Che and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Maybe you've seen it, that point in The Motorcycle Diaries when Che Guevara is pushing his raft away from the shore of a colony of lepers. It's the moment when Che is leaving a group of individuals that not only have been immensely impacted by him but also through which he is "not the same me" as when he left.

Monday marked the day some celebrated as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. To be honest I have never shown as much reverence to this holiday as I felt convicted to show this year. I will come clean. I am new to EMU; even more, I am new to Virginia. I don't mean to stereotype, nor do I mean to perpetuate stigmas in this article, but you must understand some "Southern" values are new to me.

I recently had the fortune to receive a car. The normal process as we all know is to change the title at the DMV, and, magically, the government says the car is yours. So Friday after class I went out on Route 11 and found the DMV on Peoples Ave. To my surprise it was not open. I was there within normal working hours on a work day, but in the corner of the window hung a sign reading: "The DMV will be closed Friday and Monday in respect of Lee/Jackson Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day."

There is a point earlier in The Motorcycle Diaries when Che is looking across the river at the colony of lepers and he says to his friend "it is not just that the river that separates the hospitals, it separates the sick from the well."

Perhaps it is some twisted irony that the Virginia legislature decided until 2000 to have Lee-Jackson-King day, all on the same day. It doesn't surprise me that Lee-Jackson day dates back to origins in 1904; what is shocking is that a state government office such as the DMV in 2006 takes a day off work two days before Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Monday, being MLK day, I took a field trip to Richmond and the state legislature. I was supporting clean streams in the Shenandoah Valley. This trip was for a good cause. According to the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, 80% of the adult smallmouth bass and redbreast sunfish in the South Fork and main stem of the Shenandoah River died in this 100 or so mile stretch within three months last year. Investigation has provided the cause of death but not the instigation for these deaths, meaning the fish have died from lesions but what caused the stress in the fish has not been pinpointed.

During this trip I routinely asked fellow participants and even professors if they knew the other mystery I was in search of answers for: that of "What was this Lee-Jackson Day all about?" To my dismay few even knew it existed, or they were vague in describing it as a "southern thing." This of course meant nothing to me because I was in the South and still had no answer.

This changed when a friend of mine informed me it was not a racially inspired celebration but it was rather about "southern pride." She described how abolitionists were active around the time of Civil War and the Confederate constitution abolished the slave trade (while maintaining slavery). My friend continued to explain that Lee-Jackson Day was about celebrating what it means to be from the "South."

As I walked with the Clean Streams demonstration in our state capital we intersected a group of fellow demonstrators. This group was asking legislators for funds to keep mentally challenged people in homes rather than large facilities. As I looked back over the line behind me I observed something I'm not proud to have noticed. The vast majority of the group I was with would have probably described themselves as Caucasian or white but as I looked at this intersecting group, its demographics were not same. As I trotted along with my new blue scarf our organizers gave us and sipped the coffee they treated us to, the orange balloons of this other demonstration were floating into the sky and seemed to describe it all.

Che raises his glass to toast the fellow doctors, nuns and workers on his birthday at the leper hospital, saying "...after this journey more firmly than ever, [I believe] that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictional. We constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographical similarities. And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin America."

Contact Jon at jon.helfers@emu.edu.