Martin Luther King's Righteous Anger



Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was shot in Memphis while in town to give his support to a garbage worker's strike. By 1968 the great gains of the Civil Rights Movement -- the Voting Rights Act, for instance, had been achieved -- and Dr. King had moved on to a broader set of issues, including the Vietnam War and poverty in America. He had moved from issues affecting largely Southern communities -- Jim Crow -- to those affecting Blacks in northern ghettos. Today, we remember the early King and honor him, and try to forget the anger of the later King.


In recent weeks, as Jeremiah Wright has been pilloried for what are perceived to be anti-American and "racist" words, he is compared unfavorably to Dr. King. Dr. King, we're told, would never have spoken like this. The truth is, as Michael Dyson writes in the LA Times today, Dr. King spoke very similar things in the years before his death.

Before 1965, King was upbeat and bright, his belief in white America's ability to change by moral suasion resilient and durable. That is the leader we have come to know during annual King commemorations. After 1965, King was darker and angrier; he grew more skeptical about the willingness of America to change without great social coercion.


What is interesting to note is that by and large the strongest statements about America's complicity in poverty and war -- he accused America of War crimes in Vietnam -- came in the pulpits of Black churches. Generally his prophetic rhetoric was more muted when speaking to white audiences. Consider this -- if Barack Obama hadn't been a member of Wright's congregation, we would never have heard these words so many find offensive.

Consider this:

Perhaps nothing might surprise -- or shock -- white Americans more than to discover that King said in 1967: "I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously." In a sermon to his congregation in 1968, King openly questioned whether blacks should celebrate the nation's 1976 bicentennial. "You know why?" King asked. "Because it [the Declaration of Independence] has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives."

In the same year, King bitterly suggested that black folk couldn't trust America, comparing blacks to the Japanese who had been interred in concentration camps during World War II. "And you know what, a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the '40s ... will put black people in a concentration camp. And I'm not interested in being in any concentration camp. I been on the reservation too long now." Earlier, King had written that America "was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race."


I believe that Dr. King should be honored by our nation. But as we honor him, let us not forget that he was a prophet whose words offended many at the time they were spoken. Many who now want to claim him as a kind of a dreamer, wish to set aside the other side. Dyson suggests that in many ways, Obama and Wright capture the two dimensions of King's persona and message. He did dream of a new day; but he also offered trenchant prophet statements about the failings of this nation.

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