In The War For Martin Luther King, The Wrong Side Is Winning

I’m starting to realize that achieving a national holiday for Martin Luther King, much like electing the first Black president, may have turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for Black folk

President Ronald Reagan signs the bill commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday as a national holiday on Nov. 2, 1983 in the White House rose garden. | Caption and photo by Wikimedia Commons 

On the day he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr.’s approval rating among Americans stood at just 25%. Whites (and more than a few Blacks) from across the political spectrum despised him — from the liberal northern princess Jackie Kennedy to the arch-conservative and southern white supremacist Strom Thurmond

And yet, every Jan. 15, the nation commemorates Martin Luther King Day and the man who was once disdained as a Communist-sympathizing rabble rouser by a majority of the country is unanimously celebrated as a secular saint, a modern founding father.

By 2010, King’s national legacy had been so thoroughly warped and sanitized that Fox News talking head and Tea Party activist Glenn Beck had the audacity to claim that King’s vision had been “perverted” by social justice activists and that the Tea Party movement, famous for contesting the citizenship of the first Black president, were the real inheritors of the civil rights movement. Beck even said that he would “pick up Martin Luther King’s dream.”

Today, King has become all things to all people, even to the people who espouse what King opposed when he was alive. How’d this happen? Hajar Yazdiha’s book,“The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement,” helps explain this apparent quandary.

At the start, Yazdiha outlines the history of how Martin Luther King Day came into existence and demonstrates that the national commemoration has served the interests of what we might call King’s enemies (segregationists, white supremacists, outright racists, closeted racists and everyone in between who fought valiantly against the values King died for) since its inception in 1983.

When we consider this history, there’s nothing ironic in Glenn Beck and a bunch of Tea Party activists embracing King. In fact, as Yazdiha shows, King probably would not have undergone the national rehabilitation required for him to get his own day of commemoration if those on the wrong side of history didn’t find in the commemoration an opportunity to exploit the holiday and King’s moral symbolism to their advantage.

Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan) introduced legislation to commemorate King with a national holiday four days after he was assassinated in 1968. The bill’s successful passage 15 years later took a concerted push among Black leaders like King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, in the form of national petitions and acts of political creativity like Stevie Wonder’s 1980 song,“Happy Birthday,” which praised King’s legacy. But it also took persuading white people who “saw desegregation as an oppressive practice that infringed on their own rights” and who considered radical Black human and civil rights organizations like the Black Panther Party as enemies of the state.

In the late 1970s, Yazdiha explains, “new, seemingly unlikely, sponsors for the bill emerged.” While there were still conservative politicians like Representative Larry McDonald and Senator Jesse Helms who fought stridently against a King holiday (McDonald argued that a holiday commemorating a Black person would be ‘racist’ … “‘Why not a Chinese American? Why not an Hispanic?’” he once asked), support for the holiday among much savvier conservative politicians was picking up steam.

One of those politicians was Republican John Danforth of Missouri, “a conservative Christian who saw in King a symbolic opportunity.” Danforth’s mission was to de-contextualize and misappropriate particular aspects of King’s life and rhetoric to support all manner of regressive causes. Politicians like Danforth would leverage King’s “content of our character” rhetoric to support policies that downright ignored and dismissed real racial inequities and racial injustices, and they would leverage King’s Christianity to wage war against increasingly hotbed cultural issues like abortion and homosexuality, Yazdiha explains.

On Nov. 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law H.R. 3706. In public, Reagan “sat amid a choir singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’” Privately, Reagan was apologizing to Republican governors who had opposed the holiday, assuring them “that his support for the legislation was based ‘on an image [of King], not reality.’ This image was a sanitized commemoration free of King’s political philosophies and the systemic racism and violence that shaped them. Instead, King’s image would be characterized by a rosy rhetoric of color-blindness and individualism that Reagan would return to throughout his presidency to justify assaults on Black Americans’ civil rights.”

The conservative bastardization of King has become even more grotesque since Reagan feigned support for the federal holiday and Beck announced himself an heir to King’s legacy. In the last three years alone, the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein writes, “Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of state to obtain an abortion.”

And yet, as they send us back to the 1950s, conservatives will have you thinking that Martin Luther King fought valiantly against wokeness and died so that Donald Trump could get his wings.

I’m starting to realize that achieving a national holiday for Martin Luther King, much like electing the first Black president, may have turned out to be a pyrrhic victory.

In Martin Luther King Day, Black people and everyone who values justice, fairness and equity for all got a diluted symbol that, for our side, has only lost value with each passing year and just as the very rights for which King died are vanishing in the filthy smog of white supremacy that is choking this country.

Meanwhile, the other side, the one that wants to roll back civil rights for everybody but straight, white, Christian males (i.e., the side that is an outright enemy of universal human liberation, which means Black liberation), has gained a symbol whose value only increases as we move deeper into a world where concepts like truth, facts, reality and sound history matter less and less.

The civil rights activist Elena Rocha best described this sense of regression in 1988, while standing at the Lincoln Memorial for the 25th anniversary of the March on Washington.

“If Martin Luther King could get up from the grave,” she said, “he would see that he’d have to start all over again raising hell.”