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The Holy Father may just make it official: last week the American Roman Catholic bishops asked Pope John Paul II to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. as a 20th-century martyr--someone who died for the faith. More than three decades after his death, and on the 71st anniversary of his birth, King is receding ever further into myth. To many whites, he is the preacher who, at the March on Washington, summoned the nation to higher ground--and the country answered his call, taking down the WHITE ONLY signs. To many African-Americans, particularly the young,
King was far from revolutionary: he was conservative, middle class, safe.
America has forgotten King's radical legacy. We have banished him to blandness, turning his fountain of rage against injustice into a faucet of polite protest. We have forgotten that he was once tagged by the FBI as "the most dangerous Negro in America." But King's danger had nothing to do with national security. Instead, he boldly threatened white supremacy, making him an enemy of those who sought to preserve white privilege and to extend black oppression. At the same time, he challenged both black middle-class complacency and irresponsible militancy.
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King's radical legacy is one that we should remember now more than ever. The triumph of his birthday celebration contains an irony: the holiday seems to thrive on denying his growth as a revolutionary figure. Near the end of his life he said we must have "a revolution of values." Our resistance to King's movement from racial reform to a war for economic justice means that the true Martin Luther King Jr. has disappeared in plain sight. In place of the authentic King is a prefabricated leader whose interchangeable parts permit us to fit him neatly into contradictory beliefs. In fact, we have made three mistakes in trampling King's legacy.
We have taken the teeth out of King's ideas. During the early part of his career, King endorsed the view that blacks must appeal to the white conscience to bring about social change. But as he encountered stiffened resistance from white quarters, he sadly concluded that most Americans were unconscious racists. Further, King's hunger for his children to live in a world where character counts more than color has led some conservatives to conclude that he opposed race-conscious remedies to discrimination. In truth, King advocated an aggressive campaign of racial compensation that acknowledged the injustice done to blacks. Since the nation had done "something special against the Negro for hundreds of years," it must "do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him now to compete on a just and equal basis." He also privately promoted what he termed "democratic socialism." He publicly called for "a redistribution of economic power." Add to the mix King's principled criticism of the Vietnam War--for which he was bitterly attacked but later vindicated--and one gets a sense of just how profound King's radicalism was.
We have overly romanticized him. Instead of acknowledging that he was a flawed but formidable figure, we have tended to cast King's earthly pilgrimage in a heroic light. Only when we measure the moral and personal obstacles that King had to overcome can we appreciate just how great his accomplishments really were. He surely had significant faults. He plagiarized huge chunks of his doctoral dissertation and lifted without attribution extended passages from other preachers in his published sermons; he was a guilt-ridden but serial adulterer. Still, his failures ultimately magnify his humanity, without which King would simply be a plastic icon with no appeal to flesh-and-blood mortals. If he could rise above his undeniable limitations to help America become a better nation, then we can likewise surmount barriers to create social change. That lesson is especially helpful as we attempt to connect King's humanity to the young people of today.
We have ceded control of King's image to a range of factions. The right, the federal government and its holiday, and even the King family itself, which has attempted to collect a fee for nearly every word the great man gave to the world, are at war over his legacy. Meanwhile, some corporations commercially exploit King's image while failing to pay their workers a fair wage, thereby rejecting King's vision of economic justice. He should belong to the nation, and the world, not to activists with agendas to grind.
If King is to be relevant to our age, we must cure our addiction to the amnesia that encourages us to duck King's radical legacy. The only King worth celebrating is the one who gave his life insisting that we honor truth, conquer evil, embrace love and expand justice. That is the true Martin Luther King Jr.
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