Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day 2022

Photo by Author, from his private collection.

In life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was too often cast as either a saint or a devil. This tendency has grown since his murder, so that Martin Luther King Day usually devolves into meaningless proclamations honoring the man who is no longer with us, and quotes taken out of context to support ideas directly contrary to what Dr. King espoused. This year of 2022, Dr. King is in danger of being “cancelled” by both the right and the left:

· From the right, his ideas of what now goes by the label of “critical race theory” have been declared illegal to teach in many schools.

· From the left, his personal actions, such as cheating on his wife, and his public actions in overlooking and minimizing the role of women in the Civil Rights Movement, would qualify for his being “cancelled” by the politically correct.

I don’t believe in saints or devils. King was neither. But I consider him a prophet. That doesn’t mean we should worship him. It means we should pay attention to what he was trying to tell us. In that spirit, I offer a few of my thoughts on what King was trying to tell us, and how they relate to the messages of other “prophets.”

King is often contrasted with Malcolm X, who was considered more “radical.” I believe it was King who was truly the more radical, on a deeper level. Malcolm X may have made a more strident critique of current society, but he offered no systemic change in society. Not, at least, until after his Hajj. Then he was murdered.

King, throughout his career, held up a radical vision of a different society, which he called the “Beloved Community.” That vision transcended the immediate issues of integration, and called for a complete re-ordering of our economic system. When he turned from the immediate issues of integration to the larger economic issues, supporting a strike of public workers and organizing the multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign, he too was murdered. See Victoria W. Wolcott, The Public Has Underestimated the Radicalism of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Early Work, Washington Post 1/17/2022.

King’s radical vision was influenced early on by the woman who would become his wife. While they were dating, Coretta Scott gave King a copy of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Bellamy’s science fiction novel, in which…