The truths he spoke as a living man don’t necessarily match the narrative that’s been fitted onto him as a dead icon.
We, as humans, have a habit of reducing our history down to cartoons. Thomas Jefferson was a good man. Benedict Arnold was a bad one. WWII was a good war. Vietnam was a bad one. And Martin Luther King Jr. was a crowd-pleasing, inoffensive figure for unity and tolerance and probably the opening theme song of Reading Rainbow.
A bit surprising, considering that within living memory he was considered an anti-American communist sympathizer and probable Soviet agent, a figure so loathsome and dangerous that those all-American boys at the FBI told him he should kill himself.
It’s not surprising, considering that we choose to remember Mark Twain as an avuncular old Yankee talespinner rather than a vicious social and media critic, and Helen Keller as a bloodlessly inspiring disabled person instead of a radical socialist. It’s safer to have our icons be harmless, generic, uncontroversial. Indeed, if we can yank a few inspiring lines out of context, or just misattribute them, we can hijack a person’s legacy for the opposite of everything they stood for. (Just ask George Carlin’s ghost.)
So today, as we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we’re going to hear a lot about “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” We’re going to hear a lot about “Thank God almighty, we are free at last!” We won’t be hearing as much about how Dr. King’s critique of injustice cut a lot deeper than the cartoon version would have it. Here’s a few examples.
Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.
–From Why We Can’t Wait, 1964
When I was growing up, it was common to hear right-wingers, some of them old enough to have denounced King as a rabble-rousing comsymp once upon a time, claiming that Dr. King would have agreed with them that affirmative action was just plain reverse racism. After all, he said that thing about people being judged by “the content of their character”, right? So obviously he MUST have opposed affirmative action, assuming he never said anything else ever. In fact, he said things like the above quote quite consistently, over many years. He designed one of the first affirmative action programs, Operation Breadbasket, personally. He was quite clear that claiming to be color-blind was a damn lie, but most folks don’t like to bring up that part of the story.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
–“A Time To Break Silence“, 1967
That is not what you’d call tepid anti-war rhetoric. It’s a long list of things that we know today were all true, though we like to cough and change the subject when it comes to specifics. And it’s at the heart of a speech that took a radical, and dangerous stand, in a time when it was not fashionable or safe to do so. Remember that the next time someone tells you Dr. King was basically a moderate sort.
God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. God intends for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and he has left in this universe “enough and to spare” for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth.
–“Paul’s Letter to American Christians“, 1956
When he died, Dr. King wasn’t working on civil rights, not directly. He was working on the job he’d started with the Poor People’s Campaign, which was entirely about redressing the grossly inequitable economic conditions of the 1960s. (Conditions which our contemporary One Percenters frequently refer to as having been tantamount to communism, to give you some idea of how much things have slid downhill since then.) As he put it toward the end of his life, “If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness.”
As we honor Dr. King’s memory today, let’s not pay tribute to a bowdlerized hero cast safely in marble. Let’s remember a man who was considered dangerous by the authorities, because he was dangerous to the authorities.
This is why so much of the commemoration stops the story at the “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963. Much of the stuff after that is considered too unpalatable for many white people. A lot of Northern white allies were much more comfortable thinking of racism as that thing that white southerners do and did not really want to think about what it meant for northern cities. They were thinking, “Make those hillbilly southerners desegregate, but don’t worry about the North and West, because we treat everyone the same up here….” Using the word “freedom” is always much less… Read more »
Great opening. If he was “inoffensive” he would never have gotten shot. Funny how we idolize people. They lose their humanness in a way. Also, this: “It’s safer to have our icons be harmless, generic, uncontroversial. Indeed, if we can yank a few inspiring lines out of context, or just misattribute them, we can hijack a person’s legacy for the opposite of everything they stood for.” One more: “God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. God intends for all of his children to have the basic… Read more »