![](http://colorlines.com/images/logo.png)
We Twisted King’s Dream, So We Live With His Nightmare
by Tim Wise
January 17, 2011
It’s been a rough year for Martin Luther King, Jr., and for his legacy.
First, as has become an annual ritual, politicians went to church or some other civic gathering for last year’s King Day celebration, even as they continued to support public policies that he found abhorrent. Whether continuing to prosecute a seemingly endless and most definitely murderous war, or by supporting cuts to vital social programs, there is no shortage of hypocrisy when it comes to proclaiming fealty to King’s vision in words, while besmirching it in deeds, all at once.
We have turned King into a milquetoast moderate whose agenda went little beyond the ability to sit next to white people on a bus. We’ve stripped away from the public remembrance of this man his calls for income redistribution, his insistence that the United States has become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and his proclamation that poverty, racism and militarism are the “triple evils” that America’s rulers have not the courage to confront.
The way in which we have forgotten or been misled about King’s legacy is never more apparent than when asking children what they know about his message. Sadly, when I have done so, the most typical answer given is that King stood for not “hitting people,” or “not hitting back if they hit you first,” or that his message would be, were he alive today, “don’t join a gang.” While all these things are true I suppose, they rather miss the point.
After all, King’s commitment to non-violence had a purpose larger than non-violence itself. Non-violence was, for King and the movement, a means to a larger end of social, political and economic justice. Non-violence was a tactic meant to topple racism and economic exploitation, and lead the world away from cataclysmic warfare. That so many young people seem not to get that part, because teachers are apparently loathe to give it to them, renders King’s non-violent message no more particularly important than the banal parental reminder that we should “use our words” to resolve conflicts, rather than our fists. Thanks, but if that message were all it took to get a national holiday named for you, my mother would have had her own years ago.
Please read the full article at:
http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/01/tim_wise_kings_legacy_took_a_beating_in_2010.html#