April is MLK’s Month

Since the 1990s Dr. Martin Luther King‘s birthday in mid-January has been a national holiday.

But for me April will always be MLK’s month because it is not only “the cruelest month,” (as T.S.Eliot put it in his 1922 poem The Wasteland). It is also one of the most challenging.

April is the month of the Crucifixion. But it is also the month of the Resurrection.

MLK was killed in April 1968. A year earlier, in his April 1967 “Time to Break the Silence” speech, he called his own country, the United States, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and shook the world with a new dream.

In his August 1963 March on Washington speech, MLK had only dreamed of black and white children holding hands. But in April 1967 he dreamed of a “Radical Revolution of Values, “not only against racism but against materialism and militarism, and of Beloved Communities based on persons and relationships instead of things.

In Detroit over the last few decades, MLK’s dream of beloved communities has been becoming more than a dream. As our city has been devastated by deindustrialization, neighbors have begun to look out for one another, to care for abandoned houses, to exchange services (time-banking).

The imposition of Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr by Michigan Governor Snyder has provided the opportunity and incentive for these neighborhood groups to begin viewing themselves as units of grassroots self-government...