The Other King
How the real MLK and his causes have been obscured with all the ‘recognition’

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be years old today, if he had survived. Yet in every conceivable sense of the word, he has not. At least, not in White America.

In many ways, Ronald Reagan did the worst possible thing for the memory of Dr. King by acceding -- reluctantly -- to the national holiday that bears King's name. Because the holiday has become a feel-good lie.

King, the man, is, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. MLK Day, the holiday, has devolved into the Mississippi Burning of third Mondays. What started out as gratitude, that they made a movie about it, gradually becomes revulsion at how new generations of white people mislearn the story.

King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. He is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be widely believed a relic or buffoon.

What little history TV will give us in the next week is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering, as much about self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American as self-examination that American racism made him necessary and that our government, at every level, sought to destroy him. We hear "I have a dream"; we don't hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don't see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the generations of beatings and busts before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We don't hear about the mainstream American contempt at the time for King, even after that Peace Prize, nor his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe.

We don't see retrospectives on his linkage of civil rights with Third World liberation. We forget that he died in Memphis lending support for a union (the garbage workers' strike), while organizing a multi-racial Poor Peoples' Campaign that demanded affordable housing and decent-paying jobs as basic civil rights transcending skin color. We forget that many of King's fellow leaders weren't nearly so polite. Cities were burning. We remember Selma instead. And we forget that of those many dreams King had, only one -- equal access for non-whites -- is significantly realized today. And nearly a half-century after the Montgomery bus boycott catapulted a 26-year-old King into prominence, even that is hardly achieved.

But an even bigger problem is that King has become an icon, not a historical figure (distorted or otherwise). The racism he challenged four and five decades ago in Georgia and Alabama was also dominant throughout the country. Here in Seattle, few whites know that history: the housing and school segregation, laws barring Asians from owning land (overturned only in the '60s), the marches downtown from Garfield High School, police harassment of both radical and mainstream black activists.

Every city in America has such histories. We don't know the stories of the people, many still with us, who led those struggles. And we rarely acknowledge that the overt racism of Montgomery 1955 is no longer so overt, but still part of America 2002; it shows up in our geography, in our jails, in our voting booths, in our shelters and food banks, in our military, and yes, in the very earnest and extremely white activist groups that still carry the banner on these issues.

If our cities were serious about his legacy, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. would run through downtowns. Instead, literally, in just about every big city in the U.S., urban planners and city councils put King back in the ghetto, along with both the legions of people who worked with him and the many more who've taken up his work since.

Opponents of affirmative action and racial equality can claim King's mantle and "if he were alive today" approval only because in 2002, TVland's MLK has no politics. And, for that matter, no faith.

If the King of 1955 or 1965 were alive today, he would be accused of treason for his pacifism, as he was reviled for "Communism" then; instead of the FBI trying to bring him down, he, and most of his associates, would be prosecutable under new anti-terrorism statutes. And the moral outrage of Americans, that made his work so effective? We don't do that any more. A couple of months ago we nearly starved millions of Afghans to death -- instead of the few hundred thousand dying at the hands of U.S.-backed warlords today -- and virtually nobody even noticed in this country, let alone cared. It'd take a whole lot more than police dogs to make the news today. Ask any global justice demonstrator.

Instead, for white America, King's soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacism. (See? We're not so bad. We honor him now. Why don't those black people just get over it, anyway? We did.)

Dr. King, nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark Card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by barely retired generals and ungrateful Supreme Court justices. Be sure to check out the Three-Day-Only White Sale at WalMart. Always a better price. Always.

He deserves better. We all do.

Chronology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

1929

January 15—Martin Luther King, Jr. is born to Rev. and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr. (former Alberta Christine Williams) in Atlanta, Georgia.

1935 – 1944—Dr. King attends David T. Howard Elementary School, Atlanta University Laboratory School, and Booker T. Washington High School. He passes the entrance examination to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia without graduating from high school.

1947

Dr. King is licensed to preach.

1948

February 25—Dr. King is ordained to the Baptist ministry and appointed associate pastor at Ebenezer.

June 8—Dr. King graduates from Morehouse College with a BA degree in Sociology.

September—Dr. King enters Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. After hearing Dr. A. J. Muste and Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson preach on the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, he begins to study Gandhi seriously.

1951

May 6-8—Dr. King graduates from Crozer with a Bachelor of Divinity degree.

1953

June 18—Dr. King marries Coretta Scott in Marion, Alabama.

1954

May 17—The Supreme Court of the United States rules unanimously in Brown vs. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

October 31—Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. appoints Dr. King as the twentieth pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

1955

June 5—Dr. King receives a Ph.D. degree in Systematic Theology from Boston University.

November 17—The Kings’ first child, Yolanda Denise, is born in Montgomery, Alabama.

December 1—Mrs. Rosa Parks, a forty-two year old Montgomery seamstress, refuses to relinquish her bus seat to a white man and is arrested.

December 5—The first day of the Montgomery bus boycott and the trial date of Mrs. Parks. A meeting of movement leaders is held. Dr. King is unanimously elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

December 10—The Montgomery Bus Company suspends service in black neighborhoods.

1956

January 26—Dr. King is arrested on a charge of traveling thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five miles per hour zone in Montgomery. He is released on his own recognizance.

January 30—A bomb is thrown onto the porch of Dr. King’s Montgomery home. Mrs. King and Mrs. Roscoe Williams, wife of a church member, are in the house with baby Yolanda Denise. No one is injured.

February 2—A suit is filed in Federal District Court asking that Montgomery’s travel segregation laws be declared unconstitutional.

February 21—Dr. King is indicted with other figures in the Montgomery bus boycott on the charge of being party to a conspiracy to hinder and prevent the operation of business without “just or legal cause.”

June 4—A United States District Court rules that racial segregation on city bus lines is unconstitutional.

August 10—Dr. King is a speaker before the platform committee of the Democratic Party in Chicago, Illinois.

October 30—Mayor Gayle of Montgomery, Alabama instructs the city’s legal department “to file such proceedings as it may deem proper to stop the operation of car pools and transportation systems growing out of the boycott.”

November 13—The United States Supreme Court affirms the decision of the three-judge district court in declaring Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional.

December 20—Federal injunctions prohibiting segregation on buses are served on city and bus company officials in Montgomery, Alabama. Injunctions are also served on state officials. Montgomery buses are integrated.

1957

January 27—An unexploded bomb is discovered on the front porch of the King’s house.

February 14—The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is founded.

February 18—Dr. King is featured on the cover of Time magazine.

May 17—Dr. King delivers a speech for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom celebrating the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision. The speech, titled, “Give Us The Ballot,” is given at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

June 13—Dr. King meets with the Vice President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon.

September—President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalizes the Arkansas National Guard to escort nine Negro students to an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

September 9—The first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction is passed by Congress, creating the Civil Rights Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

October 23—A second child, Martin Luther III, is born to Dr. and Mrs. King.

1958

June 23—Dr. King, along with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph, and Lester Granger meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

September 3—Dr. King is arrested on a charge of loitering (later changed to “failure to obey an officer”) in the vicinity of the Montgomery Recorder’s Court. He is released on $100.00 bond.

September 4—Dr. King is convicted after pleading “Not Guilty” on the charge of failure to obey an officer. The fine is paid almost immediately, over Dr. King’s objection, by Montgomery Police Commissioner Clyde C. Sellers.

September 17—Dr. King’s book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, is published by Harper & Row.

September 20—Dr. King is stabbed in the chest by Mrs. Izola Curry, who is subsequently alleged to be mentally deranged. The stabbing occurs in Harlem, New York while Dr. King is autographing his recently published book. His condition was said to be serious but not critical.

1959

January 30—Dr. King meets with Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers Union, in Detroit, Michigan.

February 2 - 10—Dr. and Mrs. King spend a month in India studying Gandhi’s March techniques of nonviolence as guests of Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru.

1960

January 24—The King family moves to Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. King becomes co-pastor, with his father, of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

February 1—The first lunch counter sit-in to desegregate eating facilities is held by students in Greensboro, North Carolina.

February 17—A warrant is issued for Dr. King’s arrest on charges that he had falsified his 1956 and 1958 Alabama state income tax returns.

April 15—The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded to coordinate student protests at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina on a temporary basis. (It is to become a permanent organization in October 1960.) Dr. King and James Lawson are the keynote speakers at the Shaw University founding.

May 28—Dr. King is acquitted of the tax evasion charge by an all white jury in Montgomery, Alabama.

June 10—Dr. King and A. Philip Randolph announce plans for picketing both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

June 24—Dr. King meets with John F. Kennedy (candidate for President of the United States) about racial matters.

October 19—Dr. King is arrested at an Atlanta sit-in and is jailed on a charge of violating the state’s trespassing law.

October 22 - 27—The trespassing charges are dropped. All jailed demonstrators are released except Dr. King, who is held on a charge of violating a probated sentence in a traffic arrest case. He is transferred to the Dekalb County Jail in Decatur, Georgia, and is then transferred to the Reidsville State Prison. He is released from the Reidsville State Prison on a $2,000.00 bond.

1961

January 30—A third child, Dexter Scott, is born to Dr. and Mrs. King in Atlanta, Georgia.

May 4—The first group of Freedom Riders, with the intent of integrating interstate buses, leaves Washington, D.C. by Greyhound bus. The group, organized by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), leaves shortly after the Supreme Court has outlawed segregation in interstate transportation terminals. The bus is burned outside of Anniston, Alabama on May 14. A mob beats the Freedom Riders upon their arrival in Birmingham, Alabama. The Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and spend forty to sixty days in Parchman Penitentiary.

December 15—Dr. King arrives in Albany, Georgia in response to a call from Dr. W. G. Anderson, the leader of the Albany Movement

Death

Dr. King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.

Dr. King was in Memphis to help lead sanitation workers in a protest against low wages and intolerable working conditions. James Earl Ray was arrested in London, England on June 8, 1968, and returned to Memphis, Tennessee on July 19, 1969 to stand trial for the assassination of Dr. King. On March 9, 1969, before coming to trial, he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary.