Note from the Editor-in-Chief: This article was previously published at the now-shuttered Wear Your Voice in 2020, where I was EIC. This piece was part of a series written by Musa Springer titled “Words Mean Things.” It has been lightly edited for adherence to Prism’s editorial style guide and for length.

In schools across the U.S., few Black names grace the pages of curricula as frequently and with more energy than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. From memorizing his most popular speeches to learning almost exclusively about his “nonviolent” tactics, as well as hearing all about his alleged love for racial integration, the Southern activist, writer, and preacher is folded into a choir of respectability and tiresome misconception. 

While a certain docile, priestly Martin Luther King Jr. is trained into the minds of most Americans from a young age in classrooms, this is not the only space such a Martin exists: Hanging on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in barbershops and across university campuses, with statues and sculptures in public parks, on the names of popular streets, even in courthouses and government buildings, a ghost of Martin remains memorialized into peaceful godliness. 

His words are typically cherry-picked, snatched from their context, intellectual depth, and usually-searing societal indictments, and turned into a certain kind of motivational quote. In just a few decades since his sinister assassination, King has become a symbol of equality, integration, and lawfulness, all things he did not get to witness during his tenure on earth, and none of us have yet to witness either. 

When someone becomes larger than life and is violently forced out of life itself, how can one cut through the nonsense to intimate the most accurate legacy? How do we collectively move beyond the intentional distortions of a beautifully dangerous man’s politics and into a space of powerful reclamation? When liberals and conservatives equally throw his name around like it’s worth little, like he’s the next word that means everything and nothing at all, how do we remind people that names, legacies, and words mean things? 

We start by knowing what it is that King himself actually believed, what word he preached, what practice he cultivated, what politics he espoused, and what growth he experienced. One can’t defend a person’s legacy until they actually know that legacy. 

Race and colorblindness

Of all the distortions of King’s beliefs, the widely believed notion that King believed in and earnestly called for a “colorblind” society may be the most insidious. A so-called colorblind approach to race, which is most evident when one asserts that they “don’t see race,” is responsible for its own violent form of racism, because claiming to “not see” race or color means one also doesn’t see power, privilege, or violence which shapes our daily lives. 

Many of us have never known the luxury of not seeing race, of not feeling it singe our fingertips at some point in life, and many of the same individuals who claim such racial politics also believe we live in a “post-racial” society (a lie for another day). The belief in a colorblind or post-racial society would assert that mass incarceration, police violence, racist, imperialist wars, racialized poverty, gentrification, and all of the racist systemic issues we can see around us are nonexistent, or at least nonracial. To believe such an assertion is to believe in the tooth fairy and, in short, could not be further from the fruits of Martin’s beliefs. 

Individuals usually carefully choose selections from King’s world-famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech to uphold the belief that King’s worldview mirrored something colorblind, particularly, “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.”

While the above quote could make some feel warm inside, it is not the totality of King’s words or his political trajectory. He gave speeches long before “I Have a Dream” and continued giving them until he was killed. Historians have noted that the feel-good and dreamy words often quoted were likely used intentionally, as the speech was given in front of one of the largest crowds he’d ever see, and King wanted to engage as many listeners as possible. 

In other speeches and sermons, however, King is less bubbly. In his 1968 sermon “The Drum Major Instinct,” King states: 

“… The poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice he is forced to support his [own] oppressors. And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he’s superior because his skin is white—and can’t hardly eat and make his ends meet week in and week out.” 

Here, King clearly shows that he not only sees race, but sees through it: that he sees what makes it operate, what makes the white worker tick, and he even makes a connection to U.S. militarism in the next sentence, stating that “not only does this thing go into the racial struggle, it goes into the struggle between nations.”

King rode a Montgomery bus on Dec. 21, 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of Alabama buses.

Another glaring example that “colorblindness” is, in fact, antithetical to everything King stood for is in the 1967 speech “Where Do We Go From Here?”:

“Now, in order to answer the question, ‘Where do we go from here?’ which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share: There are twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites; and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population. […]

Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amid a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being Black.”

While the befuddling of Martin’s racial politics may seem innocent or minuscule to some, in reality, it’s a crucial element of his adoption into the building of capitalism’s hegemonic narration of history. The claim of King’s colorblindness rests in the same vein as the belief that Barack Obama’s presidency was a declaration of a post-racial society, a declaration that is laughable at best and the central theme of violence in honesty. 

A radical internationalist

In his notable 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King reminded the crowd that “silence is betrayal” while discussing the need for the masses to be engaged in ending the U.S. war against Vietnam. He stated that “there is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam, and the struggle I and others have been waging in America.” 

Then he expands—noting multiple reasons for his anti-war stance—that the war against Vietnam instantly eclipsed any programs which claimed to fix Black poverty in America, the hypocrisy that “Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” that Black and white youth were unable to go to the same schools despite being forced to fight against the Vietnamese together, that the U.S. government was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world from Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, and so on. 

The speech is a lengthy, hearty, and passionate anti-war diatribe that succinctly uses the cries and hypocrisy of the American ghettos to string together a formidable argument against U.S. imperialist wars. Written by Dr. Vincent Harding, activist, historian, and close confidant to King, the speech is also not without moments of criticism. While the speech remains a critique of capitalism and calls for a war on poverty, there are unneeded and somewhat random appeals to anticommunism in certain sections of the speech. Some historians have attributed this to the Red Scare moment in which King found himself, wherein being labeled a communist or publicly supporting communism would have ensured a lengthy prison sentence or worse. 

Despite its faults, “Beyond Vietnam” remains a powerful and intense example of King’s complex internationalist politics. However, this speech wasn’t King’s only moment of internationalist clarity. In 1957, King and his family traveled to the newly independent Ghana at the invitation of revolutionary President Kwame Nkrumah, spending almost two weeks with Nkrumah and other revolutionaries from around the world and, as King described it, “weeping” at the sight of the British flag being lowered and the Ghanaian flag taking its place. 

During a radio interview in Accra, King told listeners that “[Ghanaian independence], the birth of this new nation, will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world,” claiming that “it will have worldwide implications and repercussions—not only for Asia and Africa but also for America.” And despite an obvious focus on Ghanaian politics during his time there, this was not the limits of his scope: At his request, King also met privately with anti-Apartheid activists and Nkrumah to discuss their struggles and their methods of protest and action to both learn from them and impart wisdom to them. 

During this same period, King also traveled to Nigeria, Rome, Paris, Geneva, and London, where he met with Trinidadian revolutionary and scholar C.L.R. James. The experiences of this trip would prove foundational to his politics and understanding of the world, as details from the trip found themselves places in several sermons and speeches afterward. 

For example, just weeks after returning from Ghana, King stated in a sermon:

“You also know that for years and for centuries, Africa has been one of the most exploited continents in the history of the world. It’s been the “dark continent.” It’s been the continent that has suffered all of the pain and affliction that could be mustered up by other nations. And it is that continent which has experienced slavery, which has experienced all of the lowest standards that we can think about, and it’s been brought into being by the exploitation inflicted upon it by other nations.”

King’s award-winning 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here,” was written in isolation in Jamaica, an island that appealed to King both in leisure and politics. In this book, King takes several moments to reflect on Africa and the Black American relation to the continent, its cultures and histories, and political developments, writing, “The Negro is the child of two cultures—Africa and America.” Later he states that “the hard cold facts today indicate that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structure of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.” 

Finally, in an indicting passage of the book, King states:

“In country after country, we see white men building empires on the sweat and suffering of colored people. Portugal continues its practices of slave labor and subjugation in Angola; the Ian Smith government in Rhodesia continues to enjoy the support of British-based industry and private capital, despite the stated opposition of British government policy. Even in the case of the little country of South West Africa we find the powerful nations of the world incapable of taking a moral position against South Africa, though the smaller country is under the trusteeship of the United Nations.”

Still riddled with jarring anticommunism in many places, King’s internationalist perspective is quite clear and constructed precisely nonetheless. And it is because of this anti-war perspective that we must procure his radical legacy from the likes of warmongers and imperialists, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama to John and Megan McCain, to the very institutions that ended his life like the FBI.

Reclamation

The task of reclaiming, maintaining, or uplifting the radical legacy of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. is daunting, and many, like scholar Breya M. Johnson, say he’s been assassinated twice, first in body, then in legacy. “When I think about Dr. King, I think about how they killed him twice,” says Johnson. “I think about the price we pay when white people take up our ‘legacy.’

“More importantly,” she says, “I think about how a once deeply anti-war and anti-capitalist and nonviolent man’s work can now be deployed to stifle transformation. Capitalism is also an ideology that shapes how we view the world, and in the case of Dr. King, capitalism has co-opted hope—made it individualistic and passive.”

While it is true that under capitalism, the very word hope has been co-opted and turned upside down, we must also understand that this is the nature of the beast we’re fighting. Like Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Assata Shakur, and countless freedom fighters of yesteryear, a legacy is an active thing, a verb, a transgressive appeal to memory that we must form a community around and continually raise. 

In the case of King, there is a reason that when I enter the hallways of the Centro Martin Luther King Jr. in Havana, on a small but revolutionary island, his true spirit fills the air. There’s a reason why his name conjures emotion in Vietnam and resembles pride in Ghana and across the African continent just as much as here in Atlanta. It’s because the spirit of a true revolutionary can never be distorted, misconstrued, or abused to the point of no return and will always live on for those who need it.