Why President Obama Cannot Be Like Dr Martin Luther King.

I found myself reading two books about Martin Luther King just about the time of the commemoration of his birthday in January. Hampton Sides’ Hellhound on his Trail is a wow of a book. James Earl Ray, King’s killer, is the hellhound and Dr King is the prey, the target, the quarry. Sides is a pretty good writer, his delivery is an exemplar of tonal congeniality. With a kind of soft hand that has a firm sure grip, he saunters along with the reader as he trails both Dr King and his louche hunter. In a way more gripping and portentous, Sides keeps Ray close to his crime-writerlike field of vision from the time the somewhat simple-minded, if devious, man gets it into his bemused and prejudiced head to murder the Civil Rights leader, through when he shoots him on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel, to when he is captured in London, England. From the story I read, with the insights Sides provides, I wonder why some of Dr Kings relatives still refuse to believe that it was Ray who killed the great man.

I think it was Hellhound which made me wander back to Dr Ralph Abernathy’s And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. I read the voluminous book many years ago. I own a copy of the autobiography and for some reason I had returned to the chapter which Abernathy devoted to his friend and leader of the movement, Dr Martin Luther King. Abernathy was King’s deputy and alter-ego, so if anyone was going to write truthfully about the assassinated leader it would be Abernathy. But then again, just as I felt the first time I read the book, I failed to see why Abernathy was demonised and damned - even by some of those who did not read the book. As it has been repeated by those who may have approached the book as dispassionately as I have done, what Abernathy did was to tell us that just like JF Kennedy, Dr King was very much human, a human being whose frailties did not stand in the way of his strengths, his single-mindedness and his lofty and rangy pursuit of Truth.

Okay, there are some exposition of how Dr King, more than any of his companions, succumbed to certain human needs, but these vicarious confessions are not untrue – and they are very much empathetic, it is not as if Abernathy set out to gain one up on the late Dr King or to appropriate moral mileage. What Abernathy wrote is by no means a salacious and vicious exposé of whatever relationship Dr King had with women, after all the dossier that J Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept (and still keeps) about King is far more damaging, and indeed deleterious to his reputation, than anything that Abernathy recalled. Anyone interested in knowing more about Dr King and the extraordinary life he lived should add Hellhound On His Trail and And The Walls Came Tumbling Down to her list of sources. However I did not intend to write a review of the books, I only mentioned them above as an intro to what I really wanted to write about.

Recently, something caught my eye while on the net. It was a story - a retrospective sidestory as a matter of fact - of how some of the people (African Americans, mainly) who went to the unveiling of King’ majestic granite-hewn image in Washington DC started to chant ‘Be Like Him’ to President Obama when they saw him arrive with his family. I had to reread the story to ascertain whether I had read it correctly.        

In spite of the slight ambiguity, it was obvious that the warcry of ‘Be Like Him’ was directed at President Obama, and the gist is simple: Obama should ‘be like’ Dr King, although the yodellers neglected to elaborate on how the President should be like the Civil Rights leader. So my interest was piqued, and not just because I am of the same colour and geohistorical ethnicity as both men but also that I am partial to moral philosophy and its uncertainties.

I found this rallying cry of ‘Be Like Him’ curious. All right, Martin Luther King was a great man, a hero, an icon, worthy of whatever secular (even spiritual) beatification bestowed on him, but like John F Kennedy he was flawed in more ways than one. And we must not forget that history has treated MLK kindly. Just as Hoover and his FBI minions never succeeded in their effort to smear and destroy King’s reputation when he was flourishing as a Civil Rights leader, generally historians and biographers have handled MLK with kid gloves. In Hellhound, Hampton Sides clarifies what happened the night before Dr King was shot, he writes that King only slept with one of his many mistresses and not two - and certainly there were no prostitutes -  and he did not beat any third woman up as that imaginative canard has it. Having said that, even though MLK might not be a saint (and I don’t think he ever strived to be one), he was a man full of energy, a brave soul, and again, a great man - he was unique in his own way.

There is a lot to be said for ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ but those who were hollering at Obama to be like King under the Sphinx-like image of the latter may have taken it too far. The likelihood is that in the early 21^st century world, if Obama had been like King - beyond oratory, fortitude and zeal - he would not have become the president of the United States, there would have been no sweeping under the carpet the evidence-backed dirt that would have been dredged up, and I don’t think it would have been easy for him to wriggle out of the ordure the way Newt Gingrich seemed to have done when a former wife accused him of suggesting to her the alternative of an open marriage, he would not have been allowed to get into the White House and try to out-Clinton Clinton, he would have become another fallen-man of American politics, a 21^st century Gary Hart.     

More than all, Barack Obama is of a completely different temperament from Martin Luther King. While Obama is calm almost to the point of being seen as somewhat phlegmatic, King was a dapper ambivert, a man who could easily navigate his way from being a mere detached observer to the soul of a party - that is why he now symbolises the Everyman of the old morality tales and a moral force for good. And there is the matter of selfhood, of personality - why must anyone be like another? The trouble with the ‘Be Like Him’ mantra is the high-pitched overtones of the substitution of emulation for mimicry, of the subordination of wisdom to wishful thinking. Personality is not a moveable feast which allows one to be Mr Obama today and, after drinking some magic potion overnight, become Dr King tomorrow. For all his faults, even flaws, I think Obama should be allowed to be himself. He is no Martin Luther King; he cannot be Martin Luther King - in the same way that King could never have been Malcolm X or Malcolm X King.