{"id":218097,"date":"2010-01-18T09:45:34","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T14:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.southernstudies.org,2010:\/\/5.12103"},"modified":"2010-01-22T11:29:30","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T16:29:30","slug":"mlk-day-contending-with-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218097","title":{"rendered":"MLK Day: Contending with King"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>        <i>NOTE: The following essay by Charles McKinney, professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis and former board member of the Institute for Southern Studies, appeared on the website of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jamestownproject.org\/\">The Jamestown Project<\/a> in 2008, but the themes it raises are as important as ever.<\/p>\n<p><\/i><b>CONTENDING WITH KING<\/b><i><br \/><\/i><b><br \/><\/b><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"display: inline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.southernstudies.org\/Dr%20Charles%20McKinney.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Dr Charles McKinney.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.southernstudies.org\/assets_c\/2010\/01\/Dr%20Charles%20McKinney-thumb-200x254.jpg\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"margin: 0pt 0pt 20px 20px; float: right;\" width=\"150\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a><\/span><b><i>By Charles W. McKinney, Jr., The Jamestown Project<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>As the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King,<br \/>\nJr. approaches, the nation&#8217;s attention will be ineluctably drawn, once<br \/>\nagain, to the words and teachings of an American who altered the course<br \/>\nof history. <\/p>\n<p><!-- AddThis Button BEGIN --><br \/>\n<a class=\"addthis_button\" href=\"http:\/\/www.addthis.com\/bookmark.php?v=250&amp;username=xa-4b5476ef3963ecc6\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/s7.addthis.com\/static\/btn\/v2\/lg-share-en.gif\" alt=\"Bookmark and Share\" style=\"border: 0pt none ;\" width=\"125\" height=\"16\" \/><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/s7.addthis.com\/js\/250\/addthis_widget.js#username=xa-4b5476ef3963ecc6\"><\/script><br \/>\n<!-- AddThis Button END --><\/p>\n<p>However, unlike the corporate-sponsored celebrations that<br \/>\nmark King&#8217;s birth &#8211; or the ones that take place during Black History<br \/>\nMonth &#8211; the focus this time around will be on the work and words of a<br \/>\nveteran activist, drawn to Memphis in the early months of 1968 in an<br \/>\nattempt to confront the debilitating racial and economic inequality<br \/>\nthat dogged the lives of the city&#8217;s sanitation workers. <\/p>\n<p>Perhaps, as we<br \/>\nreflect on King&#8217;s death, we will &#8211; at least temporarily &#8211; move away from<br \/>\nthe pop culture caricature of King that&#8217;s come to characterize our<br \/>\ncollective memory of him, and actually seek to understand his responses<br \/>\nto the complex dilemmas that bedeviled American society in his lifetime<br \/>\nand beyond.<\/p>\n<p>Historian Tim Tyson writes that in the years after the<br \/>\nassassination we worked hard to turn King into a &#8220;black Santa Claus.&#8221;<br \/>\nThis version of King is a raceless, non-confrontational action figure<br \/>\nthat can be, Tyson continues, &#8220;filled with whatever generic good wishes<br \/>\nthe occasion may dictate.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>In an increasingly conflict-averse society,<br \/>\nwe&#8217;ve grown comfortable with this new rendition of the Good Doctor &#8211;<br \/>\nKing 2.0. This King is meek. This King turns the other cheek. This King<br \/>\nhas dreams. Over time, we&#8217;ve become much less comfortable with the<br \/>\nblack southern preacher and fierce social critic who, for most of his<br \/>\npublic life, stood against some of the most powerful forces in American<br \/>\nsociety.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The church,&#8221; King wrote in 1963, &#8220;must be the guide and critic of<br \/>\nthe state.&#8221; If religious leadership failed in this effort, the church<br \/>\nwould be reduced to &#8220;an irrelevant social club without moral or<br \/>\nspiritual authority.&#8221; This belief that the church played a central role<br \/>\nin the transformation of society placed him on a moral and political<br \/>\ntrajectory that frequently confounded allies and convicted the<br \/>\nambivalent. <\/p>\n<p>Most significantly, it placed him at odds with the Johnson<br \/>\nAdministration on its two central issues, the War on Poverty and the<br \/>\nwar in Vietnam. By 1966, King had come to see Johnson&#8217;s domestic war as<br \/>\npiecemeal and under funded. In a time of soaring prosperity, it was<br \/>\nabsurd, King declared, to spend billions of dollars on travel to the<br \/>\nmoon while poor and working class Americans suffered under unspeakable<br \/>\nconditions. <\/p>\n<p>Johnson&#8217;s War on Poverty did accomplish the task of<br \/>\nilluminating the intractability of poverty. For King however, it also<br \/>\nhighlighted the unwillingness on the part of liberal politicians to<br \/>\nconfront the issue in more foundational ways. The seeds of this<br \/>\nanalysis would bear fruit in the Poor People&#8217;s March, King&#8217;s effort to<br \/>\nplace the issue of poverty front and center in the American conscience,<br \/>\nand to challenge the country to make the necessary political and<br \/>\neconomic adjustments to address the matter. &#8220;True compassion&#8221;, King<br \/>\nwrote in 1968, &#8220;understands that an edifice which produces beggars<br \/>\nneeds restructuring.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In 1967, a year to the day of his death, King <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hartford-hwp.com\/archives\/45a\/058.html\">delivered a major<br \/>\nspeech against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church<\/a> in New York City. To<br \/>\nKing, it was morally inconsistent to simultaneously condemn state<br \/>\nsanctioned violence within the United States while ignoring state<br \/>\nsanctioned violence abroad. <\/p>\n<p>The United States, he intoned in that<br \/>\nhistoric speech was &#8220;the largest purveyor of violence in the world<br \/>\ntoday.&#8221; Moreover, the war highlighted America&#8217;s hostile relationship<br \/>\nwith its poor and minority citizens, who were dying at dramatically<br \/>\nhigher rates than their numbers in the country merited. <\/p>\n<p>King&#8217;s<br \/>\npolitical and spiritual instincts led him to a momentous conclusion &#8211;<br \/>\nthat the war represented an immoral, racist, imperialist endeavor that<br \/>\nstained the soul of country. For King, the choice &#8211; though difficult &#8211;<br \/>\nwas crystal clear: the moral and political crusade he waged in the<br \/>\nUnited States was built upon an alter of redemptive nonviolence; this<br \/>\nreality demanded that he speak out against the war. And so he did; and<br \/>\nwhen he spoke, he did so as a child of God and brother to the<br \/>\nVietnamese.<\/p>\n<p>It was a position that placed him in uncharted political territory<br \/>\nand had serious implications. Despite the fact that he&#8217;d recently<br \/>\nreceived the Nobel Peace Prize, and had long espoused the international<br \/>\nnature of the struggle for equal rights in the United States, pundits,<br \/>\npoliticians and activists virulently chastised King, a mere &#8220;civil<br \/>\nrights leader&#8221;, for having the audacity to express an opinion on an<br \/>\nissue not unfurling on the streets of Selma or Los Angeles. <\/p>\n<p>He faced<br \/>\nintense resistance from almost every corner of his professional life.<br \/>\nThe board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference &#8211; the<br \/>\norganization he helped create &#8211; expressed its opposition to the effort.<br \/>\nHis closest advisors and political allies urged him to stick to civil<br \/>\nrights, and warned that an unwarranted foray into foreign policy could<br \/>\njeopardize everything they&#8217;d worked for over the past decade.<\/p>\n<p>By the time he arrived in Memphis, King&#8217;s opposition to the war &#8211;<br \/>\nnow in full bloom &#8211; had rendered him persona non grata at Johnson&#8217;s<br \/>\nWhite House. Surrogates for President Johnson declared that King had<br \/>\nneither the authority nor the competence to speak about foreign<br \/>\naffairs. <\/p>\n<p>His opposition to the war severely damaged his relationships<br \/>\nwith other national leaders within the civil rights movement as well.<br \/>\nRoy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, questioned King&#8217;s loyalty to his<br \/>\ncountry. Whitney Young of the National Urban League accused King and<br \/>\nother anti-war activists of intentionally undermining the War on<br \/>\nPoverty with their anti-war stance. National publications were hardly<br \/>\nmore kind. <\/p>\n<p>The New York Times called his anti-war position a &#8220;serious<br \/>\ntactical mistake&#8221;, while newspapers across the South reaffirmed &#8211; with<br \/>\nrenewed vigor &#8211; that King&#8217;s recent statements confirmed his suspected<br \/>\ncommunist sympathies. The Washington Post ran an editorial titled &#8220;What<br \/>\non Earth can Dr. King be thinking?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Simply put, King thought that unchecked racism, militarism and<br \/>\npoverty posed a direct threat to the existence of the human race. It<br \/>\nwas this perspective that drew him to Memphis, to support a group of<br \/>\nmen whose relationship with their employer seemed as if it had been<br \/>\nripped from the pages of a previous century. <\/p>\n<p>Called to work with a<br \/>\nplantation bell, paid starvation wages and fired on a whim, sanitation<br \/>\nworkers represented the nearest thing to an &#8220;untouchable&#8221; class in the<br \/>\ncity. But they were also increasingly fed up with the city&#8217;s antebellum<br \/>\ntreatment. After they decided to stand and fight for better wages, the<br \/>\nright to organize and their very manhood, they asked King to join them,<br \/>\nand he did. So, in March of 1968, he brought publicity and star power<br \/>\nto their movement. He helped to nationalize their plight.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, King brought a lot of things with him to Memphis for<br \/>\nwhat would be his final campaign. He brought the titanic pressures of<br \/>\nnational leadership, pathological harassment by the FBI and the specter<br \/>\nof his own mortality. He attracted Black Power advocates who openly<br \/>\nmocked his leadership and attempted to consign nonviolent direct action<br \/>\nto a bygone era. <\/p>\n<p>But more importantly, he brought with him a bedrock<br \/>\nassurance that the universe was morally ordered, and that there was in<br \/>\nfact a deep, abiding relationship between power, justice and love.<br \/>\nKing, the hard-nosed political realist, also brought with him the<br \/>\nrealization that coercion represented one of the crucial variables in<br \/>\nthe calculus of liberation. <\/p>\n<p>He knew, in his bones, that Frederick<br \/>\nDouglass was right about the fact that power conceded nothing without a<br \/>\ndemand. He brought the knowledge that every ounce of freedom won in his<br \/>\nlifetime was the product of prayerful, deliberative struggle. He<br \/>\nbrought an enduring, ever-deepening confidence in the power of<br \/>\nredemptive nonviolence to transform the human condition. <\/p>\n<p>He brought<br \/>\nwith him the prophetic hope that America would one day live up to the<br \/>\nhigh principles it set for itself at the Founding and in the wake of<br \/>\nCivil War. History, King believed, charted an upward path.<\/p>\n<p>Forty years ago this Friday, the nation&#8217;s pre-eminent moral voice<br \/>\nfell silent for the last time. As in years past, we will run the risk<br \/>\nof celebrating the man by reducing him to a few familiar sound bites,<br \/>\nperhaps a video or two. <\/p>\n<p>However, as we reflect on Martin Luther King,<br \/>\nJr.&#8217;s legacy this weekend, let us remember him in his context. Let&#8217;s<br \/>\nconfront the uncomfortable and perpetually uncompleted journeys he<br \/>\ndared us all to take. Have we kept each other accountable for our<br \/>\nmutual betterment? Have we done everything we can to make our democracy<br \/>\nas vibrant and inclusive as possible? Do our houses of worship speak<br \/>\ntruth to power, or have they become the &#8220;irrelevant social clubs&#8221; that<br \/>\nKing warned us they could become?<\/p>\n<p>Finally, let us remember the beautifully complex, conflicted and<br \/>\nhopeful young man whose full potential &#8211; like that of our country &#8211; had<br \/>\nyet to be fully realized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NOTE: The following essay by Charles McKinney, professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis and former board member of the Institute for Southern Studies, appeared on the website of The Jamestown Project in 2008, but the themes it raises are as important as ever. CONTENDING WITH KINGBy Charles W. McKinney, Jr., The Jamestown Project [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4084,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4084"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218097\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}