For Black History Month, Remember the True MLK

As we find ourselves in the midst of Black History Month -- a brief respite from the much whiter version of history we learn and celebrate the rest of the year -- and having recently commemorated another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, perhaps it would do us well to reflect on the vision of this man, whom so many claim as their hero, but whose message so few seem truly to understand.

This year, as with the previous ten, I once again had the pleasure of addressing a number of audiences during January MLK-related events on campuses and in communities across the country. Much of my presentation was the same as always, focused on reminding the audience of the substantial unfinished business in the ongoing fight against racism. But there was also at least one significant difference. This year, the U.S. is at war, having been engaged in bombing one of the poorest nations on Earth since October.

Given Dr. King's commitment to non-violence, even in the face of attack by others, I felt obliged to mention the likely opposition to said bombing that would have been part of King's current message were he still alive. King, after all, understood terrorism and faced it down regularly. Yet he did so without resort to arms, knowing that rarely if ever has true peace, security or justice been won at gunpoint.

Those who would claim that fanatical racists were (or are) any less dangerous than Osama bin Laden and his minions, never fished black bodies out of rivers in Mississippi, nor picked up the pieces of bombed out churches. They have forgotten the swollen face of Emmett Till, the bullet-ridden car of Viola Liuzzo, or what Billie Holiday called the "strange fruit" found hanging from tree limbs, surrounded by conscience-numbed whites, admiring their craft the way others might gaze upon paintings in the Louvre.

The fact that Dr. King in his last years had come to the painful recognition that his own government "was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" was worth mentioning, or so I thought.

Needless to say, many in my audiences felt otherwise. Although virtually all the persons of color responded to such remarks with agreement, for most whites, the mention of Dr. King's anti-militarism and condemnations of his own nation's actions abroad was more than they could handle. Many were angry, and some wrote letters in protest to those who had brought in a speaker like me to say such scandalous things.

They wanted the safe Dr. King. The pleasant Dr. King. The Dr. King who they seem to think would pat them on the head for breaking bread at a banquet dinner with black people. The Dr. King who they seem to think sought nothing more than a good, spirited chorus of Kumbaya, or perhaps a burger at the Woolworth's counter. In short, they wanted the Dr. King spoken of by their President, a man who had been too busy drinking with his Deke buddies at Yale to have personally lent his voice to the fight against racism, but who thinks nothing of invoking the good Doctor's name now.

That particular Dr. King -- the one with whom the nation's frat-boy in chief is more comfortable -- is one who, to listen to the President's speech about him, might as well have died in 1963. For Bush mentioned not one word of King's activities, nor quoted him at all from any speech or writing in the last five years of his life -- and with good reason. For it was during those years that King raised serious questions about the moral propriety of capitalism, and insisted, "any nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

For much of white America, accepting Dr. King and celebrating him is something they seek to do on their own terms, not his. They accept part of the man, and part of his message, but not all of it. They certainly don't wish to acknowledge King's decided lack of support for nationalistic patriotism the likes of which we have seen since September 11. To wit, his claim in December of 1967 that "our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation. This means we must develop a world perspective."