The Martin Luther King of American memory serves this nation as the safe Civil Rights leader. When shrunk to fit within the confines of soundbite history, the pages of a textbook, or the scenes of a primary school pageant, King is cleansed of anger, of ego, of sexuality, and even, perhaps, of some of his humanity.
Counterpoised against the ostensibly violent Malcolm X, who supposedly would have forced America to change its ways by using “any means necessary,” King comes off as a cuddly moderate — a figure who loved everyone, enemies included, even whites who subjugated black people. Although there’s some truth lurking behind this myth, there was more (about both X and King) to the story: complexities and nuances that escape most popular recollections. Martin Luther King, no matter how people remember him now, was not nearly so safe as most of us believe.
On March 12, 1968, less than a month before he was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, King visited the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Largely white, Grosse Pointe was — and to some extent still is — a bastion of establishment power. By that point in his career, King had embraced issues that moved well beyond the struggle against de jure segregation in the South. He had begun focusing most of his energy on inequality nationwide — de facto issues of poverty, job discrimination, fair housing, and, as Matthew Yglesias notes, the Vietnam war.
While in Grosse Pointe, King delivered a speech, “The Other America,”* which details the orator’s evolution over the course of his too-brief career:
Now let me say that the struggle for Civil Rights and the struggle to make these two Americas one America, is much more difficult today than it was five or ten years ago. For about a decade…we’ve struggled all across the South…to get rid of legal, overt segregation and all of the humiliation that surrounded that system of segregation. In a sense this was a struggle for decency; we could not go to a lunch counter in so many instances and get a hamburger or a cup of coffee. We could not make use of public accommodations. Public transportation was segregated, and often we had to sit in the back and…stand over empty seats because sections were reserved for whites only. We did not have the right to vote in so many areas of the South. And the struggle was to deal with these problems.
That’s the story most Americans know: from the buses of Montgomery to the lunch counters of Greensboro to a jail cell in Birmingham to the March on Washington and maybe to Stockholm and then Selma. But more likely straight from giving the “I Have a Dream” speech in DC to Memphis, to murder, to martyrdom.
This narrative skips over a number of chapters from late in King’s life, the period after he began organizing in the North, when success often proved elusive.
As King noted in Grosse Pointe:
But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. And it’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.
These problems transcended any single region of the country:
It may well be that shouts of Black Power and riots in Watts and the Harlems and the other areas, are the consequences of the white backlash rather than the cause of them. What it is necessary to see is that there has never been a single solid monistic determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans on the whole question of Civil Rights and on the whole question of racial equality. This is something that truth impels all men of good will to admit.
And while those intractable issues had begun testing King’s otherworldly patience, he remained steadfast in advocating non-violence:
I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impractical for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.
By this time in his life, though, King openly expressed sympathy for those who embraced other means, for those who would not turn the other cheek:
But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.” That’s wonderful writing. But also: that’s not the MLK my son learned about in kindergarten last week or the MLK my students learn about in their textbooks. By contrast, the MLK who spoke in Grosse Pointe laid the blame for urban insurrections at the feet of complacent whites:
And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
King offered his audience a range of solutions to the problems he outlined above: “a guaranteed minimum income for all people, and for all families of our country”; an immediate end to the war that was “allowing the Great Society to be shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam every day”; eradication of poverty throughout the nation; and real integration, extending beyond public accomodations to the corridors of power (“Integration must be seen also in political terms where there is shared power, where black men and white men share power together to build a new and a great nation.”**). King explained that, “In a real sense, we’re all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Again: good writing. But more than that: none of the above is moderate, none of it is safe.
On April 8, 1968, less than a week after James Earl Ray shot and killed King, John Conyers, then as now the congressional representative for much of Detroit and its northwest suburbs, sponsored legislation making King’s birthday a federal holiday. Conyers had hosted King during the latter’s visit to Grosse Pointe.
Because of King’s longtime support for organized labor, Conyers originally turned to unions to back his bill. And for years, in the face of bitter antagonism, workers made the King holiday part of their contract negotiations. Unions helped revive Conyers’s bill after it died in committee; through the 1970s, they kept the idea alive.
As time passed, though, Conyers found champions in the corporate community: especially Miller Brewing and Atlanta-based CocaCola. Finally, with help from Stevie Wonder and the largest petition drive in the nation’s history, the bill, despite opposition from Senator Jesse Helms, who falsely charged that King had close ties to the American Communist Party, overwhelmingly passed both houses of Congress. President Reagan, facing a veto-proof majority, signed the law in 1983.
From there, several states either flatly refused to comply with the new law or skirted it by marrying the King holiday to other celebrations. In Virginia, for example, Martin Luther King Day became known as Lee-Jackson-King Day, an ungainly and unlikely civil union of Confederate generals and a Civil Rights activist. Arizona, most infamously, only began celebrating the King holiday after Public Enemy rapped about assassinating the state’s governor the NFL threatened not to hold the Super Bowl there. Facing the potential loss of revenue, Arizona toed the line.
I wonder what Martin Luther King would think of his eponymous day. Of the MLK lesson plan — long on heroism, patriotism, and feel-good rhetoric but short on violence, non- or otherwise — in my son’s classroom. Of the fact that his holiday’s roots in organized labor have been completely forgotten. Of the painful irony that corporate sponsorship proved key in passing the law marking his birthday.
More than that, I wonder what those sponsors would think if they were transported back to Grosse Pointe, on March 12, 1968, to hear King deliver his “Other America” speech, including the line, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” I suspect they wouldn’t recognize that Dr. King. I wonder how many of us would.
* I believe that this is a slightly modified version of the same speech, given, in this case, roughly a year earlier at the Leland Stanford Junior University.
** I’m leaving the obvious gender issues alone. Much to my discredit, I know, but this post is already way too long. And I’ve got other work to do tonight.
30 comments
January 21, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Vance Maverick
“Language of the unheard” — not, I think, in the sense that people are at first unheard, but then make themselves heard through rioting. Rather, even as the speech act (broken glass, smoke, the iconic televisions) is registered, it remains enigmatic, the circuit of communication unclosed. Does anyone know what the LA riots of 1992 said? Not even Anna Deavere Smith (speaking of whom)….
All that’s a tangent. Thanks for the salutary reminder.
January 22, 2008 at 5:49 am
PigInZen
Nice piece, ari. Call me an old fighting liberal, born of his father’s fighting hippie social-equality arguments, but when you asked the question, “I wonder what Martin Luther King would think of his eponymous day” I couldn’t help but jump to the answer. I think that he would wonder why the hell we’re still fighting the same problems of the sixties forty years later. I may be cynical but I don’t think much has changed and Dr. King was 100% correct in that it’s much easier to fight the obvious, written-into-law discrimination than it is to fight the ephemeral encompassed by “social justice.”
Oh and the LA riots of 1992 were all about a populace’s frustration with small-scale police riots. That’s essentially what the LA cops used as their modus operandi – overwhelming force to intimidate and punish. There’s a ton of history in that topic…
January 22, 2008 at 7:21 am
Well, Two More « Accismus
[…] January 22, 2008 Well, Two More Posted by Elizabeth under MLK, links, marriage A more accurate (and interesting) remembrance of MLK… […]
January 22, 2008 at 8:07 am
Levi Stahl
You’re dead on: while King the memory is publicly embraced, King the living, strident activist was not–and would not be were he with us today. At the risk of sounding like I’m overreaching, I think the difference between the public-holiday King and the real thinking and acting King is not dissimilar to the difference between the Jesus-as-your-friend-and-protector of many churches and the absolutely radical Jesus of the Gospels: both are attempts, which may be innocent on their face, to make palatable someone whose ideas at their core require a rethinking of nearly all our human relations.
And though you’re right to note that King expressed understanding of those who turned to violence in the absence of real representation and options, I think it’s important to remember that King really did live his nonviolence, that by all accounts his belief in it was fundamental. For King, nonviolence was the only option–and not just because he believed it to be the only way to win in the long run.
January 22, 2008 at 8:34 am
Geschichte Grad
Relevant to King’s message of economic justice (and one of the themes of this excellent post) and the election: this letter from Dr. King’s eldest son to John Edwards. A highlight:
“I am disturbed by how little attention the topic of economic justice has received during this campaign. I want to challenge all candidates to follow your lead, and speak up loudly and forcefully on the issue of economic justice in America.”
January 22, 2008 at 8:56 am
bitchphd
Nice job.
January 22, 2008 at 9:58 am
SEK
This is so much better than what I would’ve written. Now, aren’t you glad I didn’t?
January 22, 2008 at 10:21 am
ari
No. I kept waiting. But you never wrote it. So finally I did. And yours would have been better. I’m sure of it.
January 22, 2008 at 10:35 am
BEW
Ari,
Great post!
PiginZen
“I may be cynical but I don’t think much has changed and Dr. King was 100% correct in that it’s much easier to fight the obvious, written-into-law discrimination than it is to fight the ephemeral encompassed by “social justice.””
Perhaps it is just me, I do think you a wee bit cynical, perhaps a tad jaded. I am 55 and the world has changed in my lifetime for the better in civil rights. I could list a whole list of changes but I wil just say two words
Barack Obama
How many time has a black man been nominated, let alone elected President in the last 40 years?
(Yes, I do know more changes are needed, but I do think it is important to stop and remind ourselves how much things have change for the better.)
January 22, 2008 at 10:50 am
ari
How many time has a black man been nominated, let alone elected President in the last 40 years?
Hold your horses there, BEW. It may still be another forty years. That said, I think much has changed, as you note. But there’s still plenty of work to be done. And the sanitized Dr. King who lives in American imagination might obscure some of the challenges still arrayed before us.
January 22, 2008 at 12:07 pm
urbino
Great post, Ari.
I wonder, though, if our forgetfulness about the later career of Dr. King has more to do with the old saw about history being written by the victors, than with King’s radicalism.
Clearly, all of King’s career would be happily forgotten in large sections of the South, as it is a story of the [institutional white] South’s failure. That hasn’t been possible, however, because of cultural, media, and legal pressure from the rest of the country. However, there hasn’t been anyone positioned to pressure the rest of the country to remember the later King, who took his campaign into northern and western cities and was [violently] rebuffed.
So King’s campaign in the South, in which many people from the rest of the country participated, is remembered because it is a story of those people’s victory. King’s efforts in their own regions are forgotten, because it is a story of the victors’ failure.
January 22, 2008 at 2:10 pm
ari
Also: Levi, yes, I think that’s true. I hope the post doesn’t suggest that King had, in any way, abandoned non-violence by the end of his life. And B, thanks (blush).
Finally, Urbino, I think you’re right. But I also think the King story is broader than particular constituencies (or at least broader than narrow or even regional constituencies). I think the sanitized (does deracinated work here?) King narrative is a way of telling ourselves feel-good stories about the nation, a way of making the argument that thoseproblems have been solved, that we’ve moved beyond all that. So, yes, this is particularly true of the King we hear about in large parts of the North, Midwest, and the West, places where it’s convenient to cast racism as a Southern problem. But, as Levi intimates above, in the dominant King narrative, MLK died for all of our sins. So that we may live. And shop on his birthday.
That’s too strong (drama!), obviously, but I think you know what I’m driving at. Or at least I hope so.
January 22, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Ben Alpers
Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money, here’s a great old post by Rick Perlstein about conservatives and MLK, then and now.
Nice post, ari! Sorry for my absence for the last week or so (not that I have to answer to this…or any…blog). I’ve been kind of bogged down with work of various sorts.
January 22, 2008 at 2:24 pm
ari
Thanks for the link. We’re just glad to have back. (And the idea that you don’t have to answer for your absence is a bit selfish, no? We rely on you around here.)
January 22, 2008 at 3:43 pm
urbino
But, Levi intimates above, in the dominant narrative, King died for all of our sons.
Taking that to mean “sins,” I think I agree. It’s just that “we” truncate the story so that some of “us” can say “all our sins” but not really have to think about “our” sins; just those Others’.
“We” can be big about things that way.
January 22, 2008 at 4:01 pm
ari
I think I’ll fix the earlier comment, as I’d prefer not to drag my sons into this.
January 22, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Dale
Youngsters need to remember that there are still people alive today who were alive when Dr. King was alive. Amazing as it may seem, many of those people are not really that old, are not overcome by Alzheimer’s or dementia, are still in full possession of their faculties. Believe it or not, most of the people who are now involved in running the country were adults at the time of Dr. King’s death.
January 22, 2008 at 6:22 pm
ari
And your point? Sorry, I’m not being glib. I’d really like to hear more.
January 23, 2008 at 4:19 am
Matt W
not that I have to answer to this…or any…blog
But if you do, and if you’re interested in what I’m assuming is shooting a fish in a barrel, there’s a jagoff here going on about Schivelbusch and liberal fascism and demanding a smackdown from an actual expert.
Actually, it looks like you have to read Jonah Goldberg’s “book” to meet the jagoff’s stringent standards, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But I’m curious if you have some thoughts about Schivelbusch, who I just found out about. (I’m bugging you about this because of you this.)
January 23, 2008 at 11:45 am
political @ words’ end
[…] that I did not write about. But I’ve been thinking and reading, and learned a whole lot from Ari Kelman’s post on The Edge of the American West about Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday was celebrated […]
January 23, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Lorelei
I was linked here by a friend of mine, and I’m glad of it. This was a lovely post, and very interesting and informative.
I have one singular nitpick – as a long-time resident of Arizona, I would like to point out that Arizona did NOT vote to have the MLK holiday because of the 1993 Super Bowl, which was actually held in Pasadena, California instead. In fact, the measure was defeated (by 1%) in 1991 because Arizona voters were pissed off that the Super Bowl Committee was trying to strongarm them into something that they were already planning to do. There were TWO measures on the ballot to create an MLK holiday in 1991, and both failed because voters in Arizona aren’t interested in being bullied. The measure passed resoundingly, the next year, with 61% of the vote (and we had two versions to vote on again, which doubtlessly split the vote some) once “outsiders” shut up and left us alone.
January 23, 2008 at 3:16 pm
ari
Lorelei: Thanks so much for your comment, which suggests to me that the collective memory of the adoption of the King holiday is as muddled as the memory of the man himself. That said, everything I found when putting together the post talked about the NFL, which was the story that I remembered (see above about muddled memories), or a related tourist boycott pushing Arizonans to embrace (or tolerate, in some cases) MLK Day. Still, I’m not trying to bully someone from Arizona — we know where that leads — so much as suggesting that half an hour of research on the internet well might have failed me. The story is likely more complicated than my post suggested. History is like that.
January 23, 2008 at 4:18 pm
urbino
once “outsiders” shut up and left us alone.
Was that irony intentional?
January 24, 2008 at 11:15 am
rebecca
I just wanted to comment, rather belatedly, that Cornell West made reference to the Santa-Clausification of MLK, which I think is the perfect way to describe the sanitization of the man in public schools and in the national media. Plus, it’s just cool to say: Santa-Clausification.
January 26, 2008 at 8:59 pm
andrew
When I was a kid, I remember watching Cal play a bowl game in Arizona for which they wore patches that said “MLK” on their uniforms to show their support for making his birthday a holiday.
Also Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote a book on the Depression? That’s quite a switch from cultural histories of railroads and lighting and mourning (I’ve read the railroad book).
I really should try to keep up with this blog on a daily basis.
February 10, 2008 at 8:43 am
JBall
OK guys, post season is over, it’s time to remember your wife or girlfriend. Maybe you better make up for ignoring her for most of January. How about a Valentines gift from 1-800-Flowers.com (http://www.1800flowers.com)
April 4, 2008 at 10:43 am
“Do they know about Martin Luther King?” « The Edge of the American West
[…] On this day in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. As Ari did an outstanding piece on King’s legacy back in January, we thought we’d focus on a different, but related, event that same […]
April 4, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Shame on you Matthew Yglesias.* « The Edge of the American West
[…] to shape our behavior in the present. It matters, then, that the MLK of American memory is, as I’ve suggested before, too simple and too safe. It matters that this deracinated MLK is a byproduct of corporate […]
December 7, 2008 at 1:48 am
cicekci
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January 15, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Remebering Martin Luther King (again). « The Edge of the American West
[…] 15, 2009 in memory, tdih | by ari [Author’s note: I hope you’ll forgive me for recycling a post from last year Martin Luther King, Jr., had he not been gunned down on April 4, 1968, would have been 80 years old […]