Mainstream conversations about Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy rarely acknowledge the historical truth that King was a political radical.
While King was a graduate student, he explained in an autobiographical sketch that his “present anti-capitalistic feelings” came from witnessing bread lines of the Great Depression. In the final year of King’s life, he led a Poor People’s Campaign, bemoaned the comparatively massive amount of federal funding being spent on the Vietnam war instead of federal programs to eliminate poverty, and called for a “radical redistribution of political and economic power.”
In a recent email, Chancellor Carol Folt called on Tar Heels to participate in Martin Luther King Jr. Day either by attending one of the several events on campus or “reflecting privately on what Dr. King meant to this country and what we can do to honor his legacy today.”
Members of this community should heed Folt’s call to do so, but when they do, they should engage honestly with King’s full legacy.
To do so, members of this community must acknowledge King’s wider moral perspective on American politics and life, which he articulated at Western Michigan University in 1963: “…I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence.”
King was not merely a figurehead who articulated a dream of equality at a march on Washington, nor was he just a great leader who helped to drive the passage of two of the greatest pieces of law in the nation’s history.
He was a prophetic moral force who risked his life and advocated against the very evils that most affect the United States in the present.
Manifestations of racism plague the nation in the form of mass incarceration, economic discrimination and physical violence. Economic inequality is more severe now than when King fought against it. Examples of religious bigotry can be seen every night on cable news. The Cold War has ended, but the United States retains an overly violent foreign policy.
But King was part of a movement much larger than himself, one whose lifeblood came from a large and diverse cast of people who were vastly more important than one man could ever be.
