`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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Innovation does exist in Washington -- July 9, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

If you fear for America’s future, do yourself a favor and visit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington.

I hear you -- you’ve already seen the Star Spangled Banner, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Julia Child’s kitchen and the first ladies’ gowns. Great!   

To restore your faith in the future, though, walk downstairs to the new Innovation Wing on the first floor. Opened July 1, the 45,000-square-foot space houses 12 exhibitions that explore American invention, creativity and business.

The new exhibitions will make you proud of American ingenuity in solving the world’s problems big and small with such inventions as the light bulb, telegraph, the button stitch machine, the Apple 1 computer, hip-hop, Weight Watchers and Technicolor.  

What will renew your hopefulness for the future – as it did mine on a visit over the July 4^th weekend -- is something the museum’s talented professionals can’t curate: enthusiasm.

Visitors of all ages, but especially children, mostly enjoy themselves as they tour the exhibits. One area – the Draper Spark!Lab – invites kids six to 12 to explore things that roll, from rolling pins to skateboards, and make their own creations.

At times, the exhibits teach by shining a light on the dark parts of our past. A display about the Business of Slavery in the American Enterprise exhibition features the statue of a family of three—husband, wife and their son – standing on a base that is splitting apart to represent the rending of families by the slave trade.

The Object Project exhibition -- “everyday things that changed everything” -- encourages visitors to walk around and often touch inventions ranging from the refrigerator and other household items to bicycles and ready-to-wear clothes. In so doing, we are reminded that today’s shiniest new thing one day will be quaintly old fashioned.

A woman and her teenage daughter paused before a black, candlestick telephone that looked like something from Downton Abbey. 

Mom explained that someone would lift the separate earpiece to the ear and talk into the round mouthpiece at the top. So far, so good.

“It’s a dial phone,” Mom said. 

The teen expertly tapped her fingertips on the numbers.  

“No, you have to dial it,” Mom said, demonstrating.   

The girl gingerly extended an index finger into a slot but quickly pulled back. Laughing, she tried again. Eureka! She dialed a phone. Hello, 20^th century?

Nearby was a customized interactive version of the old TV game show, “The Price is Right,” in which visitors compete by guessing the total cost of three items from selected years.

The Object Project also shows us that extravagance in America is nothing new. Tiffany & Co. in 1896 customized a bicycle with nickel- and gold-plating, diamonds and emeralds. It bears the initials in gold of the owner, Mrs. M.N. Wiley of Montgomery, Ala.

That bicycle is in a glass-fronted case, but the days are gone of museums keeping all the good stuff behind glass. The Innovation Wing has many hands-on exhibits. Where else can you learn turntable scratch like a hip-hop DJ in the 1970s – thanks to video tutorials from greats of the genre?

Hip-hop was born in the Bronx, N.Y., and the Bronx is one of six creative hotspots featured in the Places of Invention exhibition. Others are Hartford, Conn., where precision manufacturing got its start in the late 1800s; Hollywood, where Technicolor ushered in the movies’ Golden Age in the 1930s; Minneapolis-St. Paul, which advanced cardiac care in the 1950s; Silicon Valley, Calif., home of the personal computer in the 1970s and ‘80s, and Fort Collins, Colo., a college town that fosters clean energy innovations.

Conventional wisdom holds that we Americans are blasé and world weary, but I’m not so sure. I lost track of how often people said:  “Wow!” “I’ve never seen anything like that!” and “Look at this!”

The American history museum welcomes four million visitors a year. When people flock to the new Innovation Wing, they renew their gusto.  

And they can impress their children with their knowledge of ancient times. One dad pointed out a boom box and said: “People used to carry those on their shoulders.”

His little boy gazed doubtfully at the huge contraption and had a question. “Why?”

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Wright brothers soar in our imaginations -- May 21, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Perhaps no Memorial Day has been as quietly momentous as May 30, 1899.

One hundred and 16 years ago, on what was then called Decoration Day, Wilbur Wright, 32, of Dayton, Ohio, sat down and wrote a letter by hand that literally changed the course of history.

He asked the Smithsonian Institution in Washington for all the papers the Smithsonian had published on aviation and a list of other works in English on the subject. He intended, he said, to devote whatever time he could spare from his bicycle shop to the systematic study of human flight.

Aware that his plan would seem far-fetched, since most people believed man wasn’t meant to fly and it was folly to try, Wright wrote:

“I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.”

Amazingly, the Smithsonian responded and sent pamphlets and a list. Wilbur and his younger brother Orville began their studies.

They worked tirelessly -- from studying birds in flight to conquering the technical and mechanical challenges of building a flyer. Four and a half years later, on a sandy beach in North Carolina the brothers piloted the first sustained flights of a heavier-than-air machine.

Who the brothers were, how it all happened and what came next make the compelling story biographer David McCullough tells in “The Wright Brothers.” The book debuts at No. 1 in both the print and e-book nonfiction and hardback nonfiction categories in the May 24 New York Times Book Review.

We may not agree on much in this cantankerous country, but I’ll hazard a guess on one thing: Everybody loves a story of the American dream. It’s hard to resist a tale of American ingenuity, hard work, courage and perseverance, especially when it ends in unequivocal success.

The Wrights surmounted so many obstacles on their path that their triumph seems made for TV.  Indeed, Tom Hanks scooped up the rights for an HBO miniseries even before the book was released May 5.

That a man could take to the air like a bird was such an absurd notion that many considered the Wrights odd. The brothers were inseparable and never married. They shared the family house, cooking duties and a bank account.

They had “no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own,” McCullough writes.

Yet they never gave up.

They persisted despite the difficulty in shipping their flying machines in parts to the remote Outer Banks coast and in combating relentless swarms of mosquitoes, unpredictable weather and the occasional lack of wind. 

They persevered despite the real possibility that they would die trying, as had other aviator pioneers. Orville nearly did die in a crash that took the life of his passenger, the first death in aviation history.

What they did have was a dream coupled with energy, courage and the spark of genius. They worked six days a week.  Neither they nor their father, a traveling preacher, had a high school diploma, but their father had a substantial library. The boys and their sister Katharine read voraciously on all subjects.

They also pondered, thought through problems, and when they failed experimented some more. And they wrote things out. By hand. And here’s another thing that distinguishes the Wrights:  

“Seldom ever did any one of the Wrights – father, sons, daughter – put anything down on paper that was dull or pointless or poorly expressed,” McCullough says.

When the brothers made their first successful flights in Kitty Hawk, N.C., Dec. 17, 1903, no reporters were there. A “ludicrously inaccurate” news story “concocted” by the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk ran in  several newspapers around the country, McCullough writes.

A sampling of the news coverage on the Library of Congress’ site includes the story in the Richmond (Va.) Dispatch, on page 5, headlined “A Machine That Flies.”   

When the world finally took notice, the Wright brothers became larger than life, first in France and Europe, then in the United States. By all accounts, the celebrities never let wealth and fame go to their heads.

They grasped as inspiration the idea that man could soar with the birds and applied dogged determination until it happened.

This summer, the heroic Wright brothers are again lifting Americans’ spirits.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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