MLK was not meek and inoffensive
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan delivered a monologue Sunday night on the “the Santa Claus-ification” of Martin Luther King (Princeton University Professor Cornel West’s words). Over a dozen years ago, West warned his audience at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta that King’s image was at risk of being sanitized by history until the truth of the man is distilled away.
“We have to resist the ‘Santa Claus-ification’ of Martin Luther King. I don’t want to sanitize Martin Luther King. I don’t want to deodorize Dr. Martin Luther King. I don’t want to disinfect Dr. Martin Luther King, and we’re not gonna domesticate Dr. King,” West said.
“The FBI said he was the most dangerous man in America, and the FBI said he was the most notorious liar in America,” West continued. Cuddly and grandfatherly King was not.
Quotes that appear on his monument in downtown Washington, D.C. may be among his most famous because they were the least offensive, the least radical, the least threatening to white Americans. They minimize his legacy while celebrating it.
“For most Republicans,” Hasan began, “Dr King is just a guy who said to forget about skin color. They basically know just one quote of his, out of context, and they repeat it ad nauseam.”
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government,” King told Manhattan’s Riverside Church in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War. Not a quote often repeated in King Day speeches.
King was not just a civil rights leader. He advocated “a radical revolution of values” in this country. He decried that in this country “profit and property rights are considered more important than people.” A nation, King said, “that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Quotes like that don’t get remembered today either. They remain quietly buried with him.
Racial justice was incomplete without economic justice, King believed. “What good is it to be able to be allowed to eat in a restaurant if you can’t afford a hamburger?” King wrote in 1968. The work of achieving racial and economic justice remains incomplete over a half century after King’s assassination in Memphis. The wealth gap between white families and Black families persists to this day. The Poor People’s Campaign he led in 1968 was resurrected in 2017 by North Carolina civil rights activist Bishop William Barber II who leads the New Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
Don’t think because there is a federal holiday that King’s dream is realized. There is another police killing of an unarmed Black man right around the corner.
West cautioned in his 2010 “Santa Claus-ification” speech:
Speaking of Obama, West said it’s an absolute fallacy to call Barack Obama’s presidency the completion of King’s dream. “That’s not true,” he said. “It might be a fulfillment of the dream. But he’s not the fulfillment of the dream. Get it right.”
Profit and property rights remain to this day more important than people, if not more so than in King’s lifetime. The overcoming foretold in song sometimes seems as distant as Christ’s second coming.