Jonathan Eig | Vox

The myths we teach children about Martin Luther King Jr., explained by an ’80s board game

2018-04-04T10:15:47-04:00

A few months ago, while shopping on eBay, I came across the Martin Luther King Jr. Game — manufactured in 1986, intended for players ages 6 to adult, and billed as “an educational and entertaining game about America’s greatest black leader.”

Was there really fun for the whole family in a game based on the life of America’s great martyr for civil rights? It took only $27.99 to satisfy my curiosity.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Game is a little like Chutes and Ladders. Players spin to decide how far they’ll advance on the board, then follow the directions for whatever space they land on. If you land on a space with a picture of Dr. King, you draw a “Decision” card, read the back of the card, and choose one of two options. One decision card reads: “WED CORETTA SCOTT OR SWITCH PLACES WITH THE PLAYER TO YOUR LEFT.” Another says: “GO TO BIRMINGHAM JAIL AND WRITE A LETTER OR LOSE ONE TURN.”

If you land on a space marked “QUOTES,” you read from a Quote card and move the indicated number of spaces. One card says, “We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools. +1 Space.” Another says, “The Negro’s agony diminishes the white man, and the Negro’s salvation enlarges the white man. + 3 Spaces.”

In 1963, while sitting in his Birmingham jail cell, King wrote: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” That quote doesn’t appear on any of the cards in the Martin Luther King Jr. Game, but it compelled me to consider whether the game fostered the kind of shallow understanding King disdained.

After my 8-year-old daughter and I played a few times, I had my answer.

It’s a fast-moving game. Players travel chronologically across and up and the board, from King’s birth on January 15, 1929, to his ordination as a Baptist minister, the Montgomery bus boycott, his incarceration in Birmingham, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Poor People’s Campaign, and so on.

To the game-maker’s credit, they include a place on the board for King’s assassination. But the action doesn’t end there. Instead, the winner needs to move two more spaces past the assassination, from 1968 to 1986, when King is honored with a federal holiday.

It’s not difficult to understand why Cadaco, the white-owned manufacturer, made that the last square on the board, especially considering that the game was released in 1986 and probably sought to capitalize on the excitement generated by the commemoration of the holiday. But three decades later, it’s clear that creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day cannot be viewed as a game-ending victory, not in the Martin Luther King Jr. Game and certainly not in modern America.

What we leave out when we teach kids about Martin Luther King Jr.

Today, we tend to mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day by celebrating shared values such as peace and equality. We teach children that King had a dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their characters.

But we seldom ask schoolchildren to read King’s books. And we seldom discuss what often comes as a backlash to progress, as Ibram X. Kendi has written so powerfully. Nor do we discuss economic injustice, a part of King’s message that’s been whitewashed almost into oblivion.

We forget, for example, that the full name of the legendary March on Washington was actually the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King warned that ending legal segregation would not end inequality, and he began talking about concepts such as guaranteed jobs and guaranteed income.

After King’s death, racism roared and became part of a political philosophy that sought to hide its bias. Voting rights eroded, schools resegregated, and incarceration rates for black men soared. Kendi writes:

A new vocabulary emerged, allowing users to evade admissions of racism. It still holds fast after all these years. The vocabulary list includes these: law and order. War on drugs. Model minority. Reverse discrimination. Race neutral. Welfare queen. Handout. Tough on crime. Personal responsibility. Black-on-black crime. Achievement gap. No excuses. Race card. Colorblind. Post racial. Illegal immigrant. Obamacare. War on Cops. Blue Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. Entitlements. Voter fraud.

I wish the creators of the Martin Luther King Jr. Game had included the setbacks experienced by King and others in the civil rights movement. Players should lose turns when the FBI taps their phones, when bombs explode at their homes, or when they’re attacked by angry mobs, arrested, or hit in the head with rocks while leading peaceful marches for fair housing.

As we mark the 50th anniversary of King’s death, we should strive to get past the lukewarm acceptance exemplified in this game, in street namings and countless other well-intentioned tributes. We should remember the racism that so violently fueled opposition to the civil rights movement — and that hardly disappeared when segregation receded.

We should reflect on the role discrimination played then and continues to play now in creating racial disparities. We should think about how to fight our own racist ideas, even the subtle ones.

Commemorating King, whether on his birthday or on the day of his assassination, shouldn’t suggest that this symbol of the civil rights movement is a part of history long gone. It should serve as a reminder that the struggle continues, that the fight for equality is really the fight for democracy, and that King’s words still have the power to shake our complacency and call us to action.

As King wrote in another section of his letter from the Birmingham jail, we must “create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

I wish that were one of the quotes in the game.

Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life, is working on a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

The return to activism for black athletes

2017-09-26T13:10:10-04:00

LeBron James has roughly as many Twitter followers as the president of the United States. That, as we found out this weekend, gives the basketball superstar a very real kind of political and cultural power.

James used that power on Saturday, just hours after Trump attacked NBA superstar Steph Curry for declining an invitation to the White House and, for good measure, said Curry’s entire championship-winning team wasn’t welcome.

It didn’t take James long to respond. “U bum,” he called Trump on Twitter.

“@StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite, James continued. “Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!”

In the same busy weekend, Trump called for the firing of protesting football players who decline to stand for the national anthem.

As the New York Times noted, today’s superstar athletes have vast followings on social media, allowing them to bypass their team owners, PR departments, and the news media. James has 38.5 million followers on Twitter and 32.8 million more on Instagram. Curry has 10.5 million on Twitter and 17.6 million more on Instagram. Trump has 39.3 million followers on Twitter and 7.5 million more on Instagram.

That, the paper said, made today’s athletes “unlike sports heroes of the past.”

The Times should have said that made modern athletes different from most sports heroes of the past. In this area, as in so many others, Muhammad Ali was an exception.

The now-late comedian and political activist Dick Gregory was one of the first people I interviewed for my new biography of the boxer, Ali: A Life, and he was the one who first pointed out to me how Ali circumvented the media to be heard at a time when black people risked their careers and their lives by speaking out on issues like segregation.

Ali, Gregory said, could punch a white man in the face for 15 rounds on live TV and there was nothing the media could do about it. His fights were carried live, so Ali could — and often did — thank Allah and Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, and there was nothing the media could do about it. Ali could call himself the greatest at a time when many Americans considered him inherently inferior because of his race, and there was nothing the media could do about it. He could call out the folly of the war in Vietnam, and there was nothing the media could do about it.

When Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X spoke in those days, Gregory said, white reporters and white editors decided how much they would be heard. But those people could not control Ali. When we spoke in 2015, Gregory’s face lit up as if he were back in 1964 and watching it all happen again.

“This motherfucker,” Gregory said, “would be in your fucking face as many rounds as the fight last. King never got that kind of time. You watch him beat a white boy to the ground and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. This never happened before. Never, ever happened in the history of the planet. Ali was everything everybody wanted their child to be, except some ignorant-ass white folks, and they don’t count.”

To see if Gregory was right I conducted an unscientific test. I counted the number of times Ali appeared in the New York Times in 1964 and compared that with the number of times Martin Luther King and other prominent black Americans appeared.

Gregory was mostly right. Final score: Elijah Muhammad, 31; Malcolm X, 100, Ali, 203; King, 230.

Black athletes haven’t been this political in decades. The change is way overdue.

Now social media gives more athletes the ability to be like Ali, to speak up to power. For a long time, many athletes were too worried about making money to flex these muscles off the field or the court and risk losing endorsements. Michael Jordan, for example, will never live down his comment about why he stayed out of politics. The reason, he reportedly said, was that Republicans bought Nikes same as Democrats. In 1990, he also pointedly refused to campaign for North Carolina Senate candidate Harvey Gantt, who was black, when he ran against incumbent Republican Jesse Helms, who had a dismal record on race.

Compare that to James, who campaigned actively for Hillary Clinton, or to Pat Tillman, who left the NFL to join the Army, or to football player Brandon Marshall, who has spoken out about mental illness.

Trump’s current war with the NFL athletes who are kneeling during the national anthem is leading growing numbers of athletes to make the kind of explicitly political comments that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago.

Many of those NFL players are acting in solidarity with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who kicked off the current firestorm last year, when he sat out the national anthem to protest the continued police killings of unarmed black men. Kaepernick hasn’t been able to find a job in the NFL since, even though he’s statistically as good as, or better than, many current quarterbacks. (Trump, characteristically, has claimed credit, telling a crowd in March that NFL owners hadn’t signed Kaepernick because “They don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump.”)

It’s great to see James, Curry, Kaepernick, and so many others following Ali’s example. It’s also great to see Jordan’s recent donations to the NAACP.

They’re saying their power is their own and not contingent on any team owner. They’re recognizing, as Ali did, that they’re free to say what they want. After all, what’s the point in having millions of followers if you don’t even try to lead them?

Dick Gregory would be pleased, I know. We all should be.

Democracy, like any sporting event, is best when it is fiercely contested.

Jonathan Eig is the author of the new book Ali: A Life.