Social Media King: 5 Facts that Won’t Make A Meme
“The most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation.”
-1963 FBI memo about Martin Luther King
“Racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, 1967
Every 3rd Monday the United States celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. Social media platforms will be filled with memes, quotes, and hashtags of various kinds.
Photos of the March on Washington will be shown and clips of the very end of the “I Have a Dream” speech will be shared, posted, and liked.
It will illustrate just how much America loves Dr. King and always has.
Except it won’t be true. Not completely anyway.
America loves Dr. King now.
Turned him into a civil rights Santa Claus, where a specially seasoned King quote can easily be sprinkled on just about anything. In the last few days I have even seen MLK quotes used to justify the Capitol insurrection incited by the U.S. President.
America loves Dr. King now.
Now that he can’t speak. Can’t lead. Can’t agitate. Can’t prophesy. Can’t hold America accountable.
America loves Dr. King now.
But it this was not always so.
As daughter Bernice King tweeted on May 20th, 2020:
“Don’t act like everyone loved my father. He was assassinated. A 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America. Most hated. Many who quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate, and may already hate, the authentic King.”
The authentic King can’t be reduced to the last 5:17 of the “I Have a Dream Speech”.
The authentic King can’t be fully be seen in the iconic black white images or the filtered photographs that have become so popular. The authentic King has been both deified and demonized. He was flawed, he was human, and he was limited to time/space like all of us.
Five Facts About King that won’t make a Meme-
- Dr. King was largely disliked by majority of America before he was assassinated:
In a 1968 Harris Poll, Dr. King had a nearly 75% disappoval rate. After speaking out for Black economic empowerment and speaking against surface level integration America was in no mood to listen to the eloquent agitator championing racial change.
2. Dr. King was a target of the American government for years:
This was part of an FBI initiative whose racist goals under J. Edgar Hoover to eliminate any possibility of the rise of a “Black Messiah”. He was carefully monitored to make sure King didn’t stir up a black revolution and abandon obedience to white liberal doctrines and embrace black nationalism. The FBI sent a letter to him and called his wife Coretta Scott King and gave him a deadline to kill himself.
3. Dr. King said ‘my dream has become a nightmare’ a year before his assassination:
In an NBC inteview with Sander Vanocur, talked about how “old optimism” of the civil rights movement was “a little superficial” and now needed to be tempered with “a solid realism.” And just 11 months before his death, he spoke bluntly about what he called the “difficult days ahead.” King challenged the Vietnam war and called the United States “the largest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
4. Dr. King was haunted by the specter of death:
Harry Belafonte spoke of a nervous tick that King had in the extraordinary documentary “King in the Wilderness”. Dr. King was afraid of being assassinated after watching Robert Kennedy, Malcom X killed, and almost being killed via a stab wound. The tick went away when King made peace with his death.
5. Dr. King was more radical than you think:
Cornel West writes in an article entitled, ‘Martin Luther was a radical. We must not sterilize his legacy’: “…In fact, in a low moment, when the American nightmare crushed his dream, King noted: “I don’t have any faith in the whites in power responding in the right way … they’ll treat us like they did our Japanese brothers and sisters in World War II. They’ll throw us into concentration camps. The Wallaces and the Birchites will take over. The sick people and the fascists will be strengthened. They’ll cordon off the ghetto and issue passes for us to get in and out.” Dr. King wanted a sweeping economic stimulus (50 billion then, adjusted for inflation would total nearly 380 billon today) for black people so America could right the historical wrongs and inequities that the descendants of enslaved Africans experienced on U.S.soil.
In this critical time in the American epic, let us not make the mistake that Jesus spoke of when speaking of to the religious elite, “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you build tombs for the prophets your ancestors killed, and you decorate the monuments of the godly people your ancestors destroyed (Matt. 23:29).
He was saying in essence, you celebrate today who your people killed yesterday, and if they were here today…you’d kill them again (this was proven true when the young Jewish teacher was crucified on a brutal Roman cross).
May we, in this first MLK holiday after the largest civil rights movement in American history ;in our remembrance…not become forgetful. Forget that recent scenes of racial brutality in American cities are frighteningly reminiscent of what we saw in the days of Dr. King. Forget that the internet today is allowing hate groups to network and produce more white supremacists, Nazis, and racial terrorists than Dr. King could have ever imagined.
In the 53 years since his life ended by an assasin’s bullet on April 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennesee, we are still fighting for racial justice in 2021.
Yes, racial progress has been made.
But in the same manner that racial progress is moving forward, racism is progressing too. We can’t rest on the laurels of yesterday’s successes. We must contend for and take new territory.
May Dr. King’s words, ideas, and beliefs remain sharp. May he still provoke us, offend us, and threaten us. May our comfort, complacency, and cowardice be shaken. May his writings and speeches help grant us courage to dismantle the institution of American racism that we all have inherited and presently live within.
Dr. King was never the man of the meme. He was a man of action, contradiction, and unusual courage.
But…he was a man.
Let us fall out of love with the unvarnished myth, and embrace the true memory of the man.
May we continue the legacy of the dream. May we walk together. Live together. Lead together. Love together.
May we build a new future together.
This is our moment to make the dream live in our generation like never before in the history of the United States.
Let us seize it.
“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, March 8th 1965
