Denver Public Schools very well could have served my backside for lunch last Friday, given the way it was repeatedly flayed and grilled by readers angry over a column last week decrying the district’s serving fried chicken and collard greens to honor Martin Luther King Jr.
People here and from all across the country simply lit into me and Jennifer Holladay, the mother of a DPS kindergartner incensed over the menu offering, who got the decrying ball rolling.
A brief sampling:
“You’ve only managed to make Southern fried chicken a racist term when it isn’t, but instead you chose to make a mountain out of molehill. DPS should’ve told Mrs. Holladay to mind her own business and teach her child about all the good MLK did.”
Franki Rader of Thornton chastised me and Holladay for long paragraphs before ending with a simple one:
“Ask Dr. King’s children if they thought it was an insult.”
One of the most interesting things in all of the e-mailing and phone calling is that almost everyone agreed had the district also served watermelon, well, that would have gone too far.
So, the caricature of fried chicken-loving black folks is just race-baiting, mountains-from- molehills making, not even remotely in the same league as the watermelon caricature?
Let us agree to disagree.
I ran it all past my friend William M. King, who for 38 years has been a professor of Afroamerican Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is one man wise enough for me to trust to give the straight skinny on such matters.
“The problem,” he said in his deliberative way, “mostly exists in the mind of the beholder, the person criticizing the schools for serving the meal.”
He pointed out what numerous correspondents over the week highlighted — that Southern fried chicken was, indeed, Dr. King’s favorite meal.
“He said it many times, including on the day he was assassinated,” he explained. “In fact, Ralph Abernathy’s wife was preparing it for dinner that night in Memphis.”
People can view serving fried chicken to school kids as a way to honor a historic black figure as offensive; it is their right, he said.
“It doesn’t offend me, really. It is an indication, however, of the short-sightedness of people who think it is appropriate to celebrate the only national holiday for a black man with a piece of fried chicken and a scoop of collard greens.”
William King, an active participant in the civil-rights movement a half-century ago, says it tells him there remains a lack of appreciation for what Dr. King was about.
“Yes, it was just lunch, but he was about so much more than that. How does it address and remember who Dr. King was? He was about altering the balance of power in society, which has nothing to do with a piece of chicken and some collards.”
OK, if not through lunch, I asked, how should the district, or any school, have set about honoring Dr. King?
“You might have sat the kids down and read them the 33rd paragraph of the speech he gave the night before he was killed, the one where he says ‘all we are saying to America is to be true to what you put on paper,’ that if you are truly a society that teaches democracy, you ought to do the kind of things for citizens that are consistent with a democracy.
“It would have been much more nourishing than the chicken.”
Yes, indeed. That is all I meant to say.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
