We have lost sight of MLK’s radical vision
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the creation of the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.
That’s one year longer than King lived.
Over the course of those 40 years, unfortunately, in classrooms and in the media, we’ve buffed King’s image to the point of dullness. We’ve rendered the man inseparable from the myth. We’ve focused so heavily on his calls for racial harmony and nonviolence that we’ve lost sight of his radical anti-poverty and anti-war visions.
The problem is understandable, to some extent. In framing King’s message for our youngest students, it makes sense to simplify, focusing on the most famous line from his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.”
By the time students get to high school, even if they read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” it may be too late to erase the anodyne image that’s been planted in their heads. Very few students will read King’s own books or his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, in which he called the American government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Few will learn that even in his “Dream” speech, King attacks income inequality and police brutality. Even fewer are taught of his pointed critiques of capitalism and his advocacy of guaranteed living wages.
The federal holiday — championed by King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 — conferred additional respect on King and his ideas. But as I crisscrossed the country the past six years, interviewing dozens of King’s friends and former colleagues for a biography, many of them complained that the holiday may have done more harm than good in shaping the man’s legacy. The holiday, they said, served as a consolation prize after it had become clear that America had given up on the kind of massive social reform that King had advocated.
In the national conversation about race that intensified in the summer of 2020, the history of Black radical thought has received new and welcome attention, though King’s own radicalism is sometimes neglected. In response to that conversation, some states have moved to restrict teaching about racism,
While it’s worthwhile to celebrate King’s calls for unity and to teach children to judge one another by the content of their character, we can also use the holiday to search for and honor the real King.
arguing that no one should be made to feel guilt or anguish because of their race or sex. Ironically, even these states still honor King. That’s like honoring Beethoven while barring discussion of music.
In giving King his own holiday, we’ve removed him from the currents of American history, singer Harry Belafonte, an activist and a friend of King’s, told me in a 2017 interview at his home in Manhattan. The holiday makes it easier to teach King in the abstract, Belafonte said, without addressing the causes or effects of racism, not to mention the ups and downs of the man’s life and his specific calls for change.
King tried to do what our history classes still don’t, Belafonte
said: “Put Blackness squarely into everybody’s space.”
It’s not just radicalism that gets lost in the watered-down way we celebrate King each year. We also lose sight of his deep religious faith, which was inspired in part by the radical messages of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, as the Rev. James Lawson told me.
“Martin Luther King Jr., along with Coretta, were bombarded by the spirit in the Montgomery bus boycott, with the knowledge that the boycott represented the call of God, the call of history,” said Lawson, a key architect of the movement’s nonviolent confrontation strategy. “It’s the deep-down-inside awareness that connects your life up with the life force of the universe, the
God who created the heavens and the earth.”
It was faith, Lawson said, that made it impossible for King to back down after his home was bombed, after he was stabbed, after his stands on militarism and materialism cost him public support, and after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled him America’s most notorious liar and set out to destroy the civil rights leader.
Which leads to another lesson we don’t teach on King’s federal holiday: the impact of his assassination.
“A society cannot kill off emerging young leaders who promise leadership and imagination and expect that society is going to get better,” Lawson said.
But the arc of the national holiday is long, and it’s not too late to see it bend toward a more just image of King. That’s why Lawson, Belafonte and so many others continue to share stories of the friend they call Martin.
While it’s worthwhile to celebrate King’s calls for unity and
to teach children to judge one another by the content of their character, we can also use the holiday to search for and honor the real King. We can reflect on why his popularity faded in his final years. We can talk about why the FBI was more focused on ruining him than protecting him.
Finally, we can face the fact that King considered his job far from done, that his calls for economic reparations and guaranteed income have not yet been answered, that his concerns about militarism, income inequality and racism remain as relevant as ever.
As King wrote in his letter from the Birmingham jail, we must “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.”
That takes work and genuine reflection, as well as celebration.