The Dangers Of Whitewashing Martin Luther King's Radical Legacy
The politics of revisionist history is not just about keeping us from understanding the past. It's about ensuring we cannot understand the present.
You need no introduction to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and what he stood for. But MLK was, of course, one of human history's greatest civil rights leaders, activists, preachers, and justice advocates. Most people have at least a basic understanding of MLK's life and times, and his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech is a pillar in literature and history lessons across the country.
However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed a worrying trend regarding MLK. Conservative politicians and pundits perpetuate many false narratives about King. At this point, we should not be surprised, because it is what these people do best - right-wing reactionaries are cynically using MLK’s words to promote their (often brutally racist) conservative ideology. So, in honour of Martin Luther King, I want to focus on some of the most insidious ways I have seen King’s words distorted by conservatives to bolster their narrative. But more than that, I want to deep dive into some of the lesser-known adages of MLK and show how whitewashing his radical messages of anti-capitalism, antiwar, and anti-imperialism is dangerous to our current society and a total misrepresentation of the remarkable legacy of Martin Luther King.
To get the cogs turning in my brain I tried to remember my first encounter of MLK Jr, I believe I was in primary school and as a starting point to discuss the layered and complex idea of racism, we examined him. Then, in secondary school we analysed his history-defining speech, ‘I Have A Dream’ as part of GCSE English. These are as far as my formal education of MLK extended. When reflecting on these lessons, I realised that MLK was no longer treated as a person, but almost reduced to the role of a symbol. Therefore, we are in danger of sanitising King’s legacy and digesting only the palatable parts like ‘I Have A Dream’ and ignoring all of his other speeches, writings and sermons, when this is where the really interesting stuff lies. It’s almost as if we view MLK as a mythical figure who ended racism with statements about dreams. King’s daughter, Bernice, warns us not to fixate on the overshadowing quotable parts of her father’s work, but examine his legacy more wholistically. When we don’t, a problem is created: conservatives believe they can say racist things and hide behind the power of invoking MLK’s words because he is now a universally revered figure of racial and social justice. I noticed this trend even more with the renewed interest in racial justice following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which sparked a new era of Black Lives Matter protests. So, what have conservatives done?
Prominent conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, essentially says that we have to ignore the impact that slavery and Jim Crow have had on black Americans today. He states that it is 'hurtful' to examine the legacy of racism, but rather individual black people ought to think, 'what can I do today to fix the problems in my life?' In some videos, Shapiro uses MLK to support this contention. I have linked that video here.
I’ll let Dr. King rebut Shapiro’s claims:
https://x.com/BerniceKing/status/1373805424433053696
I also found a clip of ex-FOX News host, Tucker Carlson, claiming that MLK would be 'shocked and disgusted' by the equality initiatives being implemented by the Biden administration. Joe Walsh, a Republican representative for Illinois 2011-2013 tweeted: 'In fact, if he were alive today, Martin Luther King, Jr would lead an "All Lives Matter" March on Washington, DC. Would be wonderful.' Here is a disturbing video of former Vice President Mike Pence claiming to be inspired by Dr. King, meaning he... can't say the phrase Black Lives Matter?
Furthermore, when Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis, unveiled his 'Stop WOKE Act,' he said, 'You think about what MLK stood for - he said he didn't want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. You listen to some of these people nowadays, they don't talk about that.' Behind him stood kids holding banners with the letters 'CRT' on them with a big red circle and line through them: anti-CRT. The 'Stop Woke Act,' was proposed legislation which would allow parents to sue schools teaching Critical Race Theory, a legal theory which asserts that racism lives within our institutions rather than just existing on the human-to-human level. Martin Luther King was one of the first proponents of such ideas, so to suggest he wouldn't want CRT taught is mind-bendingly ludicrous. In fact, in a quote from his fourth and final book, 'Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?' I would argue MLK is making the case for reparations based on the historic, systemic injustices faced by black Americans:
The white liberal must affirm that absolute justice for the Negro simply means, in the Aristotelian sense, that the Negro must have ‘his due.’ There is nothing abstract about this. It is as concrete as having a good job, a good education, a decent house and a share of power. It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. But this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.
Finally, the example of this misinformation which I was most disturbed to see came from Barack Obama's Department of Defense General Counsel, Jeh Johnson. Johnson argued that if King were alive today, he would understand and perhaps support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a Pentagon commemoration of King's accomplishments, Johnson stated, 'I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack...Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness--the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968.'
In April 1967, King forcefully denounced the Vietnam War in a speech at Riverside Church in New York City - he said:
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
I think it's clear how MLK would feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Barring the example of the Iraq War, the commonality between all of these references is the fact that the only line these conservatives focus on is, 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.'
This line is a convenient card for conservatives to play to disguise their own racism as racial justice. They can just say, 'This is what Martin Luther King would've wanted, judge content of character, story ended.' They stagnate on this line and cannot look beyond it. They twist it from a line which endorses equality to one that calls us to ignore the impact of history, dismiss the legacy of slavery in America, and deny systemic racism. Equally insidiously, conservatives deliberately misunderstand the core sentiments that King is conveying. Here, King is referring specifically to explicit legal discrimination in America; laws which, for example, would ban black people from certain venues. Thus, in this context, not judging someone by the colour of their skin bears much more importance because that is what prevented black Americans from engaging in their society. Today, racism is much more subtle, still there, but not so explicit. In this one line which conservatives love to quote, King is specifically challenging the idea that the superficial, phenotypical trait of skin colour denotes anything about the intrinsic worth of a person and rails against the notion that there is something inherently less valuable about black lives.
What conservatives most appreciate about figures like MLK and Frederick Douglass is that they’re dead, and cannot defend themselves when their words and ideas are misappropriated. In the same vein, when they bring up MLK to support their anti-woke, pro-free market neoliberalism, anti-critical race theory ideologies, they are saying, ‘MLK would be ashamed and offended by the divisive rhetoric of MLK.’ This is demonstrably absurd. So, what did MLK stand for?
Martin Luther King was insistently anti-capitalist. As early as 1951, King wrote, 'I am convinced that capitalism has seen its best days in American, and not only in America, but in the entire world. It is a well known fact that no social institut can survive when it has outlived its usefullness. This, capitalism has done. It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.' [sic].
King was also opposed to war - he said: 'The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.'
Ultimately, King gave stark and uncomfortable messages to those he named, 'the white moderates.' These are people who would claim blindly they were not racist but were also unwilling to aid society in instituting the radical and revolutionary change necessary to end systematic and systemic racism. King says in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.' It shocks me that some conservatives would argue that MLK would oppose BLM demonstrations if he were still alive.
The final point I want to raise is that when Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, he had a 75% disapproval rating. He was a highly controversial figure, with his socialist leanings, showing solidarity with unions and sanitation workers, and his anti-Vietnam War stance sealing his death warrant. We may love him today, but it was not like that at the time. Whilst researching for this piece, I stumbled upon an excellent article written by Cornel West which sheds light on how King was viewed towards the end of his life. Cornel West is one of the few current political figures and activists who seems to truly grasp the messages at the core of Dr. King’s philosophy. As an aside, Cornel West was one of the third-party candidates in the 2024 US Presidential election and I would argue the only candidate who represented progressive politics. West writes:
King’s last sermon was entitled Why America May Go to Hell. His personal loneliness and political isolation loomed large. J Edgar Hoover said he was “the most dangerous man in America”. President Johnson called him “a n***** preacher”. Fellow Christian ministers, white and black, closed their pulpits to him. Young revolutionaries dismissed and tried to humiliate him with walkouts, booing and heckling. Life magazine – echoing Time magazine, the New York Times, and the Washington Post (all bastions of the liberal establishment) – trashed King’s anti-war stance as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi”.
And the leading black journalist of the day, Carl Rowan, wrote in the Reader’s Digest that King’s “exaggerated appraisal of his own self-importance” and the communist influence on his thinking made King “persona non-grata to Lyndon Johnson” and “has alienated many of the Negro’s friends and armed the Negro’s foes”.
Even more galling, recent evidence proves that the FBI wanted King dead, his socialist beliefs being the primary reason for this. In this time of American history, communists were public enemy number 1, so anyone suspected of communism, or socialism, was put on surveillance by the FBI. The FBI engaged in an intense campaign to discredit King’s work. Following the 1963 march on Washington, FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief, Willaim Sullivan wrote in a memo, ‘We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.’ The FBI wiretapped King to uncover whether he was a communist. Instead, they discovered he was having extra-marital affairs. Sullivan then sent a letter pretending to be someone else to King saying, ‘You have been on the record- all your adulterous acts, your sexual orgies extending far into the past. This one is but a tiny sample…[the public] will know you for what you are- an evil, abnormal beast.’ It concludes, ‘There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days.’ Here, the FBI was urging King to commit suicide. Let’s be clear, the FBI did not care about King’s affairs, they wanted him gone purely because he was seen as too radical and a threat to the status quo of American capitalism and imperialism.
To conclude, I think Martin Luther King would be ashamed and appalled to see how his legacy is being invoked today. We are still living in the nightmare of racial injustice he fought so hard to end, and conservatives who misappropriate MLK’s words are at the helm of perpetuating this injustice. As we celebrate another Martin Luther King Day, let’s remember his less well-known messages and heed his wise words as we continue to try and fix our broken society. As the quote I began this piece suggests, the best way to honour Martin Luther King is to stop sanitising and revising his legacy, but rather be brave and bold enough to dig deeper into the radicalness of his teachings. The final thought I want you to ponder is this: who today is villainised, marginalised, and brushed aside as a heretic and a radical, but will soon be looked to as a hero? I have barely scratched the surface of this subject, but I will leave you with these words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
