I grew up with people around me badmouthing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. To hear white folk in east central Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s tell it, he was the very root of all evil, and everything that was wrong in their lives was his damn fault. In fact, Dr. King had marched in my hometown of Philadelphia, Miss., in 1966 amid violent chaos when I was a kid—he even spoke near the law-enforcement murderers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
Yes, Dr. King gave his life for the search for move love and less hate, but he was not only spreading a message of love, as so many white thieves of his legacy try to say today. His message was pure fire—and he was out to hold a mirror up to our nation about white Americans—not only Mississippians and southerners—who supported using terror to maintain power over everyone else and to enjoy the fruits of that terrorism.
Throughout his life, Dr. King toiled and ultimately sacrificed his life in the fight to change power structures and systems established and enforced to keep white people on the top and Black people on the bottom. He wanted America to understand that enslaved people actually built this nation (after many of their owners figured out how to steal the land from Indigenous Americans and forcefully remove them from land they coveted).
None of this history is pretty or honorable, and Dr. King never tried to say it was or to cover up any of it. He wanted it taught to every person in this country and certainly wanted children to grow up having learned the lessons of the past. He knew that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
And he was blunt that he was not likely to live long enough to see that happen.
Remaking MLK Into Their Image
By the time a white man shot him at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Dr. King was more focused than ever on systemic racism and the links with poverty, as well