COMMITTED TO PEACE
SCHOLARS SAY KING’S MESSAGE WAS ABOUT MORE THAN ENDING RACISM
There’s more to learn about Martin Luther King Jr., a towering figure in American history and an icon of social justice. As the nation celebrates his birthday, a national holiday on the third Monday of January each year, it’s time to delve deeper into his legacy and how many misunderstand his life’s work to end racial injustice. ● “How King is taught and celebrated distorts the reality of the movement and how people opposed it. It clouds our ability to see the past, and that affects the present,” said Jeanne Theoharis, professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY and author of “A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.”
One glaring error is the idea that most Americans supported King and his work, which is far from the truth. Blasted as “mob rule,” King’s efforts were disapproved of by a majority of Americans at the time, Theoharis said.
A Gallup poll from 1966, two years before he was assassinated, found that two-thirds of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King.
“There’s a notion that most decent people supported King, but that is just not borne out,” Theoharis said.
“Dr. King was villainized as a civil rights advocate during the civil rights movement,” said Shayla C. Nunnally, professor in the Department of Political Science and chair of the Africana Studies Program at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “White Southerners, especially, detested his attempt to change a centuries-old system of Black subjugation in slavery and Jim Crow.”
While King was adamantly committed to nonviolence and never once implied countering oppression with violence, he was more radical in his views than many understand, said Ryan
M. Jones, educator/historian at the National Civil Rights Museum.
“The dream Dr. King had goes much further than the words he delivered at the Lincoln Memorial,” he said. “By the end of his life, he was seen as a threat to national security by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. He challenged the U.S. government to spread the wealth of the country to the people who really needed it. This was far from passive in the mid-1960s. His charisma and celebrity paved the way for younger, more progressive activists to have a platform. He gave his life – the ultimate sacrifice. There is no level of risk greater than that.”
Over the years, King’s legacy has been whitewashed and de-toothed, Theoharis said. While King is beloved, he was not benign.
King was a disrupter, and the civil rights movement was meant to disrupt society to upset the status quo and achieve change, Theoharis said.
“The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister. When people think of ministers they are not thinking of radicals, but Jesus was a radical and so was Martin Luther King,” said Michael Honey, professor of humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma where he teaches African American and labor history and Martin Luther King Jr. Studies. “Most Americans still celebrate King as a civil rights leader, but our scholarship clearly shows King as a pastor who followed the Social Gospel [movement] of Jesus, calling for society to take care of ‘the least of these.’ We need to embrace his nonviolence of agape love (love for all humankind) and to end the violence of institutional racism, economic injustice, war and militarism. We can see the disastrous results of our failure to do that this week and throughout the Trump era,” Honey said, referring to Jan. 6’s riots at the US Capitol.
King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech is remembered as a call to end racial injustice but has a deeper meaning. It is not just about an end to segregation; it’s a call for a radical restart to the American system, Honey said.
“King was always a social justice advocate, and going back to his days as a graduate student criticized America’s racialized capitalism and always made the nexus between the problems racism, poverty and war very clear”” he said. “You could not solve one of those problems without solving the others.”
His goal to close the racial wealth divide is often overlooked.
“King recognized that civil rights activism could not omit the importance of economic inequality, which affected Black Americans in the South and North,” Nunnally said. “Especially, in the North, where Blacks had access to more freedoms although, still in the context of discriminatory experiences compared to the South, King increasingly became aware and sympathized with northern Blacks’ plight to overcome discrimination through economic inequality, which introduced harsh living conditions for Blacks’ quality of life.”
King stated the three evils of life as racism, poverty and militarism.
“He connected all of these topics as clear tools of the oppression against African American people,” Jones said. “The overt, systemic and racist views of lawmakers who promoted segregation, class system discrimination, militarism and the war – a war in which twice as many young African American men over white males were sent to Vietnam – were the issues that eventually led to this assassination.”
Today, King would still be fighting, Jones said.
“I believe he would see that the racial wealth divide is no different today as it was over 50 years ago. He would think there is still so much work to be done and that we are not close to achieving that goal,” he said.