Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was anything but a passive dreamer.
Anyone who believes this narrative about King needs to revisit history.
Passive dreamers aren’t murdered. Activists are. On April 4, 1968, one bullet entered King’s face — his right jaw to be exact. That bullet traveled throughhis neck, severed his spine and stopped in his shoulder blade, killing him.
“He had a dream,” Indiana University history professor Alex Lichtenstein said. “It’s just that I think we as a society, whites in particular, have sanitized that dream into a dream that we’re all comfortable with. His dream was far more challenging and radical than that.”
While he used nonviolent resistance as his weapon of choice, King was a fighter. He fought for civil rights, human rights, and economic and social justice.
“He used nonviolence to expose the hypocrisy,” said Jakobi Williams, an associate professor of history at Indiana University. “In doing so, you get sympathy. People forget this is the Cold War at this particular time, and America is presenting itself as the beacon of freedom and equality for all. He used nonviolence to advertise this contradiction throughout all of the world.”
More than a dream
Those who often invoke King’s “I Have a Dream” speech recall his hope for a colorblind society where people are “not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” However, those same people conveniently forget “I Have a Dream” was but one speech — and there was much more in that speech. King called out America for not living up to its promise of freedom and justice for all. King spoke to the “urgency of now,” calling out white liberals — and Blacks — who believed that progress will happen one day, little by little; just be patient.
In King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” given exactly one year before his assassination, he called the U.S. government to task as a “purveyor of violence,” much to the chagrin of his supporters and President Lyndon B. Johnson, considered an ally of the civil rights movement.
“Johnson and the rest of the Democratic establishment said, ‘What are you doing?’” Lichtenstein said. “Even people in the civil rights establishment said, “What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I have to speak out on this.’”
On August 31, 1967, King delivered the speech “The Three Evils of Society,” naming racism, excessive materialism and militarism as the “plaque of Western civilization.” At his death, he was in Memphis to advocate for Black sanitation workers. It’s not lost on those who study history and King that his death happened at a time when he broadened his focus to economic injustice with the Poor People’s Campaign.
“He’s advocating for equitable distribution of wealth,” Williams said. “Those who make more money pay more taxes. Those who make less money pay less taxes. King might still be alive if he wasn’t an anti-capitalist.”
King, the intellectual
Another often overlooked fact is King was only 39 years old at his death. He accomplished a lot in very little time. He was just 25 years old when he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Church. King came from a middle class family, and though people today eschew intellectuals as being out-of-touch elitists, King was highly educated, said Terri Jett, associate professor of political science at Butler University.
“He was a brilliant young man,” Jett said. “He skipped two grades in high school. He was 15 years old when he started college. We position the intellectual as someone who’s not connected to the community. We think of them in the ivory tower, of their head in books. He was studying ethics, and he had a degree in sociology. He knew how to understand statistics.”
King, the radical
King was nothing short of a revolutionary.
A radical.
“Over the years we’ve sort of slapped this term radical on groups that we see as being negative when it comes to change,” said Stephanie Mahin, a professor of communications at University of Indianapolis. “So to use the word ‘radical’ in the same sentence as it relates to Dr. King messes with our minds … it sort of distorts the more palatable narrative and framing that’s been placed around him.”
Again, Martin Luther King Jr. was a radical.
“When we talk about radical Dr. King, really what we’re talking about is the revolutionary,” Mahin added. “We’re talking about the progressive, and we’re talking about the reformist.”
Contact Editor Oseye Boyd at 317-762-7850. Follow her on Twitter @oseye_boyd.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. telephones aides during a stopover on the afternoon of August 14, 1965 in Miami, Fla. (AP Photo/Jim Bourdier)
