Martin Luther King Day 2026

Welcome to the first post of Bullock Bits, where I plan to ramble about a little bit of this a little bit of that. I felt a good place to start would be Martin Luther King Jr Day. I have always had a complicated relationship with the idea of Dr King. I grew up near Richmond, Virginia the former capital of the Confederacy while sharing Dr King's birthday. I will admit that while knowing Dr King was someone to admire I enjoyed getting out of school every couple of years on my birthday. As I got older and began to learn more outside of what I was taught in school I began to understand how radicle his tactics were and how expansive his vision was.

This past summer I was fortunate enough to go on a trip through part of the Civil Rights trail in the Deep South. The framing was around Dr Martin Luther King Jr, starting at his childhood home and his family's church of Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta to spending the last day of the trip in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel where Dr King was assassinated.

The spot where Dr King died. I was listening to
his Mountaintop Speech as I walked by it

 

I learned several important things while I was on the trip, or at least had certain things solidified that had been brewing for awhile. One is that Dr King was a man. I visited the parish house in Birmingham where he was asked to lead the Bus Boycotts, which was bombed with his wife and baby girl inside (luckily Coretta Scott King was quick and knew the thud noise on her porch was nothing good and grabbed her daughter and ran to the back of the house to safety). The porch to this day still has the scar from the explosion. Three days before, months into the boycott with dozens of death threats pouring in daily, Dr King slumped down at his tiny kitchen table (and I do mean tiny, my tour group could not fully fit inside) late at night and stared into his cup of coffee and prayed, asking for the strength to go on.

"At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: "Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever." Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything." 1

The picture I took of the bombing site

The newfound strength showed itself the night of the bombing, with Dr King talking down a potential vigilante mob to go home to their families, as he was going to do since miraculously his wife and daughter were physically fine. The crowd listened despite the attack on their pastor and neighborhood. While it took remarkable strength to continue on before and especially after the bombing, Dr King did falter and had to constantly ask himself if he could on. This was only January of 1956, Dr King would have 12 more tumultuous years of work ahead of him before his murder. By 1968 he was feeling burnt out again, hoping that he could step back and let others continue the work. And there were plenty who could continue on.

I also love the pictures of Dr King
playing pool to show his more
playful human side.

The sheer size of the Civil Rights Movement is something that cannot be underappreciated. It wasn't just Dr King, or even men his age. My group went down the road to the Greyhound bus station where the Freedom Riders, including a young John Lewis, were attacked and their bus firebombed in 1961. We also went two doors down from the parsonage house of Dr King to the Dr Richard Harris house, still the family home of pharmacist Dr Harris's descendants but open to tours by appointment given by his daughter Dr Valda H Montgomery.

Meeting Dr Montgomery was life changing for me. It fully and utterly brought the humanity of the freedom fighters of the Civil Rights era to reality. Dr King isn't a legend to her, he was her neighbor. Dr Montgomery remembered playing and helping to watch Dr King's children when his family lived at the parsonage. Her home's windows were blown out by the porch bomb in 1956 and she saw the crowd gather. In 1961 John Lewis and the rest of the Freedom Riders stayed at her house while they rested and planned what to do next after the extreme violence at the bus station. When Dr Montgomery got to telling us of her teenage years and getting deeper into the movement she then said "oh and don't even get me started on my college years". This was a community, bound not by proximity but by ideals, and one that refused to stop working for a better world. By opening their home and telling their experience, Dr Montgomery and her family are continuing the fight.

The strategy room at Dr Harris's house, with John Lewis sitting in the foreground with his head bandaged. Dr Montgomery shows this picture as well as her father's WW2 artifacts, as he was a Tuskegee Airman before becoming a pharmacist, in this room. I felt chills, as the room looks just like any parlor today, as again the family still lives there.

And speaking of the size of the movement, lynchings absolutely were not limited to Black men. It was diverse, and because of that so were the victims. We went to the Southern Poverty Law Center museum in Montgomery, where visitors have to go through a security check to be let inside, as they are constantly under threat even today. The first thing a visitor sees is the Wall of Martyrs, people murdered by white nationalist forces. Emmet Till is up there, the Four Little Girls from the 16th St Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, but so are Rev James Reeb, the white Unitarian minister from Boston murdered in Selma, Alabama after the second attempt of marching to Montgomery, and Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit white mother of 5 who was driving marchers back home when she was shot and killed, mere hours after Dr King's speech on the steps of the Alabama State House at the culmination of the Selma march. And like Renee Good, she was immediately painted as having deserved it by the powers that be. Oh how little things seem to change. 2 3

But the last thing that I started to fully appreciate on this trip was the unfinished nature of Dr King's work. I've known that racism is still around (clearly, you just have to look at the vitriol that President Obama had to deal with and then the ramped up public hate rallies like Charlottesville becoming all too common) but the fact that the reason that Dr King was the most hated man in America when he died was he had a year prior started to speak out against the Vietnam War and was shifting the Movement towards combating poverty of everyone. In Dr King's words, it did not cost the country anything to integrate lunch counters, but what he planned to ask for next would cost millions if not billions of dollars.

Dr King was in Memphis to work on the Poor People's campaign after two black sanitation workers had died from a faulty truck crushing them. He was backing their strike but using it to call out the entirety of economic injustice in the country. I am white, but my father was a union man and from the time I was little taught me the dignity of any work. My father told me stories of preventable accidents he'd seen and higher ups asking him to do things he knew were unsafe and refusing. The worst my father suffered was being the first to be laid off as back door retaliation. He also walked his share of picket lines. So while Jim Crow would not have directly effected my family, I felt Dr King's last march more acutely, and his message of no one is free until everyone is free, that the triple evils of racism, militarism and economic exploitation effect anyone not in power and the possibility of making a world without the Three Evils is possible if everyone works towards it.

A very bad selfie of me at I Am A Man Plaza, where the sanitation workers would gather to march to City Hall with the famous I Am A Man signs. Dr King was supposed to lead the April 5th 1968 march. Several months before my trip, Clayborn Temple, which borders the plaza, burnt down due to arson.

So honor Dr King's legacy, and the legacy of the entire Civil Rights Movement by doing what you can to combat these evils that are trying to make a comeback from the progress that has been made. Do not despair and gather courage from each other, because while the smearing of Renee Good echoes what was done to Viola Liuzzo, so too does the response to the horrors we are seeing.

Dr King's most radical tactic was public non-violence. Viola Liuzzo and Rev James Reeb were moved to action after seeing Bloody Sunday on the evening news. They left their homes and families in Boston and Detroit and went all the way to Selma, Alabama because they couldn't stand to see such injustice. I believe a similar swell in the moderates as Dr King referred to them in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, being fed up is starting to happen.

So like Dr King, don't loose heart, and like Dr Montgomery help your neighbors, and like Ms. Liuzzo and Rev Reeb do not be afraid to stand up for what's right despite it being outside of your comfort zone.

Happy Dr Martin Luther King Day.