Let’s Celebrate Dr. King’s Real Legacy and Fight the Fight he Actually Fought!
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a master orator, the greatest speaker of his time and of all time. His way with words pierced the American psyche and pulled at the world’s collective heart strings. But, like most things, his gift was a double-edged sword. He was a self-proclaimed pacifist, and history lauds him as a moral standard bearer and a bastion of peace, but his politics were more militant then we think. Because Dr. King was such a gifted speaker and a rhetorical genius, in his absence, it has been easy for those who control the narrative of history to cherry pick his words to best serve the interest of those in power. As a result, Dr. King’s politics, policy proposals, and direct and harsh critique of America, not just the Jim Crow South, have been largely ignored for the last five decades.
Many of Dr. King’s quotes have been taken out of context, at best, to promote peace, and more often, to shame and pacify black protesters. Dr. King did not condone riots, property or physical violence, not because he believed that it was morally abhorrent to do so, he just did not believe it was an effective strategy in the effort to achieve the political goals aimed at liberating black people. Dr. King strongly believed in the ideals that America was founded upon and his objective was to hold it accountable to its promises. But, in his infinite wisdom, he knew that those promises would not be delivered without a fight. A fight that would ultimately cost him his life.
Unfortunately, throughout the last 53 years we have fixated on the gorgeous aesthetic of the language he used to get his point across. But we are not taught that those words were like iron fist in velvet gloves. Dr. King proclaimed “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” A beautiful quote etched on the side of his monument on the National Mall in our nation’s capital. A quote, if isolated describes a vague and generic problem, “a mountain of despair” and an even more abstract solution, the hewing out a stone of hope. This quote was derived from his speech titled “The Other America”. In this speech he highlights the horrible and nearly uninhabitable conditions of the American inner-cities and poor rural areas in contrast to the well-developed middle-class America that lots of Americans, particularly white Americans, were able to enjoy as a result of America’s prosperity.
In this speech, he explains why all Americans, particularly Black Americans, were not able to equally benefit from America’s prosperity, he plainly and bluntly proclaims “ America is still a racist country” a quote, while still true, is not often associated with Dr. King as something he would say. He goes on to acknowledge that the truth laid out that plainly isn’t pleasant to hear, stating “Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is.”
Dr. King was indeed a minister, and as such he was interested in changing hearts and minds and saving the soul of the country, as he stated, as a Baptist minister he was in the “heart changing business.” While his job as a minister lead him to deal in the abstract, he was very present in the here and now, far from naive about the realities of this world.
“Let me be the first to say that we will never have a truly integrated society, a truly colorless society until men and women are obedient to the unenforceable. But after saying that, let me point out the other side. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”
The prophetic proclamation that “we will never have a truly integrated society a truly colorless society until men and women are obedient to the unenforceable.” sits in sharp contrast against the quotes taken from his most famous speech made at the Lincoln Memorial, during the March on Washington in 1963, where he stated “I have a Dream.” As soon as you are introduced to Dr. King as a child in elementary you are presented with this version of him, from this speech, particularly the part towards the end of the speech where he shares a vision of hope.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Dr. King has been unfairly frozen in time, he has been framed within one part of one speech he made five years before his assassination. We practically ignore earlier parts of that very same speech, in which he says,
“… one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.”
In America it is OK to promote justice and peace, but it is controversial to fight for change as if this Country is already just and peaceful. It is unreasonable to expect anyone to carve out in stone a quote that reads “America is still a racist country” to memorialize the late great Dr. King, but it’s also very unfair that he is inaccurately and incompletely portrayed as someone who only proposed abstract solutions to abstract ideas. He was smarter and more effective than that. It is unfortunate that one has to be at least an amateur scholar of history to get even a tiny glimpse of the real Dr. King, but we can’t celebrate the hero that they created for us, we have to celebrate the hero he actually was, by continuing the fight that he actually fought.
