Reflections On This Year's MLK Day

I hesitate to put words in the mouths of dead historical figures. How can we know what someone would say about the world if they were alive today? I can't do this with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I just can't do it, because we have no idea what he'd believe in if he'd lived through 1968 until the present day. Perhaps he takes a turn away from protesting, becoming mentally and physically exhausted with the fight for justice. Maybe he becomes more conservative, as other civil rights leaders did in the 1970s and 1980s. Or, maybe he keeps fighting the good fight. I'd like to think the last of the three, but sadly we'll never know.

However, if MLK were transported directly from that balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968, to a CNN studio in Atlanta on January 15, 2012, I'm much more confident I know what he'd say. After taking the time to catch up on decades of history, he'd be happy with the progress we've made as a nation. But he'd also be disappointed. Certainly, he'd be saddened by the people who've lost everything due to the Great Recession, shocked by the ugly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and angered by the War in Iraq. Again, this is based on what he was fighting against when his life was ended in 1968.

To be honest, he would be quite stunned to see that he has his own statue on the National Mall. He'd probably be angry about it, because he'd realize one very important fact: that most Americans simply forgot about what he was fighting for. No way anyone who spoke against not just American involvement in Vietnam, but the very military-industrial complex supporting the war effort, would get a statue. No way anyone who was fighting against that war partly because it hurt the War on Poverty at home would get a statue. Yet he did. Because the unsavory, complex stances he took in the late 1960s are mostly forgotten about. As is the fact that he was quite unpopular before he was killed.

I've grown tired of stating, year after on year on MLK's birthday, what he stood for. I hope more and more Americans learn what he was fighting for before he died, because so much of it--an end to hawkish militarism, a serious attempt to fight poverty, and a desire to see Americans truly unite beyond skin color and class--is still important to us today.

But this is true of many American heroes. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is greeted by far too many with a "Yeah, but it didn't free any actual slaves." Never mind that it was the beginning of a change in public opinion on what the Civil War had always been about. Forget the fact that it started a debate over the role of Black Americans in American society. And forget about Lincoln's own changing stance on the rights of recently freed African Americans after the war.

So it is with King. We are only supposed to see him in the vein of his "I Have a Dream" speech. But he was so much more than that. Please don't forget that.