Once criticized, King’s views on reform now whitewashed

As President Bush solemnly commemorated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by placing… As President Bush solemnly commemorated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by placing a wreath at his Atlanta gravesite four days before his holiday, I could not help but feel relieved that irony was indeed still alive and kicking.

Whether he knew it or not, our fair President was honoring a man whose ideology was so contrary to his own that their value systems got more beef with each other than KRS-One and Nelly.

The reason why Bush may not be aware of what his gesture implied is because King’s legacy has been selectively filtered to the extent that he is an acceptable figure for those from nearly all parts of the political spectrum. After all, by contemporary standards King’s struggle for racial harmony, desegregation and voting rights for blacks sounds anything but radical.

But to characterize King’s legacy by those issues alone — as has become normal practice in U.S. media outlets and history curricula — is to ignore the evolution of thought that would transform the perception of King from a moderate, Nobel Prize-winning, acceptable alternative to Malcolm X’s militancy to, as The Washington Post stated in the late ’60s, a man who “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, [and] his people.”

The cause of this catastrophic change in King’s acceptability to the power structure lies in the fact that he moved beyond race to the ultimate taboo in American political discourse: social class.

Having succeeded with the passage of civil rights legislation, King next focused on structural issues of poverty and the underlying motives of U.S. foreign policy, as exemplified in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam.”

King passionately denounced the U.S. government — at the time involved in a terrorist action in Vietnam in which it and its South Vietnamese client state were responsible for several million deaths and a level of suffering unfathomable outside of a Ja Rule concert — calling that government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

A 2003 poll of citizens in a religiously and ethnically diverse group of 11 developed and developing countries, in fact, found the United States to be a greater threat to world peace than Syria and “Axis of Evil” members Iran and North Korea.

The United States, King continued, was fighting “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” Furthermore, he raised concerns about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

Sounds like the Good Doctor might have had a thing or two to say about the war in Iraq and the neo-liberal model of economics that dominates the White House’s policy towards underdeveloped nations.

King also started work on the Poor People’s Campaign. He gathered a coalition of Americans of all races to pressure the U.S. government to adopt a bill of rights for the poor. Reader’s Digest, making its class commitments explicit at the time, made apocalyptic warnings of an “insurrection.”

For King’s horrid crime of daring to point out basic truths about the existence of class-based problems in U.S. society and a militaristic foreign policy, he became the object of immense criticism in the late ’60s by the media and government. Time Magazine inveighed against his “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The FBI called him the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country,” illustrating the government’s equation of an “effective” black leader with a “dangerous” one.

Returning to the contemporary, the problem is not that Bush or other reactionary political figures commemorate King’s birthday; cynical ploys to win votes are nothing new. The deeper issue is that such an important figure can find the culmination of a life of social activism lost forever down the memory hole, with the media now preferring to completely ignore and whitewash some of his most significant contributions.

For more analogies about how KRS-One and Nelly relate to current American political realities, e-mail Kevin at kbf1@pitt.edu.