Jan. 17, 2022, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It is a day we honor one of the most influential human beings of the 20th century. The admiration for Dr. King comes from his tradition of civil disobedience and nonviolence in the struggle for freedom. He played a significant role in the Montgomery bus boycott, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Poor People’s Campaign. It was the effort of Dr. King and so many others who helped push through federal civil rights and voting rights legislation.
Posthumously, the country and the world now commemorate him, and rightfully so. In 1977, King received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After many years and several votes, the federal holiday recognizing the civil rights icon was passed into law with the support of Strom Thurmond, the man who had once filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. And oddly enough, MLK Day was then signed into law by former President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Interestingly, former President George W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to King and his wife, the great Coretta Scott King, in 2004.
If you scratched your head at the presenters of these awards, you are not alone. Why did Ronald Reagan, who called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “a bad piece of legislation,” sign into law MLK Day? Why did Strom Thurmond, segregationist and former governor of South Carolina, vote for the federal holiday? And why did George W. Bush, infamous for initiating illegal offensive wars in the Middle East, take time out of his presidency to celebrate the anti-imperialists? These men are synonymous with the exact opposite of what King represented.
While peculiar at first glance, the reason why Reagan and others radically altered their rhetoric towards Martin Luther King Jr. is simple: they wanted to canonize him. During their lifetime, great revolutionaries receive constant harassment and campaigns of lies and slander. However, after their death, attempts to convert them into harmless icons — canonize them, so to speak — and hallow their names begin.
It has taken less than 50 years to canonize Martin Luther King Jr. He has been “santaclausified,” as professor Cornel West puts it, to shape a revisionist history of him. Popular culture does not remember King as an anti-imperialist who advocated the end of the unlawful war in Vietnam. And it is safe to say King’s mainstream remembrance does not include him as a democratic socialist, who believed the nation’s problems could not be solved without a “radical redistribution of economic power.” Robbing the nuances of what King stood for continues to deodorize his legacy.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s views have undergone a defanging of their revolutionary spirit. His significance has been reduced to merely one speech given at the nation’s capital about a dream he had. The Ronald Reagans of the world perverted King’s pursuit of social equality and economic equity with the rhetoric surrounding “colorblindness.” This rhetoric has been weaponized for decades against affirmative action and other reverse discrimination policies.
It is also true that King’s canonization goes hand in hand with the illusion that everyone loved him in life. A YouGov poll conducted in January of 2021 revealed that nine in ten Americans positively perceive King. However, this was not the case during his lifetime. Gallup polls conducted throughout the ‘60s, showed an increase in King’s disapproval as the decade progressed. His disapproval rating was only 37% in 1963 when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. By 1966, though, 63% of the American public disapproved of Dr. King.
Moreover, following his assassination, a revealing public opinion poll was conducted by the University of Chicago. Participants answered the poll’s question with their strongest reaction to the murder of Dr. King. An astonishing 31% felt that King had “brought it on himself.” “If you killed King, you did a good job,” wrote a supporter of King’s assassin James Ray. “He had it coming to him.”
The United States government itself terrorized and demonized King. Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized the wiretapping and surveillance of King. The Federal Bureau of Investigation threatened to expose an alleged affair King was having, which Coretta publicly scoffed at. The FBI went so far as to send King a fake letter, posing as a Black person, condemning him, and calling on King to kill himself.
Dr. King had to withstand unimaginable hatred while he walked the earth. He was arrested on many occasions, and during one such instance, wrote one of his most famous writings, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The first attempt on his life took place in New York, where a mentally ill woman named Izola Curry stabbed him. Later it was revealed the blade was so close to his main artery, if he had just sneezed, he would have died. The amount of psychological stress put on him throughout his life was so enormous, his autopsy revealed that he had the heart of a 60-year-old at the middle age of 39.
Dr. King’s last push for justice took place in Memphis, where he stood in solidarity with striking workers. During this time, in the winter of his life, King was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign. His dialogue had matured from integration and political participation to a stern critique of capitalism and imperialism. King went around the country with the argument that if the nation could spend billions in an unjust war in Vietnam, it could also spend billions to lift up the nation’s poor. He died wrestling with these three evils of racism, poverty, and militarism and the ways in which they intersected one another.
Few can hold a candle to the courage and fortitude of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Beyond the dream and big smiles was a deep love and commitment to poor and oppressed people. A love that rallied against Jim Crow terrorism; a love that fought for economic justice; a love that spoke up for those being carpet-bombed in the Pacific. In all of the struggles that he found himself a part of, there was a profound honesty and integrity that came with him. Perhaps, on this day, we can finally begin a trend of honest discourse that lives up to the truth-seeking reverend from Georgia.
Image by Unseen Histories is licensed under the Unsplash License.
