Different People Remembered Differently

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    This week, in the archives, the most prominent thing I remember is Doris Crozier. I spent the majority of time in the archive session looking through the Crozier House Box, was presented Doris Crozier's "Person File" in class, and was searching with the intent of finding more visually aesthetic elements for our display (like a photo of Doris Crozier for example). Regardless, I would not consider myself to know a lot about Doris Crozier. I know she was the first President of the Coordinate College, I know she is Crozier House's namesake, and I know I really like her 70's chic glasses. Additionally, on Friday, all I could remember of her first name was the D. My idea of Doris Crozier does not feel like a memory, it feels like facts. 
    Martin Luther King Jr., on the other hand, feels more like a gut feeling. I might be able to conjure up some obscure specifics about King, but his functional presentation to me is not terribly based in true facts but snippets of feeling. In "The Struggle for the People's King," Hajar Yazdiha presents an overwhelming portrait of King. As his memory is so often invoked for the sake of bolstering a political message, there is not one aspect of King's public thought that seems to be contested. Because basically concrete facts like King was a religious man are so often recalled as an entrenched cog in a political assemblage, I internalize the concept of King as a religious man in the same gust that I internalize my moral response to religion being invoked for issues such as abortion or queer rights. If you grant that Martin Luther King Jr. is invoked often, as Yazdiha does; and the more often a past event is invoked, the more engrained like memory that point becomes; and if the frequent presentation of his memory is so often to contest the validity of it; then I think it is fair to think that my engrained, personal, affective memory of King is due to the way he is used so politically. 
    Comparing Martin Luther King Jr. and Doris Crozier feels somewhat absurd. What all the completely opposite perspectives we read about could agree on was this: King was a leader, King believed in some good, we should go forward as he would see fit (and how he sees fit is actually how we see fit). There is a clear moral undertone in what I can tell you about King. I guess Doris Crozier seemed...cool? I feel less connected to Doris Crozier because I don't have any sense of connection to her. Martin Luther King Jr. is that guy from posters in my middle school. And the posters are in my school because they help to instill a sense of American pride within me that enables me to be the proper American student. Martin Luther King Jr. feels mythic. He is known and regarded. He is important and thus political and thus moral and thus personal and thus mnemonic. He is the perfect example of how power shapes memory. Doris is the opposite. She just kind of was, because she exists to me in press releases and ordinary photos and event invitations. I think because of the different magnitudes at which I remember King and Crozier I feel simply unable to use them interchangeably, but it is interesting to compare their differences to see the micro differences of their lives and how they present and prove Yazdiha's theory differently. 

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