Forty-eight years ago this April, we were forced to bid an appallingly premature farewell to Martin Luther King's physical presence. Those four-dozen years have not been kind to his legacy. In place of the scholar, preacher and activist who demanded that "justice roll down like the waters, righteousness like a mighty stream," we now tend to find a mere orator, delivering only comfortable, familiar and inoffensive rhetoric. A bullet killed the man, but time and neglect have to a great extent deprived us of his great soul.
Among those who have, in recent years, worked to remind us why we should commemorate King's life is Tavis Smiley. In the introduction to his Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year, Smiley says,
[H]is martyrdom has undermined his message. As a public figure who fearlessly challenged the status quo, he has been sanitized and oversimplified. The values for which he lived and died - justice for all, service to others, and a love that liberates, no matter the cost - are largely forgotten. He is no longer a threat, but merely an idealistic dreamer to be remembered for a handful of fanciful speeches. That may be the Martin Luther King that the world wishes to remember, but it is not the Martin Luther King that I have come to better understand and love even more.
As Smiley shows, King's final year was brutal. A year to the day before he was assassinated, he delivered the speech at New York's historic Riverside Church in which he first articulated a resounding condemnation, and call for the end, of the Vietnam War. As self-evidently reasonable as such a speech might seem today, King was at the time almost universally pilloried for it, and for much of the work that followed. But he soldiered on, wounded but undeterred. Says Smiley,
The King that moves me most is the man who, during the final season of his earthly journey, faced a torrent of vicious assaults from virtually every segment of society, most painfully from his own people. ...
This is the King that I cherish: the King who, enduring a living hell, rises to moral greatness; the King who, in the face of unrelenting adversity, expresses the full measure of his character and courage. This is the King who, despite everything, spoke his truth, the man I consider the greatest public figure this country has ever produced.
As we prepare to observe another Martin Luther King Day, let's remember the man for what he was, rather than as the pale shadow that time and our own neglect threaten to make him. In Death of a King, Tavis Smiley gives us a valuable guide in our search for the great soul, rather than the fading memories, of Martin Luther King.