`A day on, not a day off’ for MLK -- column of Jan. 13, 2022

 By MARSHA MERCER

The federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. blends celebration, reflection and action.

On the third Monday in January, typically there are parades, prayer breakfasts, church services, concerts, readings from the writings of the slain civil rights leader and, yes, sales. Shopping, though, is far less a focus than on other federal holidays.

The King holiday is our national day of service, when Americans are encouraged to volunteer to make their communities better.

King would have turned 93 on Jan. 15. He received the Nobel Peace Prize at 35 and was only 39 when he was tragically killed by a sniper in 1968.

Time dims memories, so it’s worth remembering the holiday honoring him was hard won. Black members of Congress had to fight for 15 years to get the holiday through Congress.

Sen. Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, once filibustered the bill with 300 pages of documents accusing King of being a Marxist with communist leanings. Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy or Massachusetts and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York declared the papers “filth.”

Congress finally passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the law creating the King holiday in 1983, with the first observance in 1986. But some states resisted. Arizona did not recognize the holiday until 1992 and New Hampshire in 1999.

Until last year, Virginia still honored Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson with a state holiday on the Friday before the King holiday.

Shortly after the first MLK federal holiday, The New York Times published a letter from a Princeton University sociology professor.

“I propose we declare the holiday a `day on,’ rather than a `day off,’” Marion J. Levy Jr. wrote. His idea was that everyone would work on the holiday and those above the poverty line would send their wages to a special MLK fund benefiting education, housing and other projects.

Persuading millions of Americans to work on a holiday and donate their pay was a bridge too far, but the idea of service caught on.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the King Holiday and Service Act, officially designating the holiday as a day of national service.

Overshadowing the commemorations this year is the political battle over voting rights legislation.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris paid tribute to King and met with his family Tuesday in Atlanta before the president delivered a fiery speech evoking King’s memory to press for passage of voting rights legislation.   

Voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue but, like most things, it has become fiercely politicized. Partisans can’t even agree on facts.

Biden and many Democrats contend passing the two voting rights bills before Congress is so crucial to restoring equity in the election system that the Senate should set aside the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes, if necessary.

But Republicans vociferously claim the voting rights bills are a massive power grab by Democrats, an attempt to rewrite the nation’s election laws to benefit Democratic candidates.

Biden hopes to make where legislators stand a key marker in this year’s midterm elections.

As senators wrestle with their role in history, the rest of us can find meaningful ways to observe the holiday.

You can Google local MLK service events. If wintry weather or the pandemic makes in-person volunteering problematic, the federal government has two service opportunities people can do at home.

Both the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution are seeking volunteers to transcribe historical documents virtually. Digital volunteers are helping to make letters, field notes, diaries, manuscripts and other handwritten documents more widely available.

For example, the Smithsonian needs help transcribingrecords from the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was formed to improve the lives of formerly enslaved men and women during Reconstruction.

The Library of Congress needs help transcribing pages from George Washington’s farm reports that chronicle the lives and labor of enslaved people at Mount Vernon as well as other aspects of 18^th century farm life.

The library also has projects transcribing Walt Whitman’s letters and Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape architecture files. 

This MLK holiday is a chance to learn while we serve.

“Everybody can be great,” King said, “because anybody can serve.”

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Obama the marriage president? -- Jan. 31, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama made history and gladdened many hearts when he endorsed gay rights and gay marriage in his second inaugural address.

Just think what additional good he could have done had he also endorsed marriage generally.

   

I know. The tired phrase “marriage between one man and one woman” has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the political and religious right. But that need not scare the president or anyone else from talking about its benefits to individuals and society.  Married people live longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than singletons, studies show.

And you don’t have to be Rick Santorum to know that marriage is a grand anti-poverty program. Many studies have shown that If people marry before they start families, the children fare far better. This isn’t a news flash.

In 1965, an obscure assistant secretary of Labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report for President Lyndon Johnson about the breakdown of the black family. Moynihan warned that the crumbling family structure left many households headed by single women and these were more likely to be stuck in poverty. He hoped the report would be the impetus for a national strategy to break the cycle of poverty.

But Moynihan’s report was leaked to the press, causing an uproar. Any hope of a national conversation was lost as critics lambasted Moynihan for blaming the victims of poverty, insulting single moms and ignoring supports in the black community. His controversial report  notwithstanding, Moynihan went on to serve 24 years in the U.S. Senate. He died in 2003.

The problem of the collapsing American family has only gotten worse since the Moynihan report.

“Nearly 50 years later, the picture is even more grim – and the statistics can no longer be organized neatly by race,” says Isabel V. Sawhill, a budget expert and scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Moynihan’s bracing profile of the collapsing black family in the 1960s looks remarkably similar to a profile of the average white family today.”

Sawhill writes in the latest Washington Monthly: “White households have similar—or worse—statistics of divorce, unwed childbearing, and single motherhood as the black households cited by Moynihan in his report.

“In 2000, the percentage of white children living with a single parent was identical to the percentage of black children living with a single parent in 1960: 22 percent,” she says.

While Moynihan saw family formation as a racial divide, Sawhill says it’s increasingly a class issue.

“Because the breakdown of the traditional family is overwhelmingly occurring among working-class Americans of all races, these trends threaten to make the U.S. a much more class-based society over time,” she writes.

When educated, middle-class couples form two-parent families, they’re able to give their children “time and resources that lower-and working-class single mothers, however impressive their efforts to be both good parents and good breadwinners, simply do not have,” Sawhill says.

In his autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope,” Sen. Barack Obama writes that liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders, in their urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism, wrongly labeled Moynihan a racist and “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.”   

As president, Obama has approached making families stronger by focusing on the responsibilities of fatherhood, usually around Fathers Day. In June 2010, he announced a nationwide Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative, but he conceded that it’s hard for government to change attitudes or behavior.

“Now, I can’t legislate fatherhood – I can’t force anybody to love a child. But what we can do is send a clear message to our fathers that there is no excuse for failing to meet their obligations,” he said.

That may be sound social policy, but it doesn’t make anyone’s heart sing.   

As Obama and other leaders promote the value of gay marriage, they shouldn’t be silent on the value of marriage between a man and woman. It’s not either-or. Both are good.    

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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