January 20, 2025 was an eventful day in American culture. The U.S. government inaugurated a new President, Americans honored the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and legions of collegiate football fans tuned into the national College Football Championship between two stellar teams: Ohio State and Notre Dame. Many invoked King’s memory as part of each event. President Trump thanked Black and Hispanic voters who supported him in the 2024 election as he referenced King’s dream, King’s family and friends held services and ceremonies to call Americans to act on his work, and King’s daughter, Dr. Bernice King, participated in the coin toss ceremony that opened the College Football Championship. King’s memory—present in these three different events—signifies the ways in which he has developed into an icon and edifice in our culture, someone who represents an imposing ideal of a nation defined by racial harmony rather than a man with whom each of us can converse on a myriad of personal and political questions. Even his memorial in Washington, D.C. depicts such an image. King stands as an unfinished statue atop a mountain, staring resolutely into the distance. While a reference to King’s last sermon, where he told his audience that he had seen the mountaintop of redemption and justice for them and America, uninformed visitors can also see a marble man so great as to be inscrutable. This, in many ways, was a sentiment that King’s most recent biographer, Jonathan Eig, himself expressed in his work King: A Life about the public memory of the Reverend Doctor.
For most Americans, King’s legacy and memory is defined by his “I Have a Dream” speech that he delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Indeed, this one moment is centralized so much in the memory of King’s life that even Eig dedicated two chapters of his work to this speech and the events surrounding it. While certainly King’s speech and that march were the hinges that swung the Kennedy Administration’s perspective on new Civil Rights legislation, King’s legacy for us as Americans is much more complex than this one speech. To really dive into the hundreds of thousands of words King left behind often leaves one asking more questions than seeking answers.
What facets of King’s life and work have Americans forgotten or failed to remember?
Well, first, anyone who walks through his memorial in D.C. will note that there is no mention of God or scripture in the quotes that surround King’s statue. This omission may reasonably stem from the fact that King’s memorial is a national one on the Mall and its planners sought to commemorate King within the letter and spirit of the Constitution’s Religious Establishment Clause. However, anyone who approaches King needs to recognize that he was, in fact, a minister. A deep, abiding Christian faith and belief in Christian concepts of justice informed his work. King frequently mentioned that segregation, discrimination, and poverty were not unjust for what they did to their victims alone, but for how they contorted the souls of those who imposed or benefitted from them. His speeches were infused with Christian motifs and metaphors that melded New Testament redemption with Old Testament justice. King cannot be separated from his Christianity, and his philosophy of justice as a Christian minister raises questions about the role of faith and religion in public life. Though most often associated with more conservative causes in the immediate present, King’s Christianity reflected Christ’s message in the Gospels about justice and poverty. King has a place in the American Christian Canon, if you will, as much as George Whitfield, Billy Graham, or Jerry Falwell (even if some would want to exclude a name from that list, too!)
Second, as much as King spoke about the hardship and injustice of discrimination and segregation in the Jim Crow South, he also addressed issues of poverty and economic inequality. King told his audiences and interviewers that it was not enough to just end segregation if Black Americans could not also find gainful employment or afford new services opened up to them by the end of Jim Crow. This is not to say that King discounted the achievements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Instead, it is to point out that King saw this legislation as “the end of the beginning,” to borrow a Winston Churchill quote, within the larger effort to address issues of poverty and economic inequality, especially as it applied to Black Americans.
Indeed, in a speech King delivered at Stanford University in 1967, he explained the work of the Civil Rights Movement as this:
The American Negro finds himself living in a triple ghetto. A ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty, a ghetto of human misery. So what we are seeking to do in the Civil Rights Movement is to deal with this problem. To deal with this problem of the two Americas. We are seeking to make America one nation, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Now let me say that the struggle for Civil Rights and the struggle to make these two Americas one America, is much more difficult today than it was five or ten years ago. For about a decade or maybe twelve years, we’ve struggled all across the South in glorious struggles to get rid of legal, overt segregation and all of the humiliation that surrounded that system of segregation…But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality. – “The Other America,” Dr. Martin Luther King
His charge was that Americans needed to wrestle with the problems of economic inequality as much as they did racial inequality and that the two were linked.
Third, King’s stances on these economic issues, and his opposition to the Vietnam War, degraded his public image when he was alive. The Pew Research Center found that, at his most popular in 1963, only a plurality of Americans supported King’s work and his popularity later plummeted in 1966 when 63% of Americans, a clear majority, told Pew they viewed King unfavorably (mostly due to King’s failed efforts to address discrimination in Chicago). While Pew’s data from 2011 noted that an overwhelming majority of Americans (94%) viewed King favorably, his unpopularity during his lifetime reveals how contentious the issues he sought to address were. King’s criticism of the Vietnam War also earned him ire from President Lyndon Johnson’s White House since the Johnson Administration had shepherded the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act into law. Like the minister he was, however, King did not let politics totally blind him to the moral messages he felt compelled to communicate.
Fourth, King was a human person who had his own flaws and foibles. Ella Baker, a successful recruiter for the NAACP and an Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the Civil Rights organization King led), left her position because she disagreed with the idea of raising one leader to represent the Civil Rights Movement and believed the men in charge of the SCLC unfairly ignored her ideas. King himself was not the target of her complaints, but they did argue about the best strategy to work for civil rights. Moreover, King was an unfaithful husband; he had a long term affair with Dorothy Cotton, a Civil Rights activist in his circle, and liaisons with other women. These facts do not undercut the veracity of his preaching or the bravery of his nonviolent activism, but they do speak to the reality that King was a person, not an edifice or an ideal, who made mistakes and wrestled with his own temptations. Facing that part of King forces us to hold multiple ideas in our mind at the same time that a man as brave and pious as King could also betray his wife.
The point is that we, as Americans, are better served by encountering King, his preaching, his tactics, his message, and his personal life than planting him as a marble man whom we venerate once a year. This, in many ways, is what Jonathan Eig concluded in his biography. King was neither a prophet nor a saint, but a brave, faith-filled, flawed citizen who offered a vision of the American Dream. Engaging with him, dialoguing with his words, and contemplating what he sought from America and for America illuminates a man and his memory whose ideas speak both of his time and to some of the issues of the present. Getting students to do that, too, is the challenge I’ll reflect upon in my next post in this series. Until then, Happy February, and I encourage you to either read King’s entire speech “The Other America” or read Jonathan Eig’s biography, King: A Life.