Blog | Martin Luther King: “You deplore the demonstrations” but lack concern for the conditions that brought them about
Martin Luther King Jr. is being honored today throughout the U.S., including in Myrtle Beach, where I attended the 9th Annual King Day Breakfast this morning.
That’s good in one respect, because he is the personification of a movement in the 1950s and ‘60s that forced the country to live up to more of its stated ideals.
In another, though, it is disheartening because too many of us have distilled him down into almost nothingness, a figment of who he really was and what he stood for.
He wasn’t the meek, non-confrontational man many make him out to be today.
He did see race.
He did challenge and purposefully break laws.
He deliberately led people into dangerous situations for the greater good.
His non-violent stance only worked because of the violence thrown back at peaceful protests - something King was clear about.
And he confronted and shamed any and everyone who decided to stand in the way of the movement, or didn’t do enough to push for equality.
His was not a meek life talking about a dream.
And for that, when he was alive, he was often hated and despised, not just by avowed racists, but by people who were uncomfortable with that “rabble rouser” who wouldn’t just let the peace be.
In a very real sense, he preferred - and demanded - an uneasy equality instead of the comfortable inequality many pushed him to accept. The longer he lived, the harder he pushed, the more relentless he became in addressing all sorts of injustices, the more people came to disapprove of his actions.
Today too many people want peace even if there is no justice, comfort, no matter how many remain in pain, and they’ve claimed that’s what King wanted to excuse their own passivity.
It’s good that we remember King and that extremely important period of American history, but let’s examine the man - not the myth - especially given the tendency of so many people to be more taken aback by people protesting or rallying or complaining about an injustice than they are by the injustice itself.
We are still grappling with these issues today, even if things are better (they are), even if they show themselves in different ways. Having a more honest assessment of what King and the Civil Rights Movement did and stood for will make it easier for us to determine what we are getting right, and wrong, now.
Remember the trouble a sermon by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright caused then-Sen. Barack Obama because in it Wright screamed “God damn America” for a host of injustices? The title of the Sunday sermon King was preparing when he was killed on April 4, 1968: “Why America May Go to Hell.”
In 1966, King had an approval rating of 32 percent - and was disapproved by 63 percent of the public.
From “April, 4, 1968: Martin Luther King’s Death and How it Changed America”:
“King increasingly butted heads with the soft, safe image manufactured for him. The more he protested poverty, denounced the Vietnam War, and lamented the unconscious racism of most whites, the more he lost favor and footing in white America. For the first time in a decade, King’s name was left off the January 1967 Gallup poll list of the ten most admired Americans. Financial support for his organization dried up. Mainstream newsmagazines turned on him for diving into foreign policy matters supposedly far beyond his death. Universities withdrew lecture invitations. And no American publisher was eager to publish a book by the leader. King was at his nadir in white America. In truth, in many ways, King was socially and politically dead before he was killed.”
From King’s Letter from a Birmingham jail:
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
And this:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.
This story was originally published January 19, 2015 at 12:53 PM with the headline "Blog | Martin Luther King: “You deplore the demonstrations” but lack concern for the conditions that brought them about."