Discovering the complexities of the late Civil Rights leader was part of author's coming of age.
In Search of King
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
Like many African-American households in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. in my parents’ apartment when I was growing up in the Bronx. It was a classic King pose as pastor, without expression—I imagine there have been millions of these prints of King produced. Less prominent in my parents’ living room, just below the portrait of King was a button from the Poor People’s Campaign. Both existed without remark in my household and while I could fill in the gaps about King, there was little from which I could draw the significance of the Poor People’s Campaign to my parents, who rarely talked politics with me. That was my introduction to Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the years before the official King holiday, the great orator and Civil Rights leader was just that to me—a flattened “great” image from a past that my parents, both with deep southern roots, refused to talk to me about. It was during one of my earliest forays into crate digging—as a 13-year-old in the Bronx in 1979, who wasn’t going through their parents record collection in our imaginary quest to be Grandmaster Flash?—that I came across a collection of King’s speeches—In Search of Freedom—in my father’s collection. As I could not recall ever hearing the record played in my parent’s home, I took it upon myself to listen to the speeches myself.
What I heard mesmerized me—a nod to the sense of power the man possessed over language and the more tangible sense of opportunity that I felt just as the 1980s were dawning. As a Bronx kid, trekking to a huge “integrated” high school in Brooklyn—6,000 students to be exact—the sound of King’s voice on my first generation Walkman served as symbolic armor. Perhaps.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
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In Search of King
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
Like many African-American households in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. in my parents’ apartment when I was growing up in the Bronx. It was a classic King pose as pastor, without expression—I imagine there have been millions of these prints of King produced. Less prominent in my parents’ living room, just below the portrait of King was a button from the Poor People’s Campaign. Both existed without remark in my household and while I could fill in the gaps about King, there was little from which I could draw the significance of the Poor People’s Campaign to my parents, who rarely talked politics with me. That was my introduction to Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the years before the official King holiday, the great orator and Civil Rights leader was just that to me—a flattened “great” image from a past that my parents, both with deep southern roots, refused to talk to me about. It was during one of my earliest forays into crate digging—as a 13-year-old in the Bronx in 1979, who wasn’t going through their parents record collection in our imaginary quest to be Grandmaster Flash?—that I came across a collection of King’s speeches—In Search of Freedom—in my father’s collection. As I could not recall ever hearing the record played in my parent’s home, I took it upon myself to listen to the speeches myself.
What I heard mesmerized me—a nod to the sense of power the man possessed over language and the more tangible sense of opportunity that I felt just as the 1980s were dawning. As a Bronx kid, trekking to a huge “integrated” high school in Brooklyn—6,000 students to be exact—the sound of King’s voice on my first generation Walkman served as symbolic armor. Perhaps.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy. He teaches Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Email Mark at mark@theloop21.com. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.
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