The relevance of Martin Luther King
The only way to truly honour the civil rights icon is to depart from the path of self-defeating hate that America finds itself stuck in today
very year on the third Monday of January, Americans of all races, backgrounds and ideologies celebrate the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. He is rightly lionised and sanctified by whites as well as blacks, by Republicans as well as Democrats. It is easy to forget that, until fairly recently, many white Americans loathed King. They perceived him as a rabble rouser and an agitator; some rejoiced in his assassination in April 1968. How they got from loathing to loving is less a story about growing tolerance and diminishing racism, and more about the ways that King’s legacy has been scrubbed and blunted.
The King we remember today is particularly at odds with his radical turn in his last years. In 1967 he denounced the Vietnam War and warned that America was courting “spiritual death.”
In early 1968 he planned the Poor People’s Campaign, in which millions of impoverished Americans — black, white and Latino — would gather in Washington for an enormous demonstration. He called for $30 billion (Dh110 billion) annually in anti-poverty spending, and asked Congress to guarantee an income for each American. To many Americans, this sounded like socialist lunacy.
King spent his final days in Memphis, Tennessee, marching with striking sanitation workers. On March 28, 1968, some marchers behind him turned violent.
His critics believed their argument had been proved — that King’s claims to non-violence were so much pretence. When he was killed a week later, Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican from South Carolina, told an audience that King was “an outside agitator, bent on stirring people up.”
Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, described King’s killing as a “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”
Knowing whom they are honouring
But King’s legacy — the meaning of “Martin Luther King” in the popular mind — began to change as soon as the man himself left us. As groups like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen called for armed resistance, King’s peaceful methods looked more appealing. Many white Americans focused on one line of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — that he longed for the day when his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” — and moulded him into a gentle champion of colourblindness.
The King holiday was both cause and effect of this selective appropriation. In this season of political polarisation, it is tempting to hope that we can unite in celebration of King. But celebrators ought to know whom they are honouring.
King died for striking garbage workers and beseeched his government to protect the vulnerable. He had a message for those who would target immigrants or wall off the United States from the world. In a 1967 speech, he declared: “Our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than national.”
Instead of policing their borders, nations should “develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole.”
The alternative was unacceptable. “History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this selfdefeating path of hate.”
To honour King is to follow a different path.
Jason Sokol, an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, is writing a social history of the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
www.gulfnews.com/opinions