We could each be King

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 82 this year. He has been dead for longer than he was alive. 

As his living memory fades, replaced by a feel-good “I Have a Dream” whitewash that ignores much of what he stood for and fought against, it’s more important than ever to recapture the true history of King, because much of what he fought against is still with us today.

The missing principle

In 2011, King’s holiday has gone mostly unremarked as American media obsesses over the killing of six people and attempted assassination of a Congresswoman in Tucson, Ariz. — and, more tellingly, a bitter political debate over whether the current American appetite for bitter political debates helped foster a climate in which a disturbed young man resorted to what one of last year’s Republican Senate candidates approvingly termed “Second Amendment remedies.”

That so many people could fail to see the obvious connection between contempt for people and violence against them tells us a lot about how completely King’s true legacy has been eradicated. 

King’s core belief wasn’t civil rights or fulfilling a dream. It was a Christian variant on Gandhian nonviolence: the deeply held moral conviction that everyone, regardless of behavior, is worthy of respect and even, yes, love.

It’s a truly radical concept, and one profoundly inconvenient to people whose access to power is predicated on getting one group of people to despise another group of people. 

And, so, when we do celebrate King’s birthday these days, we don’t hear about nonviolence as King’s guiding principle; we only hear about select applications of his beliefs.

Selective memories

What little history TV will give us around King’s holiday this year is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering. 

We hear rebroadcasts of “I Have a Dream”; we don’t hear King’s powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam conflict and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham, Ala.; we don’t see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the years 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 the FBI harassment or his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe.

We don’t see retrospectives on King’s 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 multiracial Poor People’s 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, Ala., instead, specifically because King advocated nonviolence.

But these days, we’d rather incite people. Better ratings, more votes.

And we forget that of those many dreams King had, only one — equal access for non-whites — is significantly realized today. More than a half-century after the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott catapulted a 26-year-old King into prominence, even that is only partly achieved. Blacks are being systematically disenfranchised in our elections, and affirmative action and school desegregation are all but dead. 

Urban school districts across the country are as segregated and unequal as ever, and a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has helped usher in a new era where possible redress for discrimination is steadily whittled away. 

People rightfully mocked Sarah Palin in the wake of the Tucson shootings for claiming the mantle of Jewish oppression, but nobody of consequence says a word when Tea Party and Republican leaders repeatedly express their anti-black or anti-Latino bigotry.

Knowing the histories

At last week’s memorial service in Tucson, President Barack Obama — a direct beneficiary of King’s legacy — gave a fine speech, urging people involved in politics to embrace their better selves. But the people who most need to heed that advice aren’t likely to listen to a “Kenyan Muslim Commmie-socialist-fascist tyrant.” 

A more effective approach, perhaps, is to remove the advice from today’s political controversies and deliver it in the voice of a (mostly) revered historical figure. King embodies that tradition far more than any other historical figure the United States has yet produced.

However, as his generation dies off and the historical memory fades, King has become an icon, not a historical figure (distorted or otherwise). History requires context; icons don’t. 

The racism King challenged five and six 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 predominantly black Garfield High School, police harassment of both radical and mainstream black activists, the still-unsolved assassination of a local NAACP leader.

Every major 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 1955 Montgomery, Ala., is no longer so overt but still part of America 2011. It shows up in our geography, in our jails, in our schools, in our voting booths, in our shelters and food banks, in our economy.

While Jim Crow and the cruelties of overt segregation are now largely unimaginable, much remains to be done. 

A story to be told

The saddest loss in the modern narrative of King’s career is the story of who he was: a man without wealth, without elected office, who managed as a single (unarmed) individual to change the world simply through the strength of his moral convictions. His power came from his faith and his willingness to act on what he knew to be right. That story could inspire many millions to similar action — if only it were told. We could each be King.

King, a nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark card: a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a literally whitewashed file photo for sneaker or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo opps by dissembling politicians of all colors — all while his guiding philosophy has become the antithesis of modern American politics and culture.

King deserves better — we all do.

GEOV PARRISH is cofounder of Eat the State! He also reviews news of the week on “Mind Over Matters” on KEXP 90.3 FM.