King’s ransom

Though Martin Luther King Jr. entered our mythology with his “I Have A Dream” speech during the March on Washington, few remember that his greatest feats were organizing and activism, not oratory. Today, King’s legacy is torn at by political tribes as everyone attempts to appropriate him into their fold. Yet, his wide-reaching and radical message contained little accepted by the ruling class today: disobedience, anti-militarism, brotherhood and radical equality. \nWould the crowd holding up King as a hero be supporting him if he were around today? Each of the Republican candidates for president mentioned King in passing before getting to more important things, like bashing Washington. President Bush, who spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day praising the courageous man, has also essentially said that dissent is dangerous and threatens to undermine our “war on terror.” The elites who are lauding King have a vision of him as a quiet citizen who lived an obedient life, not as a rabble-rouser who questioned the authority of the powers-that-be.\nConsider this myth of compliance in the context of King’s statement from his 1967 speech at Riverside Church, “Beyond Vietnam.” He states, ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal.’ That time has come for us in Vietnam.” At a time when public opinion still supported the war, such a statement was made in the face of a hostile public. As a result, the insults hurled at him for such a speech were horrific. The venerable magazine Life called his speech “ demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”\nSuch language from Americans during the run-up to war is still considered equally appalling today. One need look only at the fate of anti-war protestors, regarded by the mainstream press as rabble-rousers and dirty hippies, to see that the spirit of King is alive, as is the spirit of his most virulent detractors.\nHow sad it is, then, that King has been canonized into the pantheon of the establishment, and his dream something that most people believe has been totally realized. What we must appreciate is that King’s dream of a fundamentally equal society was not something to be achieved and forgotten, but rather something to be carried out each day. \nThe moral charge with which King acted demanded urgency in the present moment. When we see an absolute wrong, prudence and deference should take a backseat to the action we wish to take. What we hear from our King-praising politicians is to wait; wait for help after Hurricane Katrina; wait for the surge to “work” in Iraq; wait for the promise of King’s radical equality to happen. What does King say? \n“For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every African-American with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”\nKing’s urgency has been lost in the rush to shove him into sainthood. We have remembered King as a dreamer when we should remember him as a doer.