1/19/16

Yesterday, folks got the day off of work to honor the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, & I realized that I don’t know very much about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sure, I know what everyone my age knows about the good Doctor, i.e., he was a civil rights leader; he was assassinated; he had a dream. I follow Killer Mike on any & every social network & he got to posting a whole lot of stuff about Dr. King yesterday, & some of that stuff was:

&:

So I thought to myself, “I don’t know shit about this, like, really important historical dude, & I should probably know some stuff about him, as, like, an American citizen, I think.” I don’t know if any of y’all saw the Killer Mike interview with Bernie Sanders, but Mike brings up some of the more radical stances that Dr. King held. You know what? I had no fucking idea that Dr. King thought that way. We don’t get taught about that in schools. I needed to know more. So I ventured over to amazon.com & searched “Martin Lurther King, Jr.” under “Books,” & these were the first hits:

look at that adorable Dr. King!

A bunch of children’s books! Hilarious metaphor for my level of knowledge concerning MLK, is it not?! I searched past the children’s books & found a few collections of Dr. King’s own words, & those collections are now are their way to me. Thinking further, though, I realized that most of my impressions of historical American figures were shaped via third parties; namely teachers & textbooks.

& so I believe I’ve stumbled upon an actual resolution for the year 2016: read historical figures in their own words. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Douglas, Lincoln, King, Paine, etc. It turns out, by the by, that there are plenty of extant writings from these dead men, & I’m curious to figure out why, as children, we read third parties more often than source material.

Hm. I haven’t written anything sexual in this post yet. Huh.

Frank X Maloney