As we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, let us remember his life and his work as they were. MLK was a great man who did great things. We honor him with a holiday and a monument. He is worthy of these honors; however, I wonder if we did not pay too great a cost to get them.
We should remember that while he lived and worked, Martin Luther King (MLK) was hated. Two years before his death, his favorability rating among white Americans was only 28 percent, meaning nearly three-fourths of whites disliked him.
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, called MLK the most dangerous man in America, and there was widespread rejoicing at King’s death. Two decades after his assassination, he was highly regarded, with a favorability rating over 75 percent and a holiday in his name. What happened?
How did he go from being the “most dangerous man in America” to America’s hero? Undoubtedly the whitewashing of MLK did the trick. King, who was arrested 30 times, has been scrubbed clean. He is depicted as a dreamer, something opposite of the activist he was. He is widely viewed as a person who mildly promoted peace – no activism, no strife, no confrontations, no defying unjust laws.
Yet King would often say, “Peace is not the absence of tension. Peace is the presence of justice, and until there is justice, there will be no peace [because he and other civil rights activists would keep up the agitation].” In 1967 King came out against the war in Vietnam and lost not only white supporters but many of his black friends and colleagues as well.
At the time of his death, Martin Luther King was leading the Poor People’s Campaign. He vowed to close down the Nation’s Capitol with massive civil disobedience if the government did not heed our demand for the reduction of poverty and hunger in this wealthy nation.
Without question, if we had carried on the work of the movement as MLK asked us to, and if we had insisted on a correct narrative about his work, there would have been no holiday and no monument. But King was whitewashed, we did not carry on the movement, and thus the holiday and the monument.
Why does it matter? You may ask.
The last 50 years might have been a different story. If we had carried on the movement and kept King’s activities alive, we might have achieved more significant progress.
We did not, and the data say poverty is worse than when he died, racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is worse, racial discrimination in employment has not diminished, and black wealth is worse, just to name a few problematic areas.
It is way past time to bring back our deceased icon, the real Martin Luther King, the man who in the face of death carried on a fight against what he called the three evils of this society–the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war. If we bring back the memory of this MLK, we may be inspired to put more energy into what he asked us to do after he was gone, “Continue this movement. Do this work.”
