Under the baobab: Using MLK Day to assess how far we’ve come, and where we need to go

Happy Birthday, MLK.

The Martin Luther King Plaza committee will be holding a Legacy Search organized by Prof. Anne Marie Mingo. Teams will be searching for local sites that have significance in the civil rights movement.

I use MLK Day to assess how far the civil rights movement has come since 1963, and what Rev. King might think about it. Politically he would have mixed reactions. He would be delighted at the election of such diverse candidates at the top of the ticket like President Obama, Vice President Harris, and Biden, only the second Catholic to serve as President. Trump, who was elected and continues to remain in the public eye by appealing to the lesser angels of our public consciousness, would likely have disappointed him — two steps forward, one back.

There were four African Americans serving in Congress in 1963. There are 61 serving in 2022. Perhaps the biggest and most pleasant surprise for Rev. King would be in his home state of Georgia, where Rev. Raphael Warnock, the first African American, and Jon Ossoff, the first Jewish person, were elected to the U.S. Senate last year. This year they might be joined by another progressive Democrat, Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor.

He would probably be disappointed in the stripping down of voting rights by so many state legislatures, yet encouraged by the call to activism to restore those rights. (Noting that the Voting Rights Act wasn’t passed until 1965.) The empowerment of women would have been applauded by his wife, Coretta Scott King. The legitimization of the LGBTQ citizenship was not on King’s agenda, but I hope he would have applauded it as expansion of human rights.

He would approve of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Middle Eastern war zones and the efforts to build peace. He would strongly disapprove of the growing income disparity between the haves and have nots in our country and the world.

He would celebrate the explosion of diversity in the expanded telling of the American story, past and present, with the inclusion and participation of so many different and distinct voices in film, drama, literature, music and visual arts. At the March on Washington in 1963, Rev. King shared the podium with Hollywood royalty including Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Marlon Brando and the incomparable Sidney Poitier. That year Poitier became the first African American to win an Oscar for best actor. (Since then, four actors have been awarded best actor or actress and 14 have received best supporting actor or actress.)

For those of us who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Poitier was not just the tallest tree in the forest, he was the whole forest. His portrayals opened our minds and dreams. Seeing his dignified characters, we could imagine what it was like to be an Arab emir, a lawyer, a police detective, a teacher, a carpenter, a lawyer, a scientist, a wagon train leader and, at the same time, Black.

In 1991 I was blessed to appear in a film with him, “Separate But Equal.” He played another hero of mine, Thurgood Marshall. It was about the cases that led up to the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, which overturned de jure racial segregation. My character, Bob Ming, delivers a speech summing up the legal strategy of the team. Mr. Poitier applauded my efforts. We were all awarded an ensemble Emmy.

Sidney Poitier died this month at the age of 94. Rev. King would have been 92. The two of them were on the front lines of a Movement that transformed our country, one on the streets and the other in theaters. They and thousands of others like them cleared a road on which millions of others still walk to freedom.