As thousands of tourists file past the monumental statue of Martin Luther King just dedicated in Washington, they will be soothed by its serenity. The new memorial is indeed beautiful, but perhaps too pristine and too peaceful in its verdant setting.
We Americans tend to turn our heroes into marble, but too often this near-beatification can erase the memories of blood, sweat, tears and death. Not too far from the King memorial, the seated Lincoln looks serene and wise, but his life was anything but. The carnage of the war he had to endure tore this nation apart. And, like Dr. King, his life was ended by a homegrown assassin.
I remember a time when Martin Luther King wasn't a statue or a national holiday. I remember when he was called "Martin Luther Coon," tossed into jail, and hated and feared by many in high places, and not just in the South. As a young reporter, I was one of a few women journalists at a press briefing in 1964 by J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI. We asked him a question about Dr. King and he said that the civil rights leader was "The most notorious liar in the country."
We reporters looked at each other, stunned, and asked if the comment was on the record. Hoover said that it was, and it became front-page news the next day.
We were all aware that Hoover thought King was a communist, or at least a tool of communists. What we didn't know was that he had agents keeping King under constant surveillance. In 1963, a month before the March on Washington, the FBI Director filed a request with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to tap King's and his associates' phones and to bug their homes and offices.
Thanks to the surveillance, Hoover was in possession of tapes of Dr. King that revealed his liaisons with white women. Hoover had voluminous files on the sex lives of many prominent Americans, which he reportedly used to keep his longtime grip on power. To this day I vividly remember Hoover's appearance as he made his statement about Dr. King. His jaw was set in a hard line; his roundish, lined face and the narrowing of his eyes gave him the appearance, I thought, of an angry bulldog.
I covered Dr. King when he met JFK at the White House, and I walked along Constitution Avenue as King and many of his associates marched to the Lincoln memorial, a bright sun and the shade of the trees dappling the procession in darks and lights. At the memorial, I soaked my tired feet in the waters of the reflecting pool as King gave his enduring, "I have a dream" speech. I remember thinking, naively, of course, that this was to be the beginning of the end of racism in America. Who could hear those soaring words and not welcome them?
Lots of people, alas. Dr. King was murdered in Memphis where he had traveled to support striking sanitation workers. But the movement that he and so many others lived and died for resulted in the civil rights act, the voting rights act, the end of Jim Crow, and ultimately to the first black president of the United States
The cost of all this was high; Medgar Evers gunned down in his driveway, four little black girls blown up by a bomb in a Birmingham church, three civil rights workers -- two white and one Black -- James Chaney, Andy Goodman and Michael Schwerner shot to death and their bodies buried in an old dam in Mississippi. As well, there were scores of other deaths, lynchings, brutal beatings, homes burned, children terrorized.
I often think back to that day in Hoover's office and reflect on the fact that although Dr, King was felled by an assassins' bullet, in the end, King won. I feel that quite personally. My son is an FBI agent, who works proudly beside African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians (of both sexes) in rescuing hostages taken by cartel thugs, keeping an eye out for those who would bring weapons of mass destruction to our shores or loose mayhem on law abiding citizens. It's not Hoover's FBI anymore.
But I worry that we as a society may be forgetting how hard it was to make the advances that we did in the wake of King's life and death and how far we still have to go. Our culture seems to have selective amnesia about the turmoil of those times. Recently, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour said that things weren't really all that bad in the state during the civil rights era -- that, in fact the White citizens councils kept the Klu Klux Klan in check. I covered those councils, and I can assure you, racial equality was not on their dance card. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, it was "a hate group that routinely denigrated blacks as "genetically inferior," complained about "Jewish power brokers," called gay people "perverted sodomites," accused immigrants of turning America into a "slimy brown mass of glop," and named Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, 'Patriot of the Century.'"
There is a tendency in popular culture to rewrite our history as more racially benign that it actually was. Recently, I saw the summer blockbuster Captain America and watched as heroic black American soldiers fought alongside whites to thwart the Nazi menace in Europe. I was glad that black actors got good parts, but I wonder how many kids who see the movie will ever know that the U.S. army was rigidly segregated until after the war, when president Harry Truman ended segregation in the ranks.
And while Hollywood loves World War II movies, it's odd that one of the great steps forward in our history, the civil rights movement, seems barely to exist for cinematic drama.
The best selling novel, The Help about a white woman and black maids in the South during that era has been made into a new movie. But as Nelson George writes in the New York Times, (Black and White Struggle With A Rosy Glow) "the film's candy-coated cinematography and anachronistic super-skinny southern belles are part of a strategy that buffers the era's violence. The maids tell of the risks they are taking, but the sense of physical danger that hovered over the civil rights movement is mostly absent."
I remember that sense of danger -- in the riots on the eastern shore of Maryland, in the veiled menace in the voices of Citizens Council members -- and in the steely contempt in the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover.
So I am glad that Martin Luther King stands not far from Jefferson near the Tidal Basin, in Washington. As was said about Lincoln, "Now he belongs to the ages."
But we should remember what lies beneath all the white marble. We came to racial justice in turmoil, tears, death and incredible courage. We did overcome, but the process was very, very hard, and it is not over.
We must not forget those facts, even in the midst of all the pomp and ceremony swirling around the new memorial.
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the co-author of "The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children. "