January 13, 2016 The Skanner Page 13
Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Restoring the Memory of MLK — A Militant for the 21st Century
D
r. Martin Luther
King, Jr. hasn’t been
this alive since
1968.
He’s no longer that
visually distant, two-di-
mensional figure, limit-
ed to speaking a single
sentence taken out of
context and shorn of its
true meaning. Instead,
the honest scholarship
and media commentary
considering what King
faced and what he did
have broken through the
obscuring fog of conser-
vative and, yes, centrist
propaganda.
In part, that’s because
today, the confrontation
between the forces of
progress and the racist
reaction to that progress
is sharper than any time
since the 1960s.
Today, as in the 1960s,
American society is
grappling with elevating
new groups of Ameri-
cans to full citizenship.
Today, as in the 1960s,
it’s being forced to con-
front the meaning of
Lee A.
Daniels
NNPA
Columnist
its widespread poverty
and joblessness, and its
diminished educational
opportunity. Today, as in
the 1960s, Black Ameri-
cans’ right to vote is un-
der siege from conser-
vatives, as are women’s
“
individuals’ access
to opportunity.
Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s words
and actions seem
relevant again be-
cause they’ve al-
ways presented a
challenge to the sta-
tus quo and always
urged individuals to live
up to humanity’s best
possibilities.
That command has be-
come particularly com-
pelling again because of
the remarkable juxtapo-
when the conservative
political ascendancy was
at its height, Rev. Hosea
Williams, one of King’s
lieutenants during the
civil rights struggles,
said, “There is a defi-
nite effort on the part of
America to change Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr. from
what he was really about
— to make him the Un-
cle Tom of the century. “
Williams insisted, “In my
mind, he was the militant
of the century.”
Dr. Martin Luther King
Far less acknowledged is the courage it took
for King – after the passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and his being awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace
Prize – to resist the temptations of partial suc-
cess and his own fame
reproductive rights. And
today, as in the 1960s, the
country is debating the
extent of government’s
responsibility to protect
sition of present-day de-
velopments and anniver-
saries of past landmark
events.
In the early 1990s,
Jr.’s 13-year life on the na-
tional stage brilliantly
represented the courage
it took in those decades
to challenge the seeming-
ly overwhelming power
of the South’s racist pow-
er structure.
Far less acknowledged
is the courage it took for
King — after the passage
of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, and
his being awarded the
1964 Nobel Peace Prize –
to resist the temptations
of partial success and his
own fame.
Instead, King kept mov-
ing leftward, to confront
the racial and economic
injustice that had created
and maintained the Black
ghettos of the North, and
the national hubris that
had led America into
the quagmire of war in
Southeast Asia.
His insistence that
nonviolence was still a
viable means of social
change was ridiculed, as
were his plans to stage
a multiracial Poor Peo-
ples March on Washing-
ton and involve himself
in the bitter sanitation
worker’s strike in Mem-
phis, Tenn.
But those difficult years
were actually King’s fin-
est hours. At the moment
of his assassination, he
was standing where he
had begun his public
life: with ordinary Black
people who were being
unjustly denied their hu-
man rights.
King’s refusal to sub-
mit offers a lesson to take
to heart at this moment
when conservative poli-
ticians and theorists are
trying to restore inequal-
ity of opportunity as the
law of the land.
It tells us we should
adopt King as The Mili-
tant of the 21st Century,
too.
Lee A. Daniels, Lee A.
Daniels is a longtime jour-
nalist based in New York
City. His essay, “Martin
Luther King, Jr.: The Great
Provocateur,” appears in
Africa’s
Peacemakers:
Nobel Peace Laureates
of African Descent,” to
be published by Palgrave
Macmillan in March.