should share it here, because it well suits Martin Luther King Jnr’s passage too. In that story, Life had asked Death the question of why do people hate him(Death) so much? And do you know the response Life got from Death? Death had told Life unequivocally that the people of the world hate him so much because he, (Death) is a painful truth, whereas, he, (Life), is the one that has always remained nothing but a beautiful lie!
Just like the painful truth that (Death) represents or connotes, the painful truth was that the clock-time meant for a peace loving Martin Luther King Jnr must cease to tick on that fateful day, and it was on Thursday, April 4, 1968. A day in which a great tree must suddenly fall, like the big Iroko tree, and rocks on distant hills will shudder! You see, when great trees fall in the forest, small and certain things must recoil in their eerie silence.
Thursday, April 4, 1968, had brought the world to its knees, with its short, brief ‘breath’ and “bliking eyes” that could only see with “a hurtful clarity”. A great soul had vanished, and in a situation where great souls die in this manner, the air around the world may also become “light” and “sterile” in their daunting rarity.
Martin Luther King Jnr couldn’t have muzzled his ‘dagger of death’ that day.The ornament of the ‘dagger’ of his death proved to be too dangerous that it must definitely bite its master! Ironically, the beautiful lie of it was that Martin Luther King Jnr’s life had remained a ‘terror’ to his killers, and therefore, he could not have escaped death, but for the painful truth, – his dreams and aspirations to become a reality, he had to die! A heiroic and sterling personalty that he was, Martin Luther King Jnr, an American minister was born on 15th January, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
It was by 6:05 pm on Thursday, 4th April, 1968, while he was standing on a balcony outside his second floor room at the Loraine Motel, Memphis,Tennessee, United States, that he was assassinated. He was aged 39. Martin Luther King Jnr. was an activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination. His Children, Martin Luther King III, Dexter King, Yolanda King and Bernice King had survived him. His wife was also Coretta Scott King.
He had his education at Boston University School of Theology (1951–1955), Crozer Theological Seminary (1948–1951), Morehouse College (1944–1948)
He was said to have been influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Bayard Rustin, Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman. His parents were Martin Luther King Sr and Alberta Williams. Martin Luther King, Jnr, (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jnr, but later had his name changed to Martin Luther King Jnr. He was a visionary leader and advocate for equality, who spearheaded the civil rights movement in America through Non-violent means.
Here in Nigeria too, the likes of Anthony Enahoro, Nnamdi Azikwe,(Zik of Africa), Obafemi Awolowo and Tafawa Balewa and several others trailed the blaze as youngsters who had equally in an altruistic circumstances displayed such enormosity of intellectual resourcefulness and mental capacity in contributing to the development of their fatherland. They unanimously and gallantly integrated their voices by asking the Whitemen to vacate their land.
Remember, they were all bye products of colonial mentorship, but, they maintained and stood their ground and fought with keen doggedness for a noble course. The welfare of their kinsmen was of paramount importance to them. They never thronged after, nor hailed the captors of their destiny. They hated the pariah condition of their people in the midst of abundant resources.They would rather stoop to conquer than bend to be vanguished.
How unfortunate it is today that this kind of altruistic feat is no longer trending? One of the reasons is that, the older generation has taken over from the younger generation and reinvented a mechanism of recycling themselves, having bashed the younger generation into a fix and stripping them of the potentials to survive with. Qualitative and sound education has been taken away from them. Job potentials and enabling environment for business ideal to thrive has been polluted and sieged. They are now left to scamper for the crumbs at the feet of the older generation, and to grovel at their beck and call as touts and political rogues. Those who would not toe that direction are either into internet and cyber crimes or kidnapping and banditry. Or yahoo and ritual killings. Some have even gone as far as becoming intercontinental robbery Kingpins to survive. The ugly trend is alarmingly worrisome.
Why is this so too? It is so, because, this younger generation has given up to fate, unlike the generation of the Ziks, the Enahoros, the Awolowos, and the Balewas! They (this younger generation) has gone into a deep-seated sleep mode, or, maybe, is been decapitated so to be, and has been suppresively muffled up completely never to raise its head again ever, because, at a time when occasion afforded them the opportunity, all they did was to exude an incalculable and reckless sense of irresponsibility.The malfeasance brought into the system by an unregulated and intermittent interregnum and incursion of military dictatorship has been deadening. Read Nigeria’s history of military dictatorship and political buckaneering to confirm my story.
Consequent upon this, we are being, therefore, balkanised into an irredeemable and incorrigible ethno-religious and political attenuation with no clear sense of direction.
But as for Martin Luther King Jnr, his death was not in vain. It has pathfound the emancipation of the black race in the socio-political structure of the American society, much to even give chances to a black Barak Obama to become President in America.
“…Who can see an inch into futurity beyond his nose?” An author had asked! Such is the case of Martin Luther King Jnr, and the events unfolding in America and around the world immediately after his gruesome murder.
Tiamiyu Adewusi is a creative writer and culture enthusiast, from Osogbo, Nigeria
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