Remembering the Real Dr. King

Remember King's Legacy
By Kelvin Wade April 3, 2008

Forty years ago this Friday, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While that tragic time will be memorialized in TV specials and editorials, I hope the remembrances will help reacquaint or introduce Americans to the real Dr. King.

The assassination did more than to silence one of the greatest leaders and orators in American history. Out of the ashes of the riots that followed his death, grew a sanitized mythology of King. The assassination, like those of the Kennedys, made Americans almost deify King as “the Dreamer.”

The reality is had Dr. King lived, he would most likely be viewed today in the same regard as Jesse Jackson more so than Colin Powell.

The “I Have a Dream” speech was given five years before his death. Today, conservatives like to quote his desire to live in a nation where his children were judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”; suggesting King would not have supported affirmative action.

King wrote in his book Why We Can’t Wait: "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."

King made his views supportive of affirmative action clear in many interviews.

The truth is the right pilloried King while he was alive. Conservatives loathed King. Ronald Reagan, who would later reluctantly sign the King Holiday legislation, implied he was a communist. And as King attacked white racism, poverty and the Vietnam War in his later years, his support among whites tanked. By 1967 he was no longer on the Gallup Poll's list of 10 most admired Americans.

Exactly a year before his assassination, King gave a controversial speech called “Beyond Vietnam.” In the speech, he referred to the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He was moved by his conscience to give a speech that called for the U.S. to get out of Vietnam and have a radical change of values. (Everyone should read this speech because it can easily be applied to Iraq today.)

After the speech, King was treated like a pariah by media and even other civil rights leaders. The Washington Post editorialized "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." Time Magazine said the speech was "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi."

The backlash continued. Barry Goldwater said the speech “could border a bit on treason.” The NAACP criticized him. The speech strained King’s relations with the White House. Financial support started drying up. Publishers would not publish his books.

The truth is had Martin Luther King Jr. lived, he would not be this universally beloved, neutered Negro leader. He’d be protesting the Iraq war. He’d be a huge thorn in the side of the Bush Administration, attacking corporate welfare, speaking out for the poor and being shredded daily on right wing radio.

Forty years ago America lost a radical leader unafraid to speak truth to power. Forty years ago, we lost a true patriot. Peace.

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NOTE: I was really going to write something funny this week. Some week's you just feel like bringing the funny, you know? Who wants to be serious when the economy is behaving like the Titanic, gas prices are behaving like skyrockets, the Iraq War is mimicking Vietnam and through it all, our government is acting like Helen Keller?

Sometimes all you can is laugh.

But with the 40th anniversary of the King assassination and the 41st anniversary of the Riverside church "Beyond Vietnam" speech, I had to write this column. i couldn't pass up the opportunity to add some perspective to King.

I've come to almost loathe the King holiday because they put the "I Have A Dream" speech on a loop on cable news and little kids learn this version of King that's not far from George Washington and the Cherry tree. I understand societies have their myths but at some point, we have to look at the complete truth, the complete body of work of our icons.

Dr. King said things that weren't far from the things Barack Obama's pastor has said, albeit King said them in a more eloquent, constructive, less clumsy way than the firebrand, Jeremiah Wright.

In this society, we're content to worship our carefully constructed caricature of King. We don't seem to want to acknowledge that he said unpopular things.

We're still having this same battle now. Half of the country believes that being a patriot is never saying anything bad about your country while the other half believes being a patriot means you love your country enough to rebuke her when she's wrong. I fall in the latter camp, as did King.

There's been this movement to deny King's work after the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid sixties was passed. But King did not quit. He fought on. He fought poverty. He fought against the war. He fought against economic and social injustice.

I think of Malcolm X, who has been treated the same way as the King legacy but in the opposite direction. America always sees Malcolm X as the angry black nationalist. It denies the fact that he broke away from the Black Muslims and formed a new organization that wanted tow work with whites shortly before he was murdered. We won't let Malcolm evolve.

And we won't let King move on past his '63 "I Have a Dream" speech. But King did move on. He did have more to say. He had more to do. And we should remember his entire body of work.


On the Wading In blog, I answered a recent funny column that my brother Tony wrote and Tony reviews new music.