Brooklyn Park hosts ‘Knowing Dr. King’ with equity manager

“Some argue that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is one of the greatest Americans that ever lived and challenged this country,” Davis said. “He led a movement that pushed and challenged America to be the America written in artifact.”

King was born Michael Martin Luther King Jr., but he wanted to be identified differently from his father and chose to use his middle name, Davis said.

King was assassinated at the age of 39, “and if you look at his body of work from the time that he was conceived to the time that he died, in 39 years, Dr. King, Rev. Dr. King, did a lot,” Davis said.

King skipped grades 9 and 12 in high school, had a bachelor’s degree in sociology by age 19, a bachelor’s degree in divinity by age 22, and a doctorate in philosophy by age 26, Davis said.

In the context of larger discussions on mental health and therapy, Davis noted that as a young man, King attempted suicide twice.

“As I grew up the thought of or the conversation centering (on) therapy, it was just not a conversation that came about in Black households to a large extent,” Davis said. “At least one of the (suicide) attempts, (King) had heard that his grandmother had went to the hospital and he thought that she was going to die, so he jumped out the window of his home trying to kill himself.”

King was arrested more than 29 times for protesting. Those arrests include protests at the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycotts, the 1961 Albany Movement, the 1963 March on Washington, the 1963 Birmingham campaign, and at the 1965 Alabama Voters Rights rally in Selma.

“As I visited Selma, it was shared with me by members who marched in Bloody Sunday, who were activists or what they would call foot soldiers in Selma, said that you didn’t see Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and it wasn’t as a negative comment,” Davis said.

“He was moving around so much helping getting different places organized, but when Dr. King would come to a space, the foot soldiers knew he was going to bring the three Ms, and what are the three Ms? He was going to bring motivation, he was going to bring money, and he was going to bring media.”

Davis said he was “saddened” that King was not able to utilize today’s media platforms for organizing.

Media and propaganda came to deem certain types of activism as “good activism” and other activism as “non-civil activism,” Davis said.

According to Davis, Stan Lee has publicly acknowledged that the X-Men comics were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. The comics created a good-versus-evil dynamic with characters inspired by King and Malcolm X, Davis said.

“I don’t know if that was part of the rationale of the X-Men series, to show you what good civil protest should look like and to show you what bad civil rights protest should look like, but creating this platform of Malcolm versus Martin is very dangerous,” Davis said.

King was not viewed favorably by many Americans during the mid 1960s, he said. He was deemed “a troublemaker, deemed to be pushing the country too fast, things of that nature,” Davis said.

Both King and boxer Muhammad Ali became well-liked American figures after they were no longer able to articulate their views.

“It wasn’t until he was assassinated and could no longer push this country in the way that he and others pushed this country that he became this revered and beloved figure to the masses,” he said.

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