Misremembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Let's not

Chris Lowe

As an historian whose graduate school exam fields included African history and the comparative history of slavery, who has taught African-American history and U.S. ethnic history (also ancient Greek and Roman humanities, but that's another story), and who got into the kind of history I studied partly as an accident of seeking perspective on my parents' small role as white footsoldiers in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, I always experience the holiday honoring the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. a bit ambivalently.

On the one hand I think it is culturally important that we have the holiday and that creating it was a good step. It honors not only a great man, but also, at its best, treats him as a synecdoche, a part representing a whole, for the wider struggles for equality, justice and peace in the United States. But on the other hand, public commemoration of the day, particularly in the mass media and to some extent in education, often falls short of that best. It thereby misses opportunities to focus on the continuing challenges of race and class, peace and justice in our country. Too often we see imagery that evades the historical realities of the Reverend King's story and that of the Civil Rights movement. Even worse, at times, some commentators cherry-pick King's words and misconstrue them for ends that obstruct our continuing struggles to reconstruct America on a more fair, egalitarian, humane and decent basis.

To begin with, consider mass media pabulum about the struggles for Civil Rights that oddly minimizes the struggles, even while honoring black people for standing up for themselves and their rights, by neglecting to mention why and against what they were struggling. The aim perhaps is to avoid giving offense to members of the white majority or perhaps to try to include us. This sort of ad, news story or presentation provides an weirdly distorted picture, in which we see black people heroically struggling and demanding their civil rights, while white America is standing on the sidelines, cheering them on. In effect the Civil Rights movement is reduced to an exercise in mass shadow-boxing.

Because virtually no one now favors formal, legally enforced racial discrimination, that lack of support is falsely projected onto what is still the relatively recent past.

At the time, of course, white America did not as whole cheer the movement on. A small minority of whites took part or supported it actively. A much larger minority fiercely and bitterly and often violently resisted the movement's demands. The great bulk of white people were somewhere in between. Some genuinely wished to see the movement succeed but did little, others were more grudging but agreed that the time had come, others passively went along with the the changes but didn't really want them. Eventually enough whites moved and were moved sufficiently away from outright opposition and toward support that Congress (bipartisanly, with most of the strongest opposition coming from southern Democrats) and President Johnson were able to pass the key Civil Rights laws: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

And that's the point -- the struggles were needed to change hearts and minds, and they were struggles against real, forceful, determined opponents who were as American as any of us. The struggles were long, decades long, and hard and painful and bloody, as is attested among other things by persistent FBI harassment and two assassination attempts against King himself, the second tragically successful.

As an antidote to anodyne presentations, I commend to you the wonderful television serial "Eyes on the Prize," directed by Henry Hampton, now available again after being suppressed by copyright issues for years. You have many choices of reminder, from Emmet Till's open coffin to Bull Connor's iconic snarling dogs and fire hoses to white mobs in Little Rock and in Chicago, KKK members in sheets and members of White Citizens Councils in suits and dresses (and, in the second series, the black man being speared with an American flag in front of the Massachusetts state capitol, near a memorial to African-American Civil War soldiers). But the episode that still astonishes me each time I see it is the riot by white students at the University of Mississippi upon James Meredith's integrating it -- Trent Lott was a student there then. The students overturned and torched cars, they threw stones and bottles, they shot guns, all aimed at hundreds of federal marshalls and other agents, wounding many, who did little to fight back, simply hunkered down. Each time I see it, I know in my head, my heart and my stomach that if it had been at an all-black university, they would not have been so restrained. There would have been a massacre.

A variant on the downplaying achievement theme is The March of Progress, an American version of the British Whig interpretation of history: that each day and every day the country is getting better and better in every way. Regarding Civil Rights, this appears both in media and I think to a degree in education as well. It takes the guise of propositions that the Civil Rights movement in some uncomplicated way reflected the true founding values of the country. Therefore its victories should be seen as the victories of the Founders, as an inevitable fruition of the seeds they had sown, a simple fulfillment of destiny. Here is a place where Dr. King's words can be plucked from context and put to distorting ends, for, as he famously said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

But why did King speak those words? They were spoken not in a time of certainty, but in a time of uncertainty. They were spoken to people who were wearied and fatigued and hurt, facing "Massive Resistance" politically, and mobs, hostile police, White Citizens Councils and the KKK -- sometimes overlapping groups. They were spoken to rally those people to keep up the fight despite the obstacles, despite defeats, despite feelings that no progress or not enough progress was being made.

And the Reverend King was well aware of the real history. In real history, the ideals expressed in the founding documents have not been self-actuating, written as they were by founders who among other human flaws were by and large profoundly racist, often enough owners of slaves. Those founders, although in some turmoil about it from the 1770s to the 1790s, at the end of the day created a country conceived in liberty, but also in slavery, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, but also that some men might be enslaved by others because of the color of their skin, made into property that the national and state governments were bound to defend and enforce. (Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to participate in certain proposed celebrations of the Bicentennial of the Constitution unless he did so dressed as an enslaved footman, a way of expressing disdain for pseudo-patriotic whitewashing history's complexities.)

It took a mass abolition movement of highly variable character half a century and a hugely bloody and destructive civil war to resolve those contradictions on the side of basic liberty. As for being created equal, the post-Civil War constitutional amendments aimed at ensuring equality were rendered dead letters in the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s, with disfranchisement, the emergence of widespread lynching, and the legal formalization of Jim Crow.

As stated, Martin Luther King, Jr. was profoundly aware of that history. We know this for the simple reason that the central goal of the Civil Rights movement, reflected in the very term "civil rights," was to breathe life back into those dead letters, to make real after a century the promises of not just the Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery) but the Fourteenth (equality before the law) and Fifteenth (right to vote) Amendments.

Yet somehow within a few short years after the great civil rights laws were passed, those dead-letter decades entered a kind of collective amnesia. In considering the persistence of racism and racialized inequality in the present, public discourse has focused on "the legacy of slavery," now long past, and virtually ignored the legacy of Jim Crow and its less legally obligatory Northern and Western counterpart practices, which remained active within living memory of today, even after the great laws were passed, since laws are not self-enforcing. Focusing on the more distant past has made it easier for many white people to entertain the illusion that they have not benefited from structural racial inequality.

The real lesson to be learned from this history is not that the Civil Rights movement embodied the greatness of American ideals, but that those ideals are only as real as we choose to make them in our actions. That was the wonder and glory of the Civil Rights movement, hundreds of thousands and millions of people seeking out ways to insist that the words be put into action. Other movements for liberation and equality have done this as well, over the decades and centuries in the U.S. There has been nothing inevitable about any of it. Nor has progress been unconditional; Jim Crow is only one example of sometimes protracted periods of regression and repression.

The mass character of the Civil Rights movement brings me to another source of ambivalence about the MLK birthday holiday: The use of King to promote a Great Man theory of history. Too often the picture is painted that Martin Luther King made the Civil Rights revolution almost single-handedly. The reality was that Civil Rights was above all a grassroots movement. King's main roles were as an inspirer and an almost preternaturally eloquent spokesman. In his day this caused considerable tension at times, as local organizers of local campaigns wrestled with the advantages of having King come and participate, in inspiration and in drawing national attention, versus the disruptiveness that could sometimes accompany King and his entourage.

That is not to say King was just a figurehead. He was a genuine leader, an organizer, or at least a convener of organizers, who was able to use his tremendous personal abilities, and the attention lavished on him by white-controlled media seeking a single figure to speak for the movement, to build that movement.

But at the end of the day the movement made Martin Luther King, Jr. who he became more than the other way around. He was a great leader, but his greatness was the greatness of his followers, something he knew well and expressed often.

The perverse irony of over-lionizing King is that it tends to support inaction, the opposite of what he would have wished, I believe. The portrayal of MLK doing it all himself sets an impossible standard for any given individual. Few of us could approach being anything like what Dr. King was in reality; no one could be what he is portrayed as being, because he was not that himself. He relied on others and leaned upon them. He formed and encouraged organizations and groups. He inspired others, surpassingly, but in turn drew inspiration from those who sacrificed when they had so little to start with.

In addition, the image of King-as-the-Movement encourages passivity, through the absence of leaders who look like what we are told he was. Where is the Martin Luther King, Jr. of today? Well, she may be out there, but if he is, she won't create the next movement for equality and justice out of nothing. Rather, people making movements will find and raise up their leaders, even as the people of Montgomery who had been organizing for years before the 1954 bus boycott found King and raised him up, even as the hundreds of pastors in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose King to be their key voice.

Of a different order of problem is King's speech at the great Civil Rights demonstration at the March on Washington in August of 1963. I have no ambivalence about the speech itself. Listening to it, with or without a picture, gives me chills and brings tears to my eyes. It is one of my sources of pride in my father that he was there in Washington that day (he is two months younger than Martin Luther King was, who would have been 80 this year had he lived -- I was four at the time of the speech). The tendency to excerpt King's speech down to just a couple of phrases in the peroration makes me sad, more than anything else, because of the richness and fighting quality of the speech that is lost. But at least it is not universal, even in broadcast media and certainly not in education.

But I hate one particular abuse of the speech, which is the use of the King's dream that his daughter would someday "be judged not by the color of her skin, but by the content of her character," to attack affirmative action.

We need to be clear about this. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a moral radical -- not an ideologue, but not a mainstream politician or a "centrist". He sought to bring people together, but not on any terms or at any cost, rather on a basis of freedom, equality and justice.

When it came to social policy, by the mid-sixties at the latest he was a left-liberal or a social democrat. He was concerned, among other things, about injustice and inequity in access to health care. On April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was murdered, he spoke out against the U.S. war in Viet Nam. In 1968 when he was killed he had begun shifting focus to economic issues as the next phase of the Civil Rights movement. He was organizing a Poor People's Campaign, from which he took time out to support a strike by African-American sanitation workers in Memphis when Ray shot him. He was focusing his thinking and his articulations on class inequality and its interactions with racial ideas, on the ideological work that creating an image of "the poor" as members of racial minorities and of "workers" and white did in harming the interests, organizing and solidarity of all, for the benefit of the wealthy.

And in that context, Martin Luther King, Jr. supported affirmative action. It was not enough to formally outlaw discrimination, or even to enforce the new laws. There were persistent effects that required redress. King's support for affirmative action was in no way contradictory to the idea of focusing on the content of character. On the contrary, that's exactly the point of affirmative action when it's done right: looking at the content of character shaped by struggle against adversity and at the potential for development it may contain. And, from a different angle, it's a challenge on the part of people with gate-keeper powers to examine the content of their own characters, to distinguish between judgments of a candidate for something that have a genuine bearing on the decision, versus judgments based on personal comfort and liking someone because they embody something familiar (never mind cruder forms of prejudice).

To end on a positive note, so far I like the increasing emphasis on making Martin Luther King's birthday a day of service. This seems to me to cut against the passivity-inducing ways of looking at King, conveying that it is what the people do, and do together, that matters. It also seems as if it has potential for development, for creativity in devising projects that bring people together to cooperate on common efforts on a basis of equality, who in the ordinary course of things might never meet, or not meet equally or work together, and so perhaps chip away at the de facto segregation that very much remains with us today.

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    A wonderful essay. I am not so ambivalent. Now 65, I was then 20 and, like your father, at the March on Washington. I was a way out, sitting just on the north side of the reflecting pool. I heard the speech then but it has grown in power. Memories get confused with video images. Like I still ask myself "did I really meet Malcolm X that day?" Friends who were there with me tell me yes.

    But this day, and this man, Dr. King, are a reminder to me, even during some of the nasty years we have just been through, that we as a people, or any people, can change for the better. It is a powerful thought. We still have much to do. There is a whole world to change in so many ways. Cherish this day! Honor the man!

  • Walking The Walk (unverified)
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    The Family of Martin Luther King, Jr. sued the government in a Federal District Court in 1999 and won. The jury took one hour to reach a unanimous conclusion that the FBI, CIA, US military, and local authorities in Memphis conspired to murder MLK Jr, and a mentally handicapped man named James Earl Ray was framed for his murder. Dr. William Pepper brought the suit on behalf of the King Family who undertook the ordeal believing that is what MLK would have stood for.

    The US government has never appealed the decision. The American mainstream media refused to report it. When the King Family went met with President Bill Clinton following the verdict, he refused to announce it or publicize it.

    Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered by a cross-agency conspiracy that involved the US government and a Federal Judge determined this to be so through official Federal Court proceedings.

    If you want to respect the legacy of MLK and the sacrifice that he made, have the courage to face the truth and think that which seems unthinkable. Read Dr. William Pepper's book "Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King."

    Google books http://books.google.com/books?id=8Bk9he6d1j8C&dq=act+of+state+pepper&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPP1,M1

    Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Act-State-Execution-Martin-Luther/dp/1859846955

    Dr. Pepper is a long-time friend of the King Family, practices law in England, and holds seminars on human rights at Oxford University.

  • Bill Bodden (unverified)
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    Chris:

    Your point about the civil rights movement not being a one-man event is well taken, and we should hope that people will realize that all the dreams or wishful thinking they are attaching to Obama will never come to fruition if they leave it up to Obama alone. Two groups invested heavily in him to make him become president. One was composed of millions of small donors and the other consisted of a relatively small number of corporations that donated millions. Obama is in the middle. If the people want to get what they think he promised they will need to push for it with the possibility of making him a great president; otherwise, the corporations will rule as usual.

    Kennedy and Johnson added credits to their presidencies by civil rights reforms, but they didn't do it single-handedly. People and events pressured them into it. The same will apply to Obama. No change there.

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    Martin Luther King, Jr. was a moral radical

    In fact, speaking in a packed hall to the striking Memphis sanitation workers and supporters the month before his assassination, King used words that today would ironically have drawn comparisons more to Jeremiah Wright than to Barack Obama.

    Using the biblical story of the rich man (Dives) who ends up in hell because he has ignored the poor (including Lazarus right outside his gate), King drew a parallel with America's neglect of the poor:

    Dives finally went to Hell because he wanted to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty. And I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell.

  • BOHICA (unverified)
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    I was listening to NPR and they played the "I have a dream" speech. And just like every other time I have listened to it, I was reduced to crying like a baby. Why that is, I have no idea. Maybe its because in my years on this earth I have seen too much that is so morally repugnant. Maybe it is because I am still waiting for the time when "...justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." The song of the movement was/is "We shall overcome". But I ask, "When will we ever learn?"

  • judeqfe (unverified)
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    Thank you for this beautiful post. I spent a lot of time yesterday wishing for more exploration and celebration of Dr. King's evolution regarding a move to take on poverty and violence.

    Last night at the Restorative Listening Project: Gentrification, we listened to Dr. Kings "I have a dream" speech and President Obama's speech on race. This was a stirring juxtaposition for many who attended.

    One of the most inspiring things about Dr. King to me was how he kept growing. I believe his commitment and practice to non-violence illuminated for him the broad scope of injustice. As it did for Cesar Chavez, Ghandi and others.

    May we each move forward willing to see the truth. Hiding from nothing and carrying the HOPE that our current president calls forth to change the way we see others on every level.

    And again, thank you Chris.

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    Great post, Chris.

    Yesterday on CBS, one of the commentators was trying to make some sort of point about how Obama and King were very different in their approaches to the world (not that I don't think they are) by saying that King was a pacifist who wanted the US to withdraw from all of its "obligations" around the world (without mentioning that one of those "obligations" was getting a lot of people killed in a pretty pointless war over Vietnam). But I don't think King was some sort of isolationist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he felt that America had a leadership role in the world, he just didn't see that as being greatly helped by the kinds of military commitments we'd been involved in since World War II.

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    Dr. King was a proponent of nonviolence...very different than being a pacifist.

  • in response (unverified)
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    In response to Walking the walks comment, The king family did not sue the federal government they sued "Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators." in a wrongful deathcase in which Pepper implicated a number of local and federal officials

  • Chris Lowe (unverified)
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    judeqfe, what is the Restorative Listening Project: Gentrification? Sounds like something worth learning about.

  • Chris Lowe (unverified)
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    Thanks for all the interesting comments, for the kind words. Dave Porter, you are right, I should not lose sight of the center while responding to the commentary.

    On non-violence, pacifism, and U.S. "responsibilities", here's my take;

    My very broad understanding of Dr. King's moral outlook was that, at least to start in the 1950s, it tried to combine an ethic of worldly responsibility rooted in the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr with a prophetic outlook rooted in the history of African-American churches, and a commitment in method in seeking worldly justice to a version of the Gandhian concept of "satyagraha,"

    Niebuhrian ethics called for engagement in the world in this life, and were not pacifist -- they were used among other things to underwrite several kinds of Cold War anti-communism. The Black Church prophetic tradition reads Christianity & the New Testament in a very particular way against the "Old Testament"/Hebrew Bible, with its narratives of enslavement and liberation, and its stresses on justice and righteousness, as in the biblical quote BOHICA cites from the March on Washington speech. While at times that tradition could counsel endurance of suffering in the face of overwhelming power and looking ultimately to the next world, it also could justify active rebellion, embodied in figures like Harriet Tubman, "the Moses of her people" who traveled armed, or Frederick Douglass, and in actions like ex-slaves joining the Union armies to liberate those still enslaved in the Confederacy during the Civil War.

    Gandhi on the other hand clearly was a pacifist. Satyagraha in the 1950s was often called "passive resistance" but I believe translates more literally as something like "soul-force." For King it was linked as well to "civil disobedience" as a more particularly American idiom, going back to Thoreau's resistance to the war against Mexico in the 1840s. At some point practitioners came to think that "passive resistance" misrepresented the vigor of the methods and started speaking of "non-violent direct action," along lines Oregonian37 points out. I am not sure if that change came during MLK's lifetime, but if not, it cannot have been long afterwards.

    (BTW, while I agree that it is not necessary to be a pacifist to practice active non-violence and prefer it strongly, it also is that case that fully committed pacifists have been and are among the most powerful practitioners of active non-violence.)

    I also believe that in the context of the ecumenical movement King subsequently was influenced by theological and moral currents that emerged in the context of Pope John the XXIII's papacy among Roman Catholics and the Second Vatican Council, particularly the moral orientation that came to be spoken of as a "preferential option for the poor" in the context of liberation theology. Again I am not sure how fully developed some of those ideas were before King was killed. For instance I believe some of the crucial early work of the Black Liberation Theologian James Cone dates from 1968. But those developing tendencies certainly relate to King's increasing focus on substantive economic & social justice as the victories in formal law were gained.

    Likewise both King and John XXIII spoke variants of the idea that "peace is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice."

    It is not clear to me whether King was a pacifist internationally. Mostly he was not that focused on international matters.

    In the U.S., as a matter of strategy and tactics, he disagreed with others who put an emphasis on the right to self-defense against racist violence (e.g. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, to give them their full name), and they disagreed with him, obviously. And clearly he took the Christian idea of turning the other cheek most seriously, so strategic and tactical considerations were not all there was to it.

    But I don't think he condemned self-defense -- rather he called for active non-violence in a more aspirational sense. It was a way to proceed that was morally elevating in ways that put unjust powers to shame and could change them. I think this is where there's a connection to Niebuhr and maybe in a way to some of the existentialists -- it contains an element of calling upon oneself to strive for perfection in the full knowledge that it is impossible fully to achieve it.

    But for the most part before 1967 King did not speak out much on international matters -- the persistence of white dominated regimes in southern Africa in the context of decolonization elsewhere in the continent perhaps being a partial exception I think. His attention was focused on the struggle for freedom and justice in the U.S.

    That was one of the reasons why King's choice to speak out against the U.S. war in Viet Nam in April of 1967 was so important. He took considerable criticism for it, not only from "the establishment" but within the Civil Rights community, and not only from groups like the NAACP but I believe also within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference itself, by people who feared the consequences of alienating President Johnson and saw it as a distraction. Speaking out as he did was both risky and costly. It was also weighty, given the moral gravitas he had established at home.

    My understanding of his stance against the U.S. war in Viet Nam is that it was anti-imperialist rather than pacifist, though in a liberal or social democratic way. His critique of the immoral violence of the war, which certainly was strong, was linked to analyzing it as a racist war as well, and as a domestically devastating waste of resources needed to build a more just society at home. That waste was all the more cruel and wrong for being turned to the ends of mass killing and of devastating a small poor country far away.

    Yet while I don't think he was a pacifist in the manner of Quakers or Mennonites or the Church of the Brethren (though I could be mistaken), I also don't think he would have moved quickly or easily to label any war "just" or that he would have been comfortably at home with the "liberal interventionist" school of thought in the last couple of decades at its more imperial end. If he wasn't an absolute pacifist (again, I may be wrong), he was a man of peace.

    On the other hand, I think we should reject out of hand the idea that King somehow advocated abdicating U.S. "responsibilities" in the world. On the contrary, his opposition to the war in Viet Nam was a call for the country to take responsibility for the immorality of the way the government was conducting that war. I think he rejected a glib and cynical machtpolitik view of what U.S. "responsibilities" were.

    He was not seeking to be president, and I think he would have been unwilling to make the moral compromises required for admission to alleged "seriousness" in international affairs, even though he wrestled strenuously with the idea of responsibility. The failure of the allegedly "serious" to be truly responsible is embodied by the echo chamber in which our elected officials propelled us into aggression against Iraq on false premises, with its exclusion of dissenting voices and contrary true information.

    It sounds like the journalists questioning King's willingness to take up responsibility internationally are cut from that same sort of cloth.

    Ultimately I think the crucial difference between Barack Obama and Martin Luther King on international matters may simply be that Obama wanted to be president, and has done what it takes to achieve that, while King did not.

  • miguel (unverified)
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    As an historian whose graduate school exam fields included African history and the comparative history of slavery, who has taught African-American history and U.S. ethnic history (also ancient Greek and Roman humanities, but that's another story), and who got into the kind of history I studied partly as an accident of seeking perspective on my parents' small role as white footsoldiers in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, I always experience the holiday honoring the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. a bit ambivalently.

    That is a mighty sentence.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    There are those of us further left that are giving Obama a genuine chance because of his association with Jeremiah Wright. Still wish he had given the invocation (if it has to be done, which it doesn't).

    It takes the John Browns of the world as well as the Abraham Lincolns to effect real change when the opposition is willing to sacrifice all. Call it the Kansas factor. It's one of Obama's positives and I hope he acts on it.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    and the Prize goes to CNN talking heads for their statement, "and there's Clarence Thomas, the first black man on the Supreme Court"...

  • Bill Bodden (unverified)
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    Ultimately I think the crucial difference between Barack Obama and Martin Luther King on international matters may simply be that Obama wanted to be president, and has done what it takes to achieve that, while King did not.

    Al Sharpton put this another way the other day: He said that King declined to be a politician and chose instead to be an activist. A smart choice if the moral imperative is primary and is not to be compromised.

    Re the point about the civil rights movement being more that a one-person (King) act that I agreed with above: But we should also note the undeniable need for someone to take the role of leader. Without the right person to rally around movements rarely go anywhere.

    As I said on previous threads, Obama has the potential to be a great president given his oratorical skills, but that remains to be seen, and it will take the people in the form of activists to push him to do what is right. Given Obama's choices for cabinet and advisory positions as well as his links to corporate America and AIPAC it looks like it will take many activists doing a lot of pushing for him to be just a good president. As FDR said in a similar situation, "Make me do it."

  • Fireslayer (unverified)
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    As another former Black History TA, son of a 40-50s civil rights activist who remembers a lot of sick things happening to blacks in the 60's, this essay is important because it reminds ups civil rights is still a work in progress. Thanks Chris for making the effort.

  • Boss Man (unverified)
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    <h2>We forget to much. This was just as important, and it's totally forgotten.</h2>

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