One of the highlights of summers in our community is the Ashland
Chautauqua event, held primarily at the Guy C. Myers Memorial Band Shell, featuring
a series of performances and workshops with characters from various segments of
our nation’s history. This year, under the banner of Voices of Freedom, scholar-actors
portrayed Rosa Parks, Bessie Coleman, Mother Jones, Maria von Trapp, and Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., twentieth century figures whose courage spoke forth
from the battleground for civil rights (Parks and King), the world of union
organizing (Jones), the challenging skies of early aviation (Coleman), and life
as a refugee from Nazi oppression (von Trapp).
Like most Chautauqua series, some of the characters are more
familiar than others, but by the end of each evening, the audience has either
met a new hero or discovered a new facet of the personality of an iconic
figure. The latter was the case for me with Marvin Jefferson’s portrayal of the
man born as Michael King, known to us as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
King was a complicated figure, best known for his civil
rights leadership, but also standing firmly against the war in Viet Nam. As
King expressed to the Saturday night audience, “I don’t know about you, but I
ain’t gonna study war no more.” No doubt about it, the prophetic voice of Martin
King married his courage to his convictions.
As I listened to the portrayal of Dr. King, and then later
as Jefferson responded to questions from the audience both in character and
from a scholar’s perspective, I did some quick math computations. King, born in
1929, died in 1968 at the age of thirty-nine. His assassination, less than four
years after President Kennedy’s death, was followed a year later by the slaying
of Robert Kennedy Jr. I remember Mr. Hurley’s knock on the door of Miss Kramer’s
third grade class on November 22, 1963, and the subsequent reporting on the
deaths of King and RFK. But I remember these events from the perspectives of an
eight-year-old child, and then a young teenager of thirteen and fourteen. I was
there. I bore witness to the history developing before my eyes. Yet I wept the
tears of grief over these larger-than-life figures with little understanding of
the complexity of their characters or the way the loss of their voices through
early death would mold our country in the years ahead.
King claimed the movement was sustained by singing; he was
also remembered through song in Richard Holler’s words about Abraham (Lincoln),
Martin, and John (and brother Robert): “He freed lotta people, but it seems the
good they die young, I just looked around and he’s gone.” My adolescent heart
and mind wondered: would this public rampage of death ever stop? Even as I
dredge up these thoughts from the perspective of almost fifty years, I am
gripped by the courage that was modeled by so many in those turbulent times.
What I realized as I listened to Jefferson bring MLK Jr. to
life is that within another generation, within the next few decades, the
memories and the voices of those of us who bore witness will be silenced. Soon,
those who fought the battles of World War II, who bore witness to the
atrocities of the concentration camps, those who vowed, “never again,” will all
be gone. Soon, those who marched at Selma, those who dreamed of a country where
the civil rights of an individual weren’t dependent on skin color, will be
gone. Who will remember?
Yet we must remember, we must repeat the stories, we must
continue to hear the voices of freedom. Because of von Trapp, we gather the
courage to climb the mountains before us. Because of Mary (Mother) Jones, we
are challenged to “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” Because
of Bessie Coleman, “we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers.
We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream” (William J.
Powell). Because of Rosa Parks and Dr. King, we can claim the dream that the
content of character overcomes the color of skin. But only if we remember . . .
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