Letters to Martin
Meditations on Democracy in Black America
-
- $25.99
-
- $25.99
Publisher Description
Letters to Martin contains twelve meditations on contemporary history and political struggles for our oxygen-deprived society. Evoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," these meditations, written in the form of letters to King, speak specifically to the many public issues we presently confront in the United States—economic inequality, freedom of assembly, police brutality, ongoing social class conflicts, and geopolitics. Award-winning author Randal Maurice Jelks invites readers to reflect on US history by centering on questions of democracy that we must grapple with as a society. Hearkening to the era when James Baldwin, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Richard Wright used their writing to address the internal and external conflicts that the United States faced, this book is a contemporary revival of a literary tradition of meditative social analysis. These meditations on democracy provide spiritual oxygen to help readers endure the struggles of rebranding, rebuilding, and reforming our democratic institutions so that we can all breathe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these erudite if scattershot epistles inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Jelks (Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans), a professor of African American Studies at the University of Kansas, reflects on King's legacy and touches on contemporary political, economic, and racial justice matters. Issuing an "exigent spiritual appeal" to recognize that "the heart of democracy is the internalization of genuine equality and respect for others, no matter their persuasions or incomes," Jelks recounts his sixth-grade teacher playing King's sermons and speeches for the entire day after his assassination ("Mr. Price, angrily grieving, told our class that we needed to know ‘our people's history, our struggle!' ") and discusses how democratic norms can be manipulated by the "economic elite." Elsewhere, he analyzes how King used his "charismatic authority," chides Barack Obama for allowing the Tea Party "to fester," and explains how King's nonviolent civil disobedience was a "demonstration of Black collective self-love." Though Jelks delves deep into philosophical, ethical, and religious topics related to King and the civil rights struggle, the letters tend to meander, as when a discussion of how Rodney King and Martin Luther King's lives are "interwoven" gets sidetracked by a reading of the Charles Johnson novel Dreamer. Still, this is a probing and expansive meditation on America's fitful progress toward racial equality.
