In Search of the Real King

Over and over again people ask, “What else do

you want?”  They feel that everything is all right.  Well,

let them look around at our big cities.  Let them look

around Chicago, where a system of internal colonialism

flourished in the slums not unlike the exploitation of the

Congo by Belgium.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our memories of Dr. King have been shrewdly pigeonholed into the comfortable moment of his August 1963, “I Have a Dream” speech.  The King who uttered the statement quoted above is virtually unknown today.  He offered this scathing observation in January 1966 after the rude awakening he experienced when he attempted to bring his Southern-style, direct action, non-violent protest movement to what was supposed to be the Promise Land of the more liberal North.

Tragically, the “internal colonialism” he recognized in America’s urban centers then continues to stubbornly persist today.  It is pervasive.  It is systemic.  It is intensified.

It is more debilitating now because it is more sinister.  It has an altered face, but the parasitic relationships remain the same and the effects of those consequences continue to be international in both implication and scope.  Immigrant merchants—Arabs, Koreans, Chinese—seeking freedom and opportunity are the new domestic colonizers in black communities today.

The reality of American domestic colonialism in an emerging 21^st century further underscores a conclusion of King’s published in Playboy Magazine during that same period: “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be changed without radical changes in the structure of our society.”  In Where Do We Go From Here, he wrote, “Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering.  Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering. By this measure, Negroes have not yet paid in full the price for freedom.  And whites have not yet faced the full cost of justice.”  Such statements reveal King the Dreamer to be King the visionary, the penetrating social critic and commentator as well.

We are now in the third decade of a new millennium, and King’s observations seem even more accurate today.  Mainstream America still asks, “What else do you want?”  Only now, the “target” audience being questioned has expanded beyond African Americans to include women, the Latinx communities (the soon-to-be new majority), Asians, new Americanized Africans (2^nd and 3^rd generation children of post-colonial African immigrants), other non-whites and the increasingly well-organized LGBTQ+ community.

The presence of high profile Black MAGA Conservatives like Tim Scott or Candace Owens or Danielle Carter-Walters or Ben Carson cannot negate the true nature of the Trumpian, “Make America Great Again” vision.  The cruel irony of George H. W. Bush’s selection of Clarence Thomas as the replacement for Civil Rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court only served to mock King’s real legacy.  The 20^th century Civil Rights agenda has been turned on its battered and bruised head.  Real progress has been obscured inside meaningless platitudes and empty ceremonial rhetoric. 

King’s contributions have been entombed with him and his complete evolution as a leader has been glossed over.  His message is now filtered through carefully selected “Head-Negro-in-Charge” talking heads.  It is no small wonder people are confused.  The real King has become an unfathomable riddle tucked away inside the annual observance of his birth as a national holiday.  Each January, we are encouraged to “keep the dream alive,” while discounting the fact that by 1967 even he was forced to reassess the state of that dream.

He recognized that his dream had become a cruel nightmare for too many.  His positions on a number of still controversial subjects like the Viet Nam war and American foreign policy or his Poor Peoples’ Campaign and the redistribution of America’s wealth have been minimized.  Status quo opinion shapers are not willing to acknowledge just how unpopular King had become during the last years of his life.  It is almost as if he is finally safe and acceptable now that he is dead and no longer capable of speaking to us in the moment.

They pay no heed to the King that cautioned, “A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.  With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, ‘This is not just.’  It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, ‘This is not just.’  The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”

Today, too many leaders—black, white or otherwise—are no more worthy of our trust than they were during King’s time.  Like Malcolm X, King has become something in death he never could have been in life.  We tend to forget that he was a man, husband and father in the face of a media machine that has cast him in larger-than-life terms.  Since his assassination, the tendency has been to limit recollections of him solely to the oratorical magnificence of his defining moment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  As a national icon, his image has been sanitized and frozen in a time warp.

The radical evolution of his philosophy and approach during the last five years of his life must become the true measure for all who claim to be disciples of his work and the standard by which to judge our own efforts.  If we study Dr. King and Malcolm X more thoroughly, we can read their words and listen to their recorded speeches for guidance instead of trying to imagine what we think they might be saying today.  They are literally speaking back to us from the House of the Ancestors and their wisdom is more relevant now.

Rather than bow to his critics, King boldly echoed the sentiments of the voiceless and the dispossessed—real people that have always been locked out of the hallowed American Dream.  He understood, “… they wonder what kind of nation it is that applauds non-violence whenever Negroes face white people in the streets of the United States but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same Negroes are sent to the field of Viet Nam.”

I have no doubt he would still be questioning the nature and the impact of America’s domestic and foreign policies.  One does not have to wonder what he would be saying about the implications of the military being the only real opportunity where young African Americans and other peoples of color can become “all they can be.”  It remains troubling that military service appears to be the best way to “escape” communities mired in mass spiritual, cultural and economic deprivation.

King’s provocative anti-war stance coupled with his clear analysis of America’s volatile class, religious, and racial divisions are aspects of his legacy that are too conveniently disregarded today.  When viewed through the lens of the aborted Poor Peoples’ Campaign, it is apparent he had expanded his vision to encompass the global connotations of the African American experience.  Like Malcolm X, King saw that the “Negro problem” was, and remains, a world problem—a “problem of humanity.”

By 1968, he realized the federal government could not provide solutions to the problem

precisely because it was a major part of the problem.  According to Stephen Oates, in Let The Trumpet Sound, Dr. King was fully engaged in a “class movement against the national economic power corporations and business moguls of capitalism itself.”  We have to look back and see the Poor Peoples’ Campaign as a more militant shift in the direction of the movement.  King’s essential vision did not stay frozen at the 1963 March on Washington.

In, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Eric Dyson takes us back to King traveling through the south drumming up support for his Poor People’s March on Washington.  He writes, “… his life would be snuffed out a mere three weeks before his massive campaign reached its destination.  But King hammered home the rationale behind his attempt to unite the desperately poor.  He understood that the government owed something to the masses of black folk who had been left behind as America parceled out land and money to whites while exploiting black labor.”

He reminds us that King pointed out, “… through an act of Congress, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor…. But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm.  Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming.  Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms.”

His argument makes it clear that he was linking white privilege and governmental support directly to black suffering.  He underscored the hypocrisy of the “whites who have been helped demanding that blacks thrive through self-help.”  Dyson writes, “King reinforces his identification with the destitute, reiterates his belief that the government has failed in its fiduciary obligations to blacks, and subverts the stereotypes of blacks shiftlessly waiting around for government cash by insisting that blacks deserve what is coming to them.”  In other words, the objective of his Poor People’s March can now be viewed within the call for reparations.

The real King is there to be found if we study the whole span of his career as a leader.  His “Drum Major for Justice” and “A Time to Break Silence” speeches may be his most relevant offerings for us to reconsider in the present post-Obama/Trump/MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN predicament.  At a time when the world is challenging American global hegemony, and 47 ordered military strikes on alleged “drug traffickers” off the coast of Venezuela and on ISIS targets in Nigeria, to hear King ask, “Who made America the world’s policeman?” poses an even more compelling implication today.

The current rise in racial, gender, religious and class tensions are symptoms of this nation’s refusal to embrace King’s essential message.  More than two decades before South Central Los Angeles erupted in response to the Rodney King verdict and more than forty years before today’s black youth mobilized in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement, he warned that “…disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and … the one thing certain about bitterness is blindness.  Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all.”

In this post 9/11 world, his point can be applied to more than just the specter of urban unrest in the United States.  If anything, his words are too eerily current.  They still implore us to remain vigilant and to look for honest and equitable solutions to combat the fabricated evils that continue to plague us.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was first and foremost a spiritual leader and a social reformer.  He sought a radical reconstruction of American society.  He called for, “a revolution of values.” 

The true nature of the struggle has not changed.  The quality of this nation’s future is tied directly to its willingness to lift the horizons of those people arbitrarily consigned to the socioeconomic bottom.  The fact that American domestic policy has international ramifications remains a given.  The results of its success or failure will be visited upon the heads of those generations waiting to be born, while the present generation of American young people struggles under the weight of the backward-looking chaos that has been thrust upon them.

African American communities are being confronted daily by a generation of our own youth who are totally disconnected from not only the historical movement that produced both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, but that produced them as well. They are the generation the successes and failures of the Civil Rights Movement created. The fact they now stand before us looking like strangers says more about us, their elders, than it can ever say about them.

Martin and Malcolm are still there trying to wake us up.  They both warned, “There is such a time as too late!”