MLK’s Unfinished Revolution
This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, remember that Dr. King was a revolutionary, not a mere reformer. We could all stand to listen to his wisdom.
An Atlanta sanitation worker kneels at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave on April 4th, 1970. Dr. King was assassinated while supporting a Black sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis two years before. Via the AFSCME Archive.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Today, millions of people will express their great admiration for an activist who had a singular dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Politicians will cite him as the man who ended segregation and, by extension, racism in the United States. Some will desecrate his corpse to operate him like a puppet for their political beliefs, turning America’s greatest Black civil rights leader into a warrior against modern-day movements for Black civil rights. None of those portrayals are accurate.
Dr. King was a revolutionary, a visionary who believed in enacting sweeping changes to the political, social, and economic landscape of the United States. Yet his radicalism has been neutered into mere reformism. Dr. King was the peace-at-all-costs, smooth-talking moderate who fought with his words, “one of the good ones,” so to speak. That’s what American conservatives, and indeed many liberals, would have you believe—shame on the Malcolm Xs and the Black Panthers, the Stokely Carmichaels and Black Powers of the world, for refusing to do things “the right way.” But Dr. King would have been outraged by this characterization and by his adoption by conservatives and even liberals as a political symbol. Here’s why.
Let’s start with Dr. King’s nonviolence, arguably the best-known part of his activism. Inspired by the nonviolence of Gandhi’s satyagraha and Henry David Thoreau, King directly applied the philosophy of nonviolence to his early activism, responding to violence, even against his life, with compassion. King’s steadfast disavowal of violence has made him a darling for the modern right, which has invoked his legacy to rail against the wave of supposedly violent Black Lives Matter protests—better yet, ‘riots’—that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Besides the fact that 93% of BLM protests in the summer of 2020 were nonviolent, it is simply factually incorrect to appropriate Dr. King’s nonviolence this way. In response to a wave of race riots in 1967, dubbed the ‘long, hot summer,’ Dr. King sympathized with Black protesters, blaming a combination of white racism, police brutality, the Vietnam War, urban poverty, and continued discrimination on the riots. At a speech at Stanford University the following year, Dr. King famously declared, “a riot is the language of the unheard”—not apologia for the riots, but a compassionate reframing of the riots as a natural consequence of systemic racism.
Incidentally, this was the same conclusion that the United States government reached in 1968 with the Kerner Commission, a task force created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the root causes of race riots in the long, hot summer; the almost entirely-white commission found that ongoing institutional racism and discrimination were to blame for this social upheaval, a finding famously summed up in the introduction of their report:
“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal... Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.”
Released just a month before Dr. King’s assassination, the Kerner Commission’s findings came as a shock to many white Americans—after all, the Johnson administration had just passed three major civil rights laws that ended de jure segregation, protected Black voting rights, and promoted fair access to housing, hadn’t it? The notion that America was continuing a backslide into racial inequality was controversial to those who believed legal equality automatically meant social equality. It is still controversial among those on the right, who believe the same thing today. But Dr. King rejected this attitude, admitting in 1967 that his “dream” of racial equality fatefully uttered in 1963 had often “turned into a nightmare.” Indeed, Dr. King shifted his focus from segregation to combating the overarching systems of American capitalism, imperialism, and racism. He was no longer merely resisting Woolworth’s lunch counters or “Colored” water fountains, but he was now fighting poverty, showing solidarity with striking sanitation workers in Memphis on the eve of his assassination and demanding an end to poverty via massive wealth redistribution. He was fighting capitalism, calling for democratic socialism in America. He was fighting militarism, fatefully lambasting the American war in Vietnam in a move that would alienate President Johnson and any support he had once had in white America. He was, well and truly, a radical—and hopefully, it’s clear that I’m not using that word as a pejorative.
But the radical revolutionary Martin Luther King Jr. has been whitewashed, so to speak. He is no longer remembered as a socialist who demanded an end to poverty via massive wealth redistribution. He is no longer remembered as an opponent of imperialism. He is no longer remembered as the Black activist who fought for reparations. His grave had been dug up before the corpse even turned cold. The status quo has weaponized him. Liberals praise his activism until it grows hostile to capital and the American empire. Fascists boast that they are the inheritors of his rich legacy, all while erasing his existence from our schools.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day which reveals to us Americans, more than all other days in the year, the gross hypocrisy of our government and nation. Dr. King’s message of love and tolerance was accepted by Americans, we are told. Yet 75% of Americans disapproved of him in 1968, and that very year, he was assassinated by a fellow American citizen. Dr. King helped the American government win support for transformative civil rights legislation, yet he was surveilled and harassed by his government to the point where the FBI once tried to blackmail him into committing suicide. Dr. King’s legacy was memorialized by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 through the establishment of a federal holiday, yet Reagan himself implied that Dr. King may have been a secret Communist, opposed civil rights legislation, openly called for “states’ rights” while campaigning in Mississippi in 1980, supported apartheid South Africa, called Black neighborhoods “jungles,” and referred to United Nations delegates from African countries as “monkeys.” Dr. King was the punching bag for the bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy of the United States from Montgomery to Memphis. Yet he is commemorated as one of its greatest heroes.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it is a day of tragedy. Today, we must mourn America’s greatest civil rights leader and the foulest deed that struck him down. We must mourn the perversion of his legacy and his incomplete dream, for his dream that America would be America to him never came to pass. We mourn because of decades of a racist war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex; because of centuries of poverty from the plantation to the ghetto, and disenfranchisement at the ballot box that our elected officials actively promote.
But today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it is a day of celebration. Celebrate, yes! celebrate the greatest civil rights leader America has ever known. Celebrate his life and his legacy, and his dream for a new America, an America free of police brutality, discrimination, and economic inequality. Celebrate, not because America never was America to Dr. King, but because America will be for us.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Excerpted from “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes