This month marked 50 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. felled not only the man, but, I often fear, the last best hope we had to ever push America out its cave of bigotry and backwater provincialism into the light of a modern, free republic.
And frankly, we have ruined his memory. I’m a teacher, I see how King is memorialized in schools — the sanitized “I have a dream” preacher who just wanted everyone to get along and be respected for who they are.
But that is not why he was murdered 50 years ago in Memphis. Fifty years ago, he was one of the most vilified men in America. And I mean he was Black Lives Matter hated, he was Muslim-immigrant hated, he was more vilified than the Parkland, Florida, teens leading the March for Our Lives.
Polls in the late 1960s showed two-thirds of Americans had a somewhat or very negative opinion of King just before his death. He had gotten more unpopular as the ‘60s had worn on. So, yes, Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of his assassination, was less popular than Donald Trump.
But King was not despised, nor murdered for wanting little black boys and girls to be able to hold hands with little white boys and girls.
No, he was despised and murdered because in April 1967, almost exactly one year before his death, he gave his most important speech ever: “Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”
In that far less remembered sermon, he shed his role as a civil rights leader, and assumed the mantle of a true, if still nonviolent, revolutionary. In that speech, he made it clear that his ambition was not for Rosa Parks to sit wherever she wanted, but to dismantle the foundations on which America had stood for at least 100 years.
In that speech, he denounced (while linking for the first time) the “triple evil … of racism, economic exploitation and militarism” that was ruining America.
By 1967, King had come to realize how insufficient his vision of civil rights was, and found himself compelled — against all advice that warned America would turn on him — to issue his unequivocal call for a “radical revolution in values.”
The bankrupting of our resources in the murderous Vietnam war abroad, and an unconditional surrender in the War on Poverty at home, made King declare America a “society gone mad on war.”
Standing at the pulpit, King declared the United States “the single greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” He told a country convinced of its moral superiority that it acted like “a policeman of the whole world.”
He had the outraged courage to warn that he heard “God telling America ‘You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways I will rise up and break the backbone of your power and place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know My name! Hear Me, and know that I am God’.”
In that speech, King declared his “eternal hostility to militarism” and issued a thinly veiled call for massive draft resistance by telling young men to “take a stand” against the war.
And so, only two years after he had cajoled and compelled America to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, economic injustice that did not know color, pushed him further still. King declared his intention to escalate his struggle to include the “glaring contrast of poverty and wealth” in the richest nation on earth.
He called out multinational corporations that not only exploited Third World nations, but “profited” from the Vietnam War and so opposed its resolution.
Yet King also made it clear his condemnation came from a place of love. “I love America … There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love.” Above all, what he wanted was for America “to come home” to its founding ideal that all people are created equal. “Come home America,” he said.
And America put him in the ground for it.
Don’t take my word for it. Visit YouTube and listen through 22 minutes, 48 seconds of spine-tingling oratory. You will understand that someone listening in real time — whether James Earl Ray, J. Edgar Hoover or John Q. Public — shuddered, and decided that King must die. (Watch the version he gave at Ebenezer Baptist church — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfGsVvnvA9w — not the version in New York City.)
But King lives. Not in our official, non-threatening “remembrances” of him over a three-day weekend in January, but in our current national malaise.
True prophet that he was, King foretold of this malaise in 1967 when he warned that “a nation which spends more money on military defense than programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
As America has done exactly that for the last 50 years, that spiritual death is upon us, and the orange-hued reaper is here to collect our souls.
And in his absence, the Democrats drifted aimlessly. By 1993, when Bill Clinton slid his sleazy self into office, “the poor” had been replaced by “the middle class” as the primary constituency of the Democratic party.
When the Dems stopped talking about the poor is when they also stopped representing the working class, as they wrongly assumed “middle class” meant blue- as well as white-collar.
It did not and does not and they have lost blue-collar America because of that.
Martin Luther King would never have allowed that to happen. So long as we remember the “Dreamer” instead of the “Revolutionary” we will enfeeble his legacy.
That’s why I tell my students: Don’t honor Martin Luther King, emulate him!
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazette.net.