Martin Luther King Jr. Was a Radical, Not a Saint

[Demo_Chris]

35. King has been polished, primed, and covered with three coats of high gloss white paint

So much so that many on the right believe he would be a Republican today. The entirety of his struggle has been largely reduced to a soundbite or two, a couple phrases that can fit onto a calling card:

"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

And...

"Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals."

The first is used today to justify anything you like. 'I don't hate you because you're black,' racists say, 'I hate you because you act like a n******r!' They love to trot that phrase out to justify ending affirmative action and social programs under the excuse that any legal recognition of race or sex is wrong and a violation of that magical dream. In this interpretation King is like Jesus, offering dime-store priced forgiveness of sins and a simplistic moral code that allows for virtually any interpretation you like. So long as a white man doesn't judge and hate based exclusively upon physical appearance he's good to go. If, say, a black man is polite, if he smiles and dances, if he talks like proper white folks talk, and dresses like proper white folks dress, if he understands his place and doesn't get uppity, if he says yes sir and no sir and keeps a proper distance from white women, why hating him just because he is black is just wrong.

These days even the racists accept that Jim Crow laws and segregation are probably wrong. They surrendered that battle long ago. Instead they say that government should stay out of it. And if that means that a business owner refuses to hire minorities or allow them into his store, that's between that business owner and Jesus. It's freedom, and the free market will take care of it eventually.

The second point about King (or Ghandi) that people are quick to bring out is his belief in non-violence. Left out, either through convenience or ignorance, is that these calls for non-violence took place in an environment in which the threat of violence from militants was real. Further, non-violence is the ONLY effective tool for winning the hearts and minds of the people, and this was what King was trying to win.

King's struggle was to win the white majority over to his side, to convince them that black people were just like them, only currently oppressed, and please stop doing that. That's a battle that you cannot win with a gun. Just the opposite. But it was undoubtedly useful that other people with guns were waiting in the wings in case the nice approach failed to work. And it worked -- though it could easily be argued that people like Bill Cosby, Hattie McDaniel, Paul Robeson, Nichelle Nichols, Sherman Hemsley, Jesse Jackson, Eddie Murphy, and Michael Jackson did as much to win people's hearts. King stood on a mountaintop and preached, Bill Cosby was invited into their living rooms to talk to their kids.

Violence and non-violence are both tactics. When you are outnumbered and want peace on acceptable terms, non-violence is always the way to go. King recognized this reality. In his day, and for his struggle, non-violence was the only tactic that could work. Some have taken this to mean that non-violence is the proper tactic for every struggle, but this is of course absurd.