The Good Reverend
What do you think about when you think about MLK? Do you envision his famous “I Have a Dream” speech from the March on Washington? Do you see him walking down a road, dressed in a fine suit, holding arms with other Black folks while white supremacists hurl insults? Do you reflect on some of his most famous quotes, many of which were shared yesterday in ready-made meme-able formats? If you’re a white person, it’s likely that whatever you think you know about Dr. King is wildly incomplete if not outright wrong.
A strange and predictable thing has happened since April 4th, 1968 when escaped convict and failed pornography director James Earl Ray put a single bullet into Dr. King: white people have reclaimed and rewritten much of what we collectively know and teach about him. I say that it is strange because celebrating and “honoring” the legacy of MLK would have seemed impossible when he was alive. Why? Because the majority of Americans did not like him.
In an article by one of the greatest writers I read, Michael Harriot, he makes it clear just how unpopular MLK was when he was alive. From his piece:
Although, in death, he became one of the most revered figures in US history, for the entirety of the 39 years that King lived and breathed, there wasn’t a single day when the majority of white Americans approved of him. In 1966, Gallup measured his approval rating at 32% positive and 63% negative. That same year, a December Harris poll found that 50% of whites felt King was “hurting the negro cause of civil rights” while only 36% felt he was helping. By the time he died in 1968, three out of four white Americans disapproved of him. In the wake of his assassination, 31% of the country felt that he “brought it on himself”.
Imagine that. A third of Americans thought that MLK deserved to be assassinated. This isn’t ancient history. Both my parents were alive when this happened. And the story I remember being told in school was that James Earl Ray was some kind of lone madman. That just isn’t the case. He was merely the first person to do what many other white Americans wanted to be done.
But what was so dangerous about Dr. King? In school, we were taught that all he wanted was to live in some kind of post-racial kumbaya utopia. And someone killed him for that. We were played videos that featured highlights from his most famous speeches, carefully edited and with the context removed. White people killed MLK and in order to clean the blood off their hands, a collective effort was made to control the narrative surrounding his newfound martyr status. It is not an accident that you don’t know a lot about MLK.
Yes, Dr. King wanted racial harmony and equal rights. But he was so much more than that. He wasn’t a fool. He understood that marching and giving speeches could only do so much. He wanted action. He wanted America to face up to and own our sins. He wanted white people to finally have a reckoning with their racist past, present, and (sadly) future.
Yesterday, in their ongoing effort to steal and reshape American history (especially the history of heroic Black figures) many white Republican congresspeople sent out messages of remembrance for Dr. King. It was a parade of hypocrisy and bad faith. Here are just a few examples:
This thread of tweets is LONG. How can you say you honor and embrace the legacy of MLK when you overtly work to undo it? It’s incredible. But not unusual. See, a lot of these people were only taught one version of Dr. King, the sanitized, guilt-free, easy-on-the-whites version. Other people are being deliberately misleading and know better but don’t have the courage to either say they don’t agree with King or shut the hell up. Take pissboy Marco Rubio for example. He tweeted out this:
Sounds nice! But he left out something: context. What did King say immediately after this that Rubio deliberately left out?
Oh, gotcha! So King wasn’t saying that since we’ve got “equal rights” now it’s all good. Nah. He was saying the opposite. That white Americans have defaulted on their promise and owe on a bad check. Makes a bit more sense. But Rubio knows you won’t google and read the speech yourself. You’re white! The less you know, the better! How did King feel about white people like you?
I hope that stings.
Nicole Hannah-Jones did a cool thing yesterday. She had been invited to speak at a commemoration of Dr. King. Some members of the group that she was going to speak in front of objected, saying that she was too divisive a figure to be associated with MLK. As the creator of the 1619 Project, she has faced a LOT of racially motivated hate and unfair criticism. So what did she do? She spoke to the crowd but substituted the speech she was going to give with one compromised of the worlds of Dr. King. I wish someone recorded it because it sounds like it was amazing. A few highlights:
Those are all his words. They ring as true today as they did 60 years ago. And what was the reaction from the crowd? LOL
Amen.
You see, this is the problem with the “arbiters” of history and Black heroes being white men. They pick and choose the stuff they can live with and ignore the rest. They understand that they MUST speak on Dr. King and his legacy. To discard it would be obviously racist. Instead, they compromise. They can acknowledge his life and work to give the appearance of racial understanding while ensuring that no white people get uncomfortable. We can all celebrate him with a day off and continue to promote the status quo. The most galling example of this came from the state of Texas, where their governor said this:
Imagine honoring a man and then within the same 12-month period eliminating the need for any child in your state to learn about him? Incredible. I don’t know how much more evidence you need to see to understand that all this CRT backlash is really just white backlash. When you hear people talk about how “parents” don’t want their kids learning this “divisive” history, who are they really talking about? Do you honestly think that the majority of Black and Brown parents are like “meh, no need to get into slavery, Jim Crow, or civil rights”? No. Remember that when you hear a politician say “parents” they are speaking about white people.
We could ensure and guarantee the right to vote for all our citizens today. It’s as simple as changing the filibuster rules within the Senate. It’s not unprecedented. Mitch McConnell did it to ram through a SCOTUS justice. And the Senate just did it a few months ago to get the debt ceiling raised. You really don’t think we can do it to ensure free and fair elections? What do you think Dr. King would say?
Gotcha. The filibuster has a long racist history in America. It was used to maintain racist Jim Crow laws. It was used to fight anti-lynching bills. It was used to try and stop the creation of the very holiday we celebrated yesterday. Its time has come and we need to get rid of it so we can begin restoring actual democracy, not some zombified white-approved version of it.
There is so much more I could get into about MLK and what he fought for. He believed in a guaranteed universal income. He saw the systemic and structural racism that existed and understood that we needed to educate white people about it, the very thing people today derisively call CRT. Dr. King would have been marching with Black Lives Matter. And you can get bet that he wouldn’t approve of the voter suppression and supplication laws being passed around the country.
The best way to educate yourself about MLK is to go and read his writings and speeches. There, you will find the truth from the mouth of the man himself. Go read find out why he was seen as so dangerous that the FBI wiretapped him, surveilled him, and was eventually murdered by a white supremacist. It is in his words that you see him, not in the carefully chosen quotes white people use to alleviate their discomfort.
This is the true legacy of Dr. King. It’s time we honor him for real.