In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, I have decided to post the tribute that Toni Morrison wrote to him as featured in her book The Source of Self-Regard. I will input it below in its entirety:
“Pursuing the recollections of several people for projects he is engaged in, Martin Luther King III recently asked me for my thoughts on his father. And one of his questions was predictable, designed to elicit some subjective response. He said, ‘If you were having a conversation with my father, what would you like to ask him?’ And for some wholly unaccountable reason, my heart skipped and I fairly keened into the telephone. ‘Oh, I hope he is not disappointed. Do you think he’s disappointed? There must be something here to please him.’ Well, I calmed my voice to disguise what was becoming obvious to me, that what I really meant was, ‘I hope he is not disappointed in me.’
I went on to frame a question that I would like to put to him, and I set aside my thoughts about the current state of affairs for the dispossessed: some wins, but some big-time losses; some vaulting leaps, but much slow sinking into muddy despair.
But all the while, I was wondering, Would he be disappointed in me? And it was odd, because I never met Reverend King. My memory of him is print-bound, electronic, through the narratives of other people. Yet I felt this personal responsibility to him. He did that to people. I realized later that I was responding to something other, and more durable, than the complex personhood of King.
Not to the preacher he was or the scholar he was or the vulnerable human being, not to the political strategist, the orator, the brilliant, risk-taking activist. But I was responding to his mission. His, as he coined it, audacious faith. His expectation of transforming, appending, cosmic elegy into a psalm of brotherhood.
His confidence that we were finer than we thought, that there were moral grounds we would not abandon, lines of civil behavior we simply would not cross. That there were things we would gladly give up for the public good, that a comfortable life, resting on the shoulders of other people’s misery, was an abomination this country, especially, among all nations, found offensive.
I know the world is better, finer, because he lived in it. My anxiety was personal. Was I any better? Finer? Because I have lived in a world that is imaginary. Would he be disappointed in me? The answer isn’t important. But the question really is, and that is the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He made the act of assuming personal responsibility for alleviating social harm ordinary, habitual, and irresistible. My tribute to him is the profound gratitude I feel for the gift that his life truly was.”
Rest well to Toni Morrison and Dr. King.
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