MLK should be remembered as more than a civil rights leader

This year Americans from all walks of life will join the international community Monday to honor the life and legacy of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. under the thematic banner “Living King’s Legacy: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century.”

King’s holiday has a history of its own. In January 1979, then-Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, speaking at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church on King’s 50th birthday, made the initial public call for a national holiday to honor King’s birthday.

Then, in November 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a legislative bill to make King’s birthday America’s 11th national holiday.

Reagan said at the historic signing event, “Traces of bigotry still mar America. So, each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King but re-dedicate ourselves to the commandments he believed in and sought to live every day: ‘Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

In the context of King’s beloved community, he is often appropriately remembered for his leadership role in the American civil rights movement and, indeed, as a drum major for peace in a world that is often embroiled in wars, violence and unfortunate racial hatred.

What is often forgotten about King, however, is that while his civil rights efforts initially focused on issues of racial justice, they eventually shifted — by 1967 — toward the fight for economic justice.

In early 1968, King realized that while the civil rights movement had provided his fellow blacks with an opportunity to move toward the proverbial mountaintop.

With desegregated lunch counters, they still lacked the resources to buy food at these lunch counters.

King argued that while things were improving for America’s downtrodden, blacks still lived “in the basement of the Great Society” that President Lyndon B. Johnson was trying to build.

The statistics for black versus white unemployment, as well as payrolls for the same group, showed unlimited disparity.

All of the foregoing circumstances caused King to realize there was still much work to be done to knock down the walls of racial segregation and bigotry that Reagan mentioned when he signed the King holiday law.

King and other meaningful Americans — blacks and whites — did their best between 1967 and 1968 to ensure progress for America’s minority population.

Yet he was so bewildered that, in a April 16, 1967, speech to his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King posed the question of where America would go from the existing circumstances.

He made clear that his movement would henceforth focus on economic inequality by using tactics of civil disobedience.

Sadly, he did not live to see that dream realized, as he was assassinated April 4, 1968.

Today, almost 44 years later, America is experiencing vibrations from a new movement called Occupy Wall Street, which has staged nonviolent protests in several U.S. cities.

This nascent movement is similar, in a variety of ways, to King’s own movement. Seen as multiracial and diverse, the Occupy movement has been woven together by a serious discontent with economic exploitation and inequality.

It is also similar to King’s Chicago-based Poor People’s Campaign, which prompted Americans to reflect, once again, on the underlying principles that we as a country hold dear.

In singing “E pluribus unum” (or “Unity in diversity”), it is important to return to basics during the 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

In doing this, we remember Reagan’s words, which exhort all of us to eschew bigotry and to love our neighbors as ourselves, in keeping with King’s beloved notion of community.

Also, let’s remember that the holiday should be “a day on, not a day off.”

­— Yvette Marie Alex-Assensoh, political science professor and dean of IU Office for Women’s Affairs and A.B. Assensoh, professor emeritus of IU African American and African Diaspora Studies Department