The Hidden King

It is entirely fitting that we in the U.S.A. have a national holiday on the birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), nonviolent warrior for justice and peace. Nevertheless, the WAY we celebrate Dr. King's legacy is usually disappointing: a day off from work for many, coupled with 30-second sound-bites of the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington--not even the whole speech and no context. Politicians congratulating themselves that "we have overcome" racism even while we are busy re-segregating our schools because housing patterns remain segregated (de facto, though no longer de jure) and busing is now taboo, and even while the race gap in wages is huge, and African-American and Latino children are now routinely fast-tracked from kindergarten to prison.

Our children have a distorted view of the Freedom Movement, believing that one day Rosa Parks sat down in a 'white' seat on a Montgomery Bus, the next day King gave the I Have a Dream Speech in D. C. and "poof"--segregation disappeared. The numerous campaigns and the struggles of thousands of ordinary people are thus masked. And Dr. King's increasingly radical economic views (calling himself a democratic socialist and working on a Poor People's Campaign that would unite all races to end poverty) and ever stronger opposition to the Vietnam War (which lost him the support of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and even many other civil rights leaders who thought he had no business speaking out on foreign policy), are also hidden.

The tragedy of this is that it is precisely the radical King of 1965-1968 whom we need to remember and look to for guidance today. This was the King who pointed out the connections between government-sponsored violence and the violence of city streets, and who saw the connections between the money spent on war and the money unavailable for economic justice here. This was the King who had to be silenced.

[via Levellers, emphasis mine]