Having been robbed of his physical life nearly 48 years ago, Martin Luther King has since been robbed of his legacy as well. Today, as in the middle of every January, corporate media will NOT do a good job of reminding us of King's unwavering calls for radical love and radical justice. Instead, we'll see the same now-mundane, extremely brief film clips we've seen hundreds of times before, preceded and followed by a few quick, warm, vacuous and extremely fuzzy pontifications - and that'll be about it for another year. It's likely that we as individuals won't do much better. The odds of our going cover-to-cover with a substantive King biography are microscopic. Spend a few hours re-reading complete texts of key speeches and sermons? Maybe. But don't bet on it. Instead, the vast majority of us will settle for the airbrushed, barely extant ghost of a man presented annually by corporate media. And Martin Luther King will continue to grow ever more wraith-like in America's collective (un)consciousness.
Or ...
This year, we could take it upon ourselves as individuals to re-engage - personally - with the REAL Martin Luther King - in his own words. Cornel West provides an excellent opportunity to do so in his collection of King's writings, speeches and sermons, The Radical King. In the book's introduction West reminds us that,
The radical King was a warrior for peace on the domestic and global battlefields. He was a staunch anti-colonial and anti-imperial thinker and fighter. His revolutionary commitment to nonviolent resistance in America and abroad tried to put a brake on the escalating militarism running amok across the globe. As a decade-long victim of the vicious and vindictive FBI, King was a radical libertarian as well as having closeted democratic socialist leanings. ... The radical King was a democratic socialist who sided with poor and working people in the class struggle taking place in capitalist societies. This class struggle may be visible or invisible, manifest or latent. But it rages on in a fight over resources, power, and space. In the past thirty years we have witnessed a top-down, one-sided class war against poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes, and cutting spending for those who are already socially neglected and economically abandoned.
Included in West's anthology is King's definitive explanation of why he was driven to do all he did, "Letter from Birmingham Jail." There's the speech he gave one year to the day before his assassination, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence." In hindsight, it might not seem remarkable that King condemned the war in April 1967, but at the time his doing so was not only radical - it was almost universally condemned. Among many other fine examples of the radical King is "The Bravest Man I Ever Met," a tribute to the great American socialist Norman Thomas.
We could (fail to) observe this Martin Luther King Day by sitting idly by while corporate media further bleaches the bones of his legacy. Or we as individual citizens can resolve to do better. In The Radical King, Cornel West offers a particularly good opportunity for the latter option.