Shabbat — Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday — Inauguration Weekend 2009
As this weekend began, Debbie and I attended services at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, as we often do. There, Cantor Angela Warnick Buchdahl played a short recording and spoke of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I have a dream” speech and we ended services by singing We Shall Overcome with a verse in Hebrew as well.
Shabbat morning, as I read the Book Review section of the New York Times I enjoyed Anthony Lewis’ review of a new book by Eric J. Sundquist called King’s Dream in which he suggests that the I have a dream speech has entered the cannon of American scripture.
The Movement
For my eighteenth birthday Libbe gave me a book. This should not be surprising, as we often gave books as gifts. However, this was a special book and she wrote a special note to accompany it. I was moved by the note and pasted it into the inside cover of the book.
Libbe’s letter sending me The Movement for my birthday
It reads:
Dear Mark
Happy Birthday!This is a beautiful representation of one of the most important movements of our time. By working though this movement, we can help others recognize these people as part of the Family of Man. It is frightening but true that this is only one of many problems that demand our immediate and active participation in order to make this a world of peace and freedom for all.
Love,
Libbe
The book is called quite simply “The Movement”. It is a collection of photographs with quotes and some text by Lorraine Hansberry. The book has been with me throughout all these years. We kept it on the shelf in the dinette (in Poway) behind where Debbie sat along with a number of other (picture) books that had significant meaning for us in the passage of time (one about the HUAC, another about the war in VietNam and yet one more about the June 23 demonstration against the war that occurred at the Century Plaza Hotel). I don’t know if this happened, but I always imagined that the easy availability of these books would mean that our kids would pick them off the shelf and explore them.
So, now, as my birthday approaches again, forty-four years later. I have brought this book to our current home and scanned the first few pages to share… at this transformative moment in our nation’s history.
And why these pages?
I often refer to Leo Frank and his lynching. So much so, that I have been “accused” of ignoring or not teaching that lynching was rife throughout America and that Leo Frank was the only Jew lynched out of hundreds… if not thousands of Black men and women.
And so, that may be the case, yet this book…. It was available at all times, at every meal, perhaps too available, and thereby ignored and not learned from as I might have imagined.
It has been a long time coming.
The Movement. It was not new to us Hurvitz kids. Our parents had taken us as children to local demonstrations. Their parents were involved as well. In fact, the FBI dossier on Nathan Hurvitz reported (I paraphrase) well-dressed Negroes attending social events at his parents’ home in Cleveland, OH. During my years in high school I regularly wore a lapel button the size of a dime with a white equals sign on a black field. Periodically I’d change that for a button the size of a nickel with the nuclear disarmament symbol. At other times, I wore this one:
black and white handshake in a Magen David
The following year at Yom Kippur (1996) we would, as a family, prepare and distribute a leaflet calling on the Jewish community to work to stop the war in VietNam. It is good to have had even the small role that I did in helping to bring about this change, at the same time, as I hinted at here eleven years ago, those larger actors in the change played a role in who I was to become as well.
The Movement; Documentary of a Struggle for Equality
Originally posted 23 January 2009 (27 Tevet 5769)
