On Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, I read two things other than my traditional rereading of the Letter from Birmingham Jail. I reread part of the historian Taylor Branch’s three-part America in the King Years masterwork. And I read a CNN article: “The white moderates MLK warned us about.” The second did its level best to ruin the day for me because it reminded me that even the most important history is now processed solely through aphorisms and buzzwords. As the CNN article and many left-wing commentators have pointed out, today’s Right fixates on the quote he uttered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in his most famous speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The reason this quote is taken as the apotheosis of King’s theory of race is that it is. That it would now be considered an unfashionable thought in many left-wing magazines who enthuse over Ibram X. Kendi does not change history. Nor does it mean King is somehow a right-wing figure now, which you can find out by reading him on economic policy. What invites so much cherry-picking around King is that he’s an icon, a saint of the American civil religion, so everyone wants to claim him. But the man was also a man and a complicated thinker, which means nobody really agrees with his entire program of thought. I admire King’s radical commitment to nonviolence, for example, but I do not share it.
The way to honor King’s complexity is to sit down and read his writing. This is what CNN commentator Victor Ray suggests, too, in bringing up another famous quote, the section from the Letter from Birmingham Jail about “the white moderates.” The problem is, Ray apparently didn’t read the words he’s putting to such petty use. Famously, King wrote that white moderates represented the biggest obstacle to his movement. The moderates King decried were early 1960s liberals who were notionally on his side but didn’t care quite enough to risk the turmoil of passing the Civil Rights Act or marching themselves. His broader point was that merely holding the right views is not enough. Somehow, in CNN, Ray has contorted this into the view that to honor King’s legacy requires disapproving of “Manchin and Sinema’s procedural complaints about the filibuster.” It’s as though, magically, the politics of key moments in American history are always playing out again in the petty present. If Ray had read the Letter from Birmingham Jail, he’d know that King, taking the long view of history using counterintuitive rhetoric, decries moderates who don’t take extreme stances in support of justice and glorifies “extremists,” including Thomas Jefferson.
“Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist?” King asked. “Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here.” Amen, reverend.
This is not exactly what today would get called “woke.” So, who gets to claim King, and who does not? Everyone — but unless you are King himself, only somewhat. The only people who may not claim him at all are people who invoke him for exigent political purposes without reading even his most famous works. Let’s not minimize history as we reevaluate it, because the past is not Twitter. It’s about more than clever quotes.
