From an article about MLK Jr in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day,” King told the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, two months before his assassination, “I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize — that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards — that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.”
The article gives a brief overview of some of the scholarly books about Dr. King, and emphasizes how his radically left views — not just on racial justice, but also on economic justice (two subjects that I doubt MLK saw as separable) — have been obscured by the safe, saintly image of MLK that predominates. Obscured also is the fact that MLK was part of a mass movement that long preceded him, not a sole Great Man creating change out of whole clothe.
There are too many interesting bits to quote, but here’s another sample:
Never was King’s full agenda more visible than after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his last years, King struggled to devise tactics suitable to challenging economic injustice, a target more amorphous than Jim Crow. In 1966 he launched an ill-fated challenge to Chicago’s slums and residential segregation. In 1967, in a speech against “racism, materialism, and militarism,” he described the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” placed America “on the wrong side of a world revolution,” and blamed the “need to maintain social stability for our investments.”
In 1968, King visited a bare-bones elementary school in rural Mississippi. As he watched, the teacher provided each child with a few crackers and a quarter of an apple for lunch. “That’s all they get,” his friend Ralph Abernathy whispered. King nodded, his eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. That night, King conceived the notion of a Poor People’s Campaign. To open the eyes of the nation to poverty, he would lead a Washington encampment of poor people whose civil disobedience would compel a shift of funds from war to social priorities such as full employment and a guaranteed annual income.
Opposition instantly greeted the Poor People’s Campaign. King’s advisers privately doubted its wisdom. Former allies criticized it publicly. As King soldiered on undaunted, he was called to Memphis, where garbage workers requested his presence.
Curtsy: Crooked Timber.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was a complex man, and you are quite right to point out that what we hear about at these times is a carefully selected and sanitized portion of what he was all about.
After this time last year I did some reading up on him. There are those who would wish to paint him as a Communist. While he did have contacts with some out-and-out Communists, there’s nothing to suggest that he ever signed up. He was certainly tending towards socialism, but they can’t really full claim him either. How many socialists in America could agree with this:
Most socialists (but by no means all) in America seems to want to deny or bury our Judaeo-Christian heritage and the acts of the founders of this country, not embrace them and hold them up as the highest example of what this country is and should be all about.
The more of the Rev. King’s work you read, the more you get to see that he was indeed a complex man. In church yesterday our priest called him a prophet and saint. Interesting juxtaposition, that. The word “Saint” (for those who haven’t actually studied the lives of any of them) paints a picture of someone separated from reality, someone almost sinless. Prophets tended to be a real pain in the ass to whatever power structure existed at the time, and like Rev. King often did not live out their full natural span of days. The label that I didn’t hear in church is likely the one that might fit him best; Rev. King was a martyr.
The common depiction of saints is one that’s usually quite cleaned up from the real life of the person involved. Prophets somewhat less, and all that people generally know about martyrs is the cause they died for and how they died. In all cases, little is known about the man or woman, and their image is carefully crafted out of those aspects of their lives that it is desired to use as an inspirational example to us all.
So too with Rev. King. It’s no surprise. Going out of one’s way to tie him to socialism will be more likely in America to degrade Rev. King’s image, not to enhance that of socialism.
Well, if Obama wins and does a decent job, then maybe he can become the secular, moderate saint for future generations, and King can be re-radicalized and sent to the margin.
If Obama fails, maybe we can bring back Frederick Douglass and GW Carver.
“Going out of one’s way to tie him to socialism will be more likely in America to degrade Rev. King’s image, not to enhance that of socialism.”
If going out of one’s way is what’s necessary to clean up a gross inaccuracy, I think MLK would have considered it important – certainly more so than cleaning up his image for the very sort of people who stood against him anyway. In any case, I think the truth trumps appearances.
slyphhead, you may well be right. I don’t view our viewpoints as opposed to each other. And I don’t mean that because I want Rev. King’s civil rights work discredited. I don’t.