Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 96th birthday was on January 15, and the national holiday in his honor will be on Monday, January 20. In a recent editorial in The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize winning author and King biographer Jonathan Eig noted that the federal holiday will be celebrated for the 39th time this year, the same number of years that Dr. King lived. He also pointed out the danger of using the holiday to repeat the same Dr. King quotes in ways that distort his message and mission, especially the quote from his “I Have a Dream” speech in which he called the nation to judge people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This has been misused for decades to claim that the goal of his mission was a “color blind society” in which race no longer mattered.
Yet the truth is that Dr. King consistently called out both individual and systemic racism while advocating for policies that promoted racial and economic justice. In his editorial, Jonathan Eig also points out that Dr. King’s persistent criticism of ongoing racism in our nation made him unpopular with the vast majority of white Americans up to the time of his assassination in April 1968:
In 1966, even after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, a Gallup survey showed that 63 percent of Americans viewed him negatively. Just prior to his assassination, 3 out of every 4 White Americans disapproved of him. After the assassination, a shocking 31 percent of Americans, according to one survey, believed that King “brought it on himself.”
The best way to honor Dr. King is to learn the truth and tell the truth about his life and ministry. Instead of domesticating and mythologizing him to make a “hero” who can be misused to support any cause or ideology, we need to take his words in the context of the deep pain and struggles that characterized his life, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ongoing journey toward racial justice today. In his final book written the year before his death, Dr. King wrote the following prophetic words warning against the misuse of our national history in a misguided attempt to appear “great”:
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness – Justice. (from Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?)
The video posted below provides a good summary of Dr. King’s mission in a way that does not overlook the resistance, struggles, and opposition that he faced throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Honoring Dr. King by knowing and telling the truth also empowers us to face the struggles that inevitably come with confronting systemic racism and advocating for change in our time.