The Hypocritical Praise for Dr. King: Remembering the Reality

I just read a column on an otherwise right wing editorial page, full of piety for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While my prediction on the first MLK holiday hasn't to my knowledge yet come true---that soon, like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, King's likeness would be animated to cheerfully shill for used cars and (as I so intemperately suggested to an audience rather south of the Mason-Dixon Line) perhaps even for MLK Day White Sales. However, his memory is being demeaned in other ways, mostly by this false piety.

People who are the ideological descendants of those who opposed MLK's every move and even vilified him now find him a remote enough figure to pretend to revere him, or at least the few soundbites anybody knows. Though the wisdom of those words has become clearer through the years, their radical nature at the time is conveniently forgotten.

In the early 60s, King was criticized for insisting on moving the cause of African-Americans too fast. In the mid and late 60s, he was criticized by some younger activists for moving too slow.He was a prominent moving target of racism for his public life. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered him a dangerous subversive, especially when he called upon America to live up to its own Constitution. King was followed, bugged and wiretapped, in the interests of national security.

When he began by trying to integrate in the deep South, he was called dangerous. When he moved his efforts to the North, he offended some of his former supporters as well as making his Democratic party allies nervous. When he came out strongly against the Vietnam War, some supporters within the Civil Rights movement derided him for straying from the path, while right wingers accused him of being a traitor. When he moved from attempts to strike down bad local laws and get just federal laws passed to addressing economic injustice, he was once again called a Communist.

In short, if he were alive today, his past actions strongly suggest he would be an activist against the war in Iraq. He would be railing against the rapidly increasing economic inequality, and against the fat cats who buy congressional votes for a relative pittance, and write laws for their benefit that mean to other Americans, including future generations.

He would note as he did in the 60s that the burdens of war are borne overwhelmingly by those low on the economic scale, both Americans and the victims of war in Iraqnam.And he would probably be bugged, wiretapped and followed by the FBI, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. His 21st century March on Washington would not include an invitation to the White House, as his 1963 march did, by a President who would be assassinated in a matter of months.

Those of us who revere Dr. King do so for a variety of reasons. But it seems clear to me that certain people now praising him revere him chiefly for the fact that he isn't here dogging them, and telling the truth about how they are destroying the promise of this country, the Constitution and the American Dream.