Will The Real Martin Luther King Please Stand Up?

Martin Luther King is perhaps the most willfully misunderstood man in our history (One of many; Americans don't seem to want to understand their leaders). All people have a tendency to ignore those aspects of a person's life that they are discomforted by, to obscure all traces of contradiction or challenges to their own preferred and preconceived narrative.

And what is America's preferred narrative of Martin Luther King? It can be summed up in 4 words: I Have A Dream. That was, indeed, a great speech. But it is nowhere near an accurate portrayal of all that the man stood for, especially if one looks at the last year of his life.

In 1963, King was not a radical, and he was most certainly not a revolutionary, even though millions of cretinous and frothy bigots surely would dispute that fact. Rather, King was at this stage simply a reformer. And this difference is not only semantic.

A reformer accepts the basic foundations and tenets of the system in question. If one listens to what King was saying during this period, it was simply this: America is a great country with a great form of government full of great people who simply need to be challenged to live out the greatness inherent in our souls, as articulated in those twin pillars of greatness, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Proposing that a government enforce its own laws is not a radical proposal. And that's all King was saying during this period. In fact, he often pointed out that Civil Rights Acts would be entirely unnecessary if the laws already on the book were simply enforced and if people walked through life as if they actually believed in the words of the Declaration and Constitution.

In fact, King was so conciliatory toward the "system" or the "establishment", that he submitted his I Have A Dream speech to the government for possible censorship and revision before he even delivered it. That the Kennedy brothers saw no need for revision is evidence enough that King was no radical, no revolutionary.

And when, today, Americans are asked what King's message was, more than 95%, from President Obama on down, will directly or indirectly give the exact same answer: "I Have A Dream".

And again, not to detract from this speech, and it was a great speech, but dreaming that white and black folks will be allowed to have a hamburger next to each other in public is not all that audacious a dream, is it? There was nothing radical or revolutionary about it, except among openly avowed white supremacists of the type who see no difference between treating a black man as a human being and begging him to rape your daughter.

But what King should remembered for, he is not. What he should be remembered for is largely forgotten, because it challenges the dominant narrative: that all King ever wanted was for black and white kids to be in the same algebra class, and that some deranged loner bigot killed him for it.

Well, if one examines the language from King's last year, one will see swiftly, surely, and shockingly that, by 1967, King was no reformer. And he seemed to have simply skipped over the radical phase. In the pantheon of the three "R's", he was now, without a doubt, a revolutionary.

No longer was his bedrock the assumption of American goodness, greatness, and fairness. No longer was he simply seeking admission to the freest, greatest society in the world. Now, he talked of total overhaul. Now, he questioned the very moral and political and economic foundations of our entire culture. Now, he wanted more than a hamburger.

Why this shift? Well the shorthand answer to that question is the same as it is for so many seemingly unrelated questions about the course of this nation over the last 50 years: Vietnam. It was Vietnam that felled the scales from King's eyes, that obliterated the traditional quarantine between foreign policy and civil rights, and that led to a scathing critique not of some logistical question about the Cold War, but to the very soul of us.

"A time comes", he began, "when silence is betrayal." When one reads this speech, one is enlivened and awed by the intellectual and rhetorical freedom of a man who has no intention of ever running for president. The apolitical King made American politicians seem even more venal than they already did, with talks of "credibility" and "peace with honor".

"A time comes when silence is betrayal...I watched the War on Poverty broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war...we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools".

"So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the fact of such cruel manipulation of the poor".

"I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without haveing first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government".

"Perhaps only my sense of humor and irony can save me when I hear the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of tons of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8,000 miles away from its shores".

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death"

Those are a few samples of King's rhetoric in his last year. First he had a dream, but 4 years later he perceived the onset of spiritual death.

Why does this matter? It matters because King must not be allowed to be confined, cribbed, castrated, really, into a paradoxical sliver of what and who he actually was: the moral and intellectual conscience of a nation.

To confine King to "I Have A Dream" is to take the view that the only thing really wrong with America 50 years ago was that blacks couldn't go to the movies with white people. That is cartoonish and dangerous.

It is quite easily work to apprehend why so many people, and especially politicians, have zero interest in remembering what King was saying as he matured. On the one hand, he's held by the establishment (only after his death, of course) as an angel, a peacemaker, a true American. But then there's the problem of the quotes above.

And therein lies the contradiction. Since President Obama has (rightly) said that his life is the fulfillment of King's (early) dream, let's do a little hypothetical. What if, next Martin Luther King day, President Obama was asked whether he agreed with quotes like those above.

We know what would happen. President Obama, casually cast as cherry on top of King's sundae, would have to publicly and explicitly say "I do not agree". We all know he would HAVE to reject such treasonous and slanderous statements, since no president has or will ever acknowledge that America has sinned.

Personally, I do not cherish the thought of Obama being so confronted, but it would be a "teachable moment", as the president says , to watch Obama have to condemn Martin Luther King's true thoughts.

The whole truth about Martin Luther King is that he started out as a reformer and ended up as a revolutionary. In the officially-sanctioned memory of the man, however, his radical and revolutionary words and actions are excised from the record, leaving us with an inaccurate and unchallenging Hallmark card of a memory, and relegates a great man's greatest words to the proverbial dustbin.