The editors of For the Love of Men want to celebrate this month with a mustache-a-day for November.
Movember is an annual, month-long event involving the growing of facial hair, especially mustaches, to raise money and awareness around men’s cancers and mental health issues. You can donate to the cause here.
We celebrate Martin Luther King for much, much more than his facial hair. He was a revolutionary in the civil rights movement. But today, we are going to celebrate the blackness and masculinity that MLK also deserves recognition, because we don’t celebrate those things enough, and skin color, even in 2013, remains a License to Profile, to arrest and to even murder.
A lot of MLK’s journey can be examined to discuss what makes a good man. You may have heard snippets of criticism surrounding the man. According to Snopes.com, a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that King had plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, yet they didn’t call for his degree to be rescinded. This doesn’t erase the mass struggle he led in the civil rights movement. As Time magazine wrote, “for all King did to free blacks from the yoke of segregation, whites may owe him the greatest debt, for liberating them from the burden of America’s centuries-old hypocrisy about race.
MLK was, as we all are, a mixture of good a bad. An imperfect human striving for perfection in the midst of oppressive social structures. He also sported some stylish lip fur.