"Thank God Almighty I'm free at last."
-MLK
As intimidating as it is to take on such a subject as the legacy of the good Rev Dr, we ought to have at it.
The first thing that I think about when I think about MLK is a scene in which I am standing on his shoulders, surveying the promised land, which is a green valley and a great glittering city. We are on a hill which represents the Civil Rights Movement. I look to the valley and to the mountains beyond, only barely visible. I never look behind. He says he has been to the mountaintop, and I am there with him ready to run down into the valley - but I've seen the mountains beyond the valley and they are constantly on my mind.
The second image is that of black and white children playing patty cake somewhere at the foot of Stone Mountain.
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As long as I've been on the web, I have despaired of the King family allowing MLKs papers be published and available for free. It strikes me as a sorrowful legacy, one that's simply broke, one of tragic miscalculation. The reason is money, and nobody has met the family's price. So for a message putatively for the world, it has gone unheard for the lack of the proper payday. So we've been left with a less than clear way to assess his intentions.
I've never been able to think about any wrong King might have done in principle until I understood the Black Power criticism which was that King mistook non-violence for a principle, when in fact it is nothing more than a tactic. King's solution was thus a Negro solution which couched all possibilities for dissent in the context of a citizen's dissent, and not of a human's dissent. Human dissent includes the threat of violence, the dissent of a citizen can be only that of political protest and petition. And thus King could only be a leader of those Americans who were satisfied that the level of injustice heaped upon the Negro could be reconciled within the political confines of American democracy.
It is wrestling with the implications of this final matter that occupies my thoughts about King today and it is, I think ultimately where I must be satisfied with him. King therefore represents to me the bright line between radicalism and reform. King may have been called a radical, but against the background of human history, he was not. King used all of his skills to highlight a contradiction between the promise and the presence of democratic justice in society. King used power in such a way as so it would disaggregate after his demise - he did not use it in any conventional way to force change. He was a one man minority whip who gained a democratic majority. He was the ultimate citizen-Senator outside of the formal Congress.
Like Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry, he was able to electrify the people and gain an extraordinary consensus of action and purpose. It is why, like them, he is a great patriot and perhaps the greatest of all patriots.
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The image of King on the mountaintop is of *my* King, a black king making promises to a black people. It is in that regard that I find he can be questioned. As the great American patriot, his electrification of the government and of the people found expression in the passage of laws guaranteeing equal defense of civil rights for all - not quite a Constitutional amendment, but certainly the most significant legislation of the era. In that act he is *everyone's* King and in that regard cannot be questioned. Why he must do double duty has everything to do with black expectations of their own trajectory towards freedom and blackfolks' very definitions of freedom.
The American Middle Class is free, as free as the Founders intended, as free as anyone would defend their rights to be free. Free enough to determine their fate. Free enough to self-destruct tragically. I am free. And so I don't expect anything more of MLK. Others do not believe they are free, and so they have greater use for him than I. It is the very controversy of my claim that I think generates friction.
King has no legacy save the effect he had on American government and on American attitudes. He did not aggregate power and so there is no well of power remaining. He did not collect money, nor build buildings. He didn't amass an army or grab land. He didn't build a church or run for office. He lived to be a catalyst in a reaction that would end without a need for re-ignition. I am confident that this was a conscious omission, one generated out of his Christian sensibilities. He would build no earthly kingdom. He would pass no such power to his heirs. It is in that breach that we find people scratching their heads wondering what King might do or what King might say. People who are dissatisfied with the freedom his reaction delivered. People who wish to recreate the old formula. The time is long past, and if there is any truth in what King said but left undone, then it is to that message and not to King that the future belongs.
Every man is born free and every man must fight to stay free. The amount of freedom depends upon the amount of the fight, because enslavers are everywhere, even in ourselves. King's fight reminded us all of that and he fought for us so that we might remember nothing is conceded without a struggle and that some freedoms are worth dying for. But King would not say which freedoms were worth killing for, and that left him the leader of men who would talk, walk and sit in jails. Of men who would endure cruelty for the sake of a moral argument. But such are not the fullness of man's desire to be free, but man's desire to be avoid combat. Thus King is the author of our comfortable freedom, and so long as we can enjoy it in comfort, we need only thank MLK.
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