Soulsville USA

The national Martin Luther King holiday is tomorrow. This weekend, I've been thinking about Dr. King's legacy and how it relates to the 2008 elections and where our country is now. How do people my age and younger (Generation X and the Millenials) acknowledge the challenges and struggles of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s? Do those successes and scars still resonate with my peers of varying backgrounds and ethnicities?

Consequently, I'm reading Senator Barack Obama's two books now - Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope. I haven't made up my mind yet whether I'm voting for him or Senator Hillary Clinton in the Virginia primary on February 12th. So many people, including many I know very well, are swept up in Obama mania, I wonder if they've taken a measure of the man and, more importantly, asked hard questions about what he would actually do to bring about "change".

I admire both of these senators, and I will likely support whoever has the Democratic nomination in November (unless I vote for Bloomberg!) Mostly, I'm concerned with electing who will likely win the November general election (against likely Republican nominee John McCain). Most Democratic candidates adhere to major tenets in their governance that Dr. King was willing to (and did) go to jail for back in the 1960s. His is a legacy worth pausing to consider not just annually but frequently.


Like countless other white suburban kids in the early 80s, I first really connected with MLK's powerful rhetoric via U2's "Pride (in the name of love)" from their Unforgettable Fire album. I doubt if I have to tell you what an inspirational, soaring song it is (if slightly historically inaccurate).

In 1988, when I was seventeen years old, Martin Luther King III came to speak at a Baptist church in my hometown of Roanoke, Virginia. My aunt and I were the only white people there. Well, the city's caucasian vice mayor showed up with his wife and two kids to say a few remarks, as I recall, but then left with his family halfway through the service. (I found hard to believe the Roanoke vice mayor had something so pressing personally or professionally that he couldn't stick around for another half an hour or so. I was embarrassed, but I did see some striking rhetoric that morning, and I felt welcome in that church's congregation.)


Last Thursday night, at the famed Birchmere in Alexandria, I saw the one and only Isaac Hayes perform live in concert. He's one of the greatest singer-songwriters out of Memphis and was a vital instrument in the Stax Records machine that produced so much great music that was a soundtrack for the civil rights movement. He had a stroke some years back, so he was a little unsure and frail walking to the stage in his black robe last week. Once he arrived at his keyboard, his voice was as resonant and strong, as leonine and sexual as ever. With the help of one of his back-up singers, his mashed up cover of Glen Campbell's "By the Time I get to Phoenix" with Bacharach and David's "I Say a Little Prayer" was ingenius and thrilling. It was a fantastic show!

So in addition to reading some of Dr. King's works this weekend or throughout the week, as well as deeply considering whom you're going to vote for this year and why, I'd suggest also watching Wattstax, the documentary about the 1972 concert that was Stax Records' last hurrah before financial insolvency (but not irrelevancy).



Issac Hayes wrote "Soulsville" for the 1971 movie Shaft, as well as that movie's Oscar winning theme. Here is Hayes' moving performance of the former song from Wattstax and it remains, sadly, entirely too current thirty five years later: