The Annual Re-assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
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On April 4th, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee pastor and civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Because of his prominence during the 1950s and 1960s fight against Jim Crow, racial terror, and for political and civil rights we deservedly celebrate Dr. King annually on his birthday and we solemnly reflect on the anniversary of his death. In all this remembering, reflection, and inevitable discussion we risk re-assassinating Dr. King. Obviously not literally but figuratively when we talk about him and neuter the message, we are killing the fully developed King.
The main way that this happens today is whittling his whole life down to the “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963. Not only is King confined to the speech but only certain parts of the speech. We repeat the lines,
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not but judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”.
While that line is powerful and important it is not all-encompassing of what he was there for. We love that the “dreamer” King because he gives us hope that even amid unimaginable circumstances things can be better at some future time. What we don’t often discuss is the reason that King’s dream was a dream in the first place: the reality of the situation. In the same speech he says,
“In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
Dr. King was also fighting for the economic justice for the poor. Go read his address to the National Conference on New Politics, “The Three Evils of Society”. In it he states:
The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of forming trends, they were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms and now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm and these are the same people that now say to black people, whose ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat; that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor.
We can also fall into the trap of making King a messianic figure that is unable to be touched by criticism. There was only one perfect person to walk the earth, that was Jesus Christ. The rest of u, even the best of us have flaws and are not above critique. We don’t have to make King into something he is not to honor his legacy. His ideologies and thoughts are readily available to us though speeches and writings. We must talk about the man as he was, or we run the risk of re-assassinating the character of King.
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