AJ Springer offers his thoughts on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and how aspects of his legacy are being tarnished.
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I have a confession.
I wasn’t always a fan of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Among the backdrop of bruised and battered black bodies, immortalized in photographs and videos on the receiving end of batons, fire hoses, police dogs and angry white mobs, the embrace of non-violence was one I could not wrap my mind around. Turning the other cheek, so my oppressor had a fresh backside to smack sounded painful and non-appealing.
My childhood disagreements aside, history is clear: Dr. King was onto something.
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While my relationship with Dr. King has evolved, if my relationship with Martin Luther King Day was a Facebook status, well… “It’s complicated.”
We have come to the portion of our yearly program when the memory of Dr. King is stripped of all contexts and prostituted by those who, if actions were of any indication, not only would not have supported King in the sixties, but would have actively opposed his agenda.
Martin Luther King Day is all about one speech (“I Have a Dream”) delivered one time. Actually, a couple paragraphs of the speech. Conveniently harvested lines about “content of character” of skin color and all of us joining hands to overcome the issue of the day.
The real Martin Luther King Jr. was more than a man who had a dream. As I write this #ReclaimMLK is sparking a very real conversation in social media spaces. We’re seeing very real activism in the form of disruptions, which mirror more of Dr. King’s actual philosophy than most of the dedications given by men and women dressed in their Sunday best.
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The real Dr. King is an inconvenient truth for today’s power structure.
There is perhaps, no greater distortion of King’s memory than in condemnation of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Last August, former governor, Mike Huckabee, slammed the Black Lives Matter movement, saying the late civil rights leader would be “appalled” at what’s taking place today.
“You don’t do it by magnifying the problems, you do it by magnifying the solutions,” he stated. Huckabee also stated, “When I hear people scream ‘black lives matter,’ I’m thinking, of course they do. All lives matter. It is not that any life matters more than another…That’s the whole message that Dr. King tried to present, and I think he’d be appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some lives above others.”
While King certainly put equal rights for all at the forefront, he was well aware that the lives of black Americans were under attack. When people trot out Dr. King as a referee against disruption and protest, it is evidence that they have no idea what they’re talking about.
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In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, King writes about the necessity of protest in no uncertain terms, criticizing those who would criticize him for raising awareness of racial inequities:
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored…Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
King was openly condemned as an outside agitator, and much of the hate he received is a mirror image of the hate lobbed at the Black Lives Matter movement by those who would throw a rock and hide behind the culled legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.
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Though King dramatically stood for nonviolence, he was learned enough to understand that violent social unrest was a possibility when a marginalized community remains ignored. In “The Other America,” King spoke frankly to white Americans:
…at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
King’s surgical-like dissection of black pain is as relevant today, in the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore, as it was in the 60s. That these speeches could’ve been given last night calls into question our progress as a country. Which is not to say we’ve made no progress, but it is a damning indictment that we not only have a long way to go, but that it may not be time for a pat on the back and a victory lap from those King likely would’ve stood against today: our elected officials and a power structure that simply wished he would go home instead of agitating.
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To say that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would’ve uncritically and unequivocally sided with Black Lives Matter as a movement, had he lived, is speculative and inappropriate. We do not know how King would’ve evolved. We do not and cannot know where he’d stand.
We do, however, know where he stood. Dr. King stood firmly against racism and was not afraid to call out his political allies and fellow clergy. He boldly spoke against the war in Vietnam, charging the United States as being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He stood for the rights of workers and was in the midst of launching a campaign on behalf of poor people of all races before his assassination.
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During Martin Luther King Day, liberals and conservatives alike will come together in a bipartisan chorus to sing the praises of a man rightly honored by a country that failed to honor his courage in life. Reducing King to snippets of one speech fails to honor him in death, too. The real King was an inconvenient truth to those who preferred to sweep the dust, dirt and grime of injustice under a rug. He helped America clean the areas of its massive mansion that were filthy and sullied with the stench of injustice.
If those in power really wanted to honor King’s memory, they’d pay it forward and do the same.
Photo Credit: Elvert Barnes/Flickr