Years ago, the U.S. Congress decided that the official federal holiday to commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would not be observed on his actual birthday (January 15). Instead, it would fall each year on the third Monday in January. That may have been a sign of the degree of accuracy about Dr. King that we could expect from America’s rulers in their official pronouncements about the holiday in the years that followed.
Ever since President Ronald Reagan reversed course and signed the bill creating the federal holiday in November 1983, this country has witnessed a systematic campaign to distort Dr. King’s beliefs and his role in history. (We should have known that when outright racists like U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina voted to create the holiday, something was up.)
Again and again, some political commentators have taken one paragraph from Dr. King’s magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom out of context. They have cited King’s eloquent expression of hope that someday his children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” to dishonestly portray King as an opponent of affirmative action and other programs which take race into account when grappling with systemic racism in this country.
Others have reduced Dr. King to a harmless plaster saint, distorting his ethical philosophy to claim that he would have condemned the social explosions that followed the murder of George Floyd last spring.
This year it is imperative that all of us who are fighting for justice speak up and reclaim the legacy of an important leader. We need to honor the memory of the real Martin Luther King Jr. The King who on more than one occasion said that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” The Baptist preacher who challenged the very idea of “moderation” when fighting oppression. The man who denounced the U.S. war against Vietnam, proudly calling himself “a brother to the poor of Vietnam” and emphatically declaring “I speak for the poor in America who are paying double the price for smashed hopes and death and corruption in Vietnam.”
What would the real Martin Luther King Jr. have to say about America in early 2021, as we grapple with the coronavirus?
On March 25, 1966, at a press conference in connection with the annual meeting of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Dr. King famously declared: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Is there any doubt that Dr. King would have spoken out forcefully against America’s current for-profit health care system? That he would have denounced the government’s callous response to the coronavirus? That he would have pointed out how that callousness disproportionately harms poor people and people of color?
An insightful social critic of capitalism, Dr. King was also a practical organizer of mass protests in the streets. At the end of his life he was planning the Poor People’s Campaign to bring tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities to the nation’s capital for mass protests against poverty in America.
Murdered in Memphis many years ago, Dr. King’s legacy lives on today — in the concrete efforts of all those who are continuing the fight he waged so valiantly against systemic racism, militarism, and economic inequality. This year, as we celebrate Martin Luther King Day on Monday, January 18, it’s time to say: Dr. King belongs to the people, not to the one percent!
