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Opinion: More than ever, Americans must heed Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for “creative altruism” and reject “selfishness”
“Our remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a call to bear witness, look, believe, and act to end that suffering.” —
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In 1943, at the height of the Holocaust, a courier for the Polish resistance, Jan Karski, arrived in the United States to bear witness to the gruesome details of Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”
Karski met with President Franklin Roosevelt and other political leaders during his visit to convey the enormity of the suffering of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime. One of those meetings was with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Karski, who had personally witnessed the Nazi’s atrocities, told Frankfurter of the horrors being inflicted upon the Jews in Warsaw’s ghettos and Polish concentration camps. It is recorded that Frankfurter, a Jew and a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “I do not believe you.” When asked if he thought Karski was lying, Frankfurter said, “I did not say that he is lying; I said that I don’t believe him.”
Despite being directly confronted with the horrible brutality of the Nazi regime by Karski, who had suffered under and been witness to it, Frankfurter flatly refused to believe that Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, and gays were the victims of genocide. Perhaps it was because the enormity of their misery was too much for Frankfurter even remotely to fathom. No matter the reason, the failure of Frankfurter, Roosevelt, and others to believe and act on Karski’s eyewitness testimony prolonged the long nightmare of those suffering under Nazi rule.
What is the proper response is when we are confronted with the suffering of others?
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
Asked another way, when confronted by the voices of the bullied transgendered child, the woman forced to flee across state lines to receive reproductive care, the migrant fleeing persecution, or the Black family detained by the police simply because they are in the wrong part of town at the wrong time of night what are you going to do? Will you retreat to “destructive selfishness” like Frankfurter or “walk in the light of creative altruism?”
There is a tendency around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to focus on his writing and sermons that make us the most comfortable. Why wouldn’t we? It’s a holiday, and holidays are meant to be celebratory. We do King and ourselves a disservice when we treat his day as nothing more than a celebratory occasion.
Yes, we should celebrate the life and work of Rev. King. But more appropriately, it is a day of remembrance. By remembrance, I don’t mean simply recollecting and reminiscing. In the typical Baptist church, we celebrate Communion service on the first Sunday of each month. The service is, in part, a memorializing of the Last Supper. In the church where I grew up, carved in the large wooded communion table were Jesus’ words: “Do this in remembrance of me.” For us, these words were more than about remembering some long-ago dinner between Jesus and his disciples. These words were an invitation to bear witness to Christ’s suffering and make present and real today the work of Jesus.
Similarly, our remembrance of King is a call not to turn away from the suffering of the marginalized. The story of the meeting between Jan Karski and Justice Felix Frankfurter is striking because it is all too familiar. When our comfort and privilege are disrupted by the reality of what King termed the “unearned suffering” of our neighbors, the most expedient cognitive response is to disassociate from that reality and deny its existence … to look away. We look away so that we don’t have to act. We look away so we don’t have to acknowledge our shared humanity.
Our remembrance of Dr. King is a call to bear witness, look, believe, and act to end that suffering.
Terrance Carroll is a former speaker of the Colorado House. The first and only African American to ever hold that position in Colorado. He is a Baptist preacher, attorney, and former police officer. He is on X @speakercarroll.
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