Seeing Stars
“Only in the darkness can you see the stars”. –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
This past weekend we slipped away with some friends to their cabin north of Ely. It was bitterly cold, but the cabin was warm with good conversations and the heat from their wood stove. It was good to be together in this fear filled time of transition for our nation.
After dinner we decided to go for a walk outside to see the stars. After putting on multiple layers to fend off the minus 20 degree temperature, we headed out. The sky was spectacular in the darkness. Beauty even in the frigid cold, we just had to get outside and look for it together.
I think that is how it will be for these next four years. We will have to work together, serve together and celebrate the small things we can do. For it is in the small things we do and say that sometimes contain the most beauty and power.
In Gloria Steinem’s book, My Life on the Road, she writes about the 1963 March on Washington in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. Steinem wrote this, “On that hot August day I was just one person being carried slowly along in a sea of humanity. I washed up next to Mrs. Greene with an e, an older plump woman wearing a straw hat, who was marching with her grown up elegant daughter. Mrs Greene explained she had worked in Washington during the Truman administration in the same big room as the white clerks but segregated behind a screen. She hadn’t been able to protest then so she was protesting now.
As we neared the Lincoln Memorial she pointed out that the only woman seated on the speaker’s platform was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that had been doing the work of racial justice since the 1930’s yet she even hadn’t been asked to speak. Mrs. Greene wanted to know where is Ella Baker? She trained all those SNCC young people. What about Fannie Lou Hammer? She got beaten up in jail and sterilized in a Mississippi hospital when she went in for something entirely else..“
Steinem continues, “I hadn’t even noticed the absence of women’s speakers. Mrs. Greene’s daughter rolled her eyes as her mother told me about complaining to the state delegation leader. He had countered that Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson were singing. Singing isn’t speaking she told him in no uncertain terms. I was impressed, not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them they would be taken more seriously. You white women, Mrs. Green said kindly, if you don’t stand up for yourselves how can you stand up for a anybody else.
As streams of people surged toward the Lincoln Memorial and the speakers platform, the three of us got separated. I used my press credential to climb the steps hoping to see them. But when I turned around all I could see was an ocean of upturned faces. The sea of humanity looked calm, peaceful, not even pressing to come closer to the speakers as if each one felt responsible for proving that the fears of violence and disorder were wrong. We were like a nation within a nation.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr read his much anticipated speech in a deep, familiar voice. As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” and he did begin the I Have a Dream litany from memory with the crowd calling out to him after each image – tell it! What would be the most remembered had been least planned. I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up and make all the difference.”
It is our turn now to speak up. It is our turn to do what we can wherever we find ourselves. Our TV will remain off on this MLK and Inauguration Day. And I’m heading out soon to donate a pint of blood. It’s one small thing I can do for another, my little bit of light in this frigid night.
