Dr. King’s Legacy
Posted by tgirsch

Let’s take a moment today to remember that Martin Luther King was a lot more than “just” a civil rights leader:

King was working on anti-poverty and anti-war issues at the time of his death. He had spoken out against the Vietnam War and was in Memphis when he was killed in April 1968 in support of striking sanitation workers.

King had come a long way from the crowds who cheered him at the 1963 March on Washington, when he was introduced as “the moral leader of our nation” — and when he pronounced “I have a dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

By taking on issues outside segregation, he had lost the support of many newspapers and magazines, and his relationship with the White House had suffered, said Harvard Sitkoff, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire who has written a recently published book on King.

“He was considered by many to be a pariah,” Sitkoff said.

But he took on issues of poverty and militarism because he considered them vital “to make equality something real and not just racial brotherhood but equality in fact,” Sitkoff said.

Scholarly study of King hasn’t translated into the popular perception of him and the civil rights movement, said Richard Greenwald, professor of history at Drew University.

“We’re living increasingly in a culture of top 10 lists, of celebrity biopics which simplify the past as entertainment or mythology,” he said. “We lose a view on what real leadership is by compressing him down to one window.”

That does a disservice to both King and society, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University.

By freezing him at that point, by putting him on a pedestal of perfection that doesn’t acknowledge his complex views, “it makes it impossible both for us to find new leaders and for us to aspire to leadership,” Harris-Lacewell said.

She believes it’s important for Americans in 2008 to remember how disliked King was before his death in April 1968.

“If we forget that, then it seems like the only people we can get behind must be popular,” Harris-Lacewell said. “Following King meant following the unpopular road, not the popular one.”

Nearly 40 years after his death, there’s still a lot of work to be done — on all those fronts.

January 21st, 2008 | Holiday | one comment

Dr. Martin Luther King
Posted by Kevin

I have been very sick the last week, hence my absence from the site. But today is the celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday and Dr. King is the perhaps the greatest American to ever live. He was the most effective civil rights leader to this date, and the struggle for civil rights is the most important struggle in American history. Civil rights are the political embodiment of the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. Without the enforcement of civil rights, this country has no special claim to decency or liberty.

Despite the work of Dr. King and the thousands who organized and the millions who protested, we are not a post racism society. We have come a long way, there is no doubt; the fact that an African-American could be one of two front runners for the Democratic presidential nomination speaks to that. But the fact that an unrepentant minority vote suppressor was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court until recently, the fact that the most popular political commentator on the right is an unreconstructed racist, the fact that the current President owes his position, in part, to a blatantly racist whisper campaign in South Carolina prove that we still have very far to go.

January 21st, 2008 | General, Race | 6 comments