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If we were to read some, if not all, of the speeches, sermons and essays that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered and wrote in the last three years of his life, we might get a true understanding of what he envisioned for America.
As it is, the average American is left believing King’s hope for America is exactly what the mainstream media says it is. So it’s no wonder that many people’s image of King is of a civil rights leader who did nothing more than dream of a colorblind society.
This belief that all King cared about was living in a country where people are judged by the content of their character as opposed to the color of their skin makes him perhaps the most misrepresented American hero ever.
In the last years of his life, King sought a radical transformation of society. But this view of King isn’t likely to be gleaned from today’s media. Each January, when Americans across the land seek to honor the life and work of King, television stations roll out the tried and true footage of King delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech during the 1963 March on Washington.
American newspapers, for their part, focus on various "King Day" activities across the country. There are always reports of how Americans of every color are working hand in hand to achieve this dream of racial equality. They might even toss in a few lines from the "I Have a Dream" speech for good measure, but seldom go beyond that.
How is it possible that the American media, which knows so much about King’s life, constantly skips over the last years of his life?
There are those who feel this omission of the last few years of King’s life isn’t a mere oversight by the media, but a cold and calculated move to not only give the masses a false image of King and what he wanted for America, but also to erase the radical King from memory.
And just what did Martin Luther King, Jr. want for America in his last days? On April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City, King delivered a speech titled "A Time to Break Silence." In it he came out against the war in Vietnam. Although he knew there were people who felt he should stay focused on civil rights, he said:
At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask?
King felt that poor men were being asked to "fight and die in extraordinary high proportions relative to the rest of the population" of the nation. He said it was wrong to take young Black men "crippled by our society and [send] them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."
Time magazine was one of many media outlets that felt King should have kept the focus only on civil rights. In its April 21, 1967 edition, Time hinted that King should give up his anti-war activities in favor of championing the cause of the Negro.
Along with speaking out against the war, King seemed to realize that as much as he dreamed people would become colorblind, there were racial beliefs deeply entrenched in society making that more difficult than he realized in 1963, when he first his revealed his dream for the nation.
And while King believed in the dream, the grim reality of life in America at the time caused him to become more of a realist than dreamer. King knew he needed to show working White people how supporting the cause of Black folk might just improve their own lives.
In his sermon, "The Drum Major Instinct," King tells of an incident where, while discussing the "race problem" with his jailers during a stay in the Birmingham jail, he attempts to awaken them to their own suffering in America. He asked his jailers how much they earned a year. When they told him of their inadequate salaries, King replied:
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… You are in a position of supporting your oppressors. Because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress the Negroes in American society oppress poor White people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being White, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are White.
Although delivered just weeks before King’s assassination, "The Drum Major Instinct", like so many of his later sermons and speeches, has been largely ignored by the media. The same media which always boasts of the races coming together to live the dream of King, obviously doesn’t embrace the idea of brotherhood if it involves thinking about class issues.
And so the media, which knows that right before his death King was planning a Poor People’s March on Washington, chooses to ignore it. King’s goal was to attack a system that kept millions of Americans mired in poverty. He wanted to gather a rainbow coalition of the poor together in hopes that they could fight against a common oppressor. This is a dream of King’s that we don’t hear from today’s media.
Nor do we hear about the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis and how King went there to help. How his hope was that after the strike was settled, he would lead masses of the poor to march on Washington to achieve real change in America’s economic system.
It is a safe bet that today’s media aren’t likely to include anything about King’s speech, "Where Do We Go from Here?" Delivered at the eleventh annual convention of the SCLC in Atlanta on August 16, 1967, he said:
... I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
King had ideas and was working to bring about big changes in our society. All of this, of course, is of no consequence to the American media. It chooses to portray a King who is forever stuck dreaming of desegregation. It chooses to ignore almost everything he did after the landmark speech during the March on Washington. And even this version of King distorts the truth to some extent.
While most people can quote verbatim the parts of the "I Have a Dream" speech where he mentions the dream of a colorblind society and judging people based on the content of their character, few seem to understand the true message of the speech. On August 28, 1963, King spoke of a society that kept Black folks on the margins. He spoke of the urgency of making "...real the promises of democracy."
Yet for all his talk about making real changes in society to ensure that the masses of Black folk are given every opportunity to make a decent living in our society, all that seems to be remembered are a few words about being colorblind. And even those words seem to be taken out of context, which is probably why even conservatives are eager to embrace them.
The moment King’s thoughts reached beyond desegregation, mainstream society wasn’t as eager to embrace him. They stopped thinking of him as the man who would help America find its way, and seemed to regard him as just another nuisance.
Perhaps they couldn’t take away his voice in the last years of his life, but the media seems intent on shaping his memory into the person they wanted him to be in the 1960’s.
When asked to limit himself to issues of racial equality, King didn’t. He actively worked to see an America where all its citizens lived the kind of life worth living. If the media and conservatives are allowed to give us their version of Martin this probably wouldn’t be what he thought of as a dream, but a nightmare.
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