A Tale of Two Kings

Thirty-seven years ago this month, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. In the wake of King’s brutal murder, a man with the same name and same face has been elevated to a level of reverence that no other black person in American history has achieved. This other King’s birthday is a holiday, his name graces boulevards, and a honorary monument is being erected in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, the real, infinitely more complex King sits idly by, buried in the stagnant dust of college libraries lamenting his doppelganger’s decades-long turn in the spotlight.

In the American imagination, this doppelganger King embodies the nation’s conscience; he taught us to live up to our American ethos of equality and justice for all. In a deeply Christian nation, this King becomes a modern-day Christ figure, dying for our collective sins of virulent white racism and frustrated black retaliatory rage, and leading us to a color-blind promised land that was our American destiny all along. But unfortunately for those who would cling to this fraudulent King and the sanitized version of American history he represents, no matter how many Apple Computer commercials or elementary school Black History Month celebrations he shows his face at, the false King cannot ever stamp out the real King’s greatest legacy.

This great legacy does not lie in integrated water fountains, but instead is embedded in King’s philosophy, which immediately before his death began to develop into a comprehensive and prescient critique of the symbiotic global relationship between American capitalism, racism, and imperialism. As those who would have been King’s enemies in life pay lip service to his ideals, hijacking his rhetoric for their own purposes, it is imperative that the true custodians of his legacy see to it that the true King is not lost to the dustbin of history in favor of a whitewashed figment of the national imagination.

The King of our memorials is remembered as a nonviolent agitator for black civil rights. This King supposedly managed to achieve a national consensus to grant black civil rights and was ultimately responsible for creating the purportedly racism-free environs we inhabit today. But the real King moved beyond this limited view of equality and began to incorporate elements of Third World radicalism, black nationalism, and Marxism into his understanding of geopolitics and the United States’ race problem. Confronted with the quagmire of Vietnam, the rise of Third World anti-colonialism, American imperialism (under the benign name of Cold War containment) abroad, and the entrenchment of white supremacy and privilege at home as the civil rights movement attempted to evolve to fit a ghetto landscape and address economic issues, King grew acutely aware of the forces at work in the modern world.

This King burst onto the scene most spectacularly in 1967 in an anti-Vietnam War speech that won him not monuments or holidays, but disparaging criticism. As U.S. Cold War posturing and Vietnam militarism derailed the support of the black freedom struggles of the 1960s, King began to see that America’s global imperialism, obsessive pursuit of free market capitalism, and white supremacy are intimately intertwined and connected to each other. Reconciling his profoundly humanist sentiments with the reality of modern racism, capitalism, and imperialism, King saw black civil rights as merely a prelude to the larger struggle for the achievement of a common humanity worldwide. King began to speak more frequently of blacks as a people within America, with a singular history separate to and, at times, oppositional to the dominant American value system. The black struggle in America, King eventually recognized—as W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Malcolm X had before him—was important not because it represented the last frontier for the extension of American liberalism and democracy, but because the black political tradition represents the most expansive and comprehensive vision of common humanity, social justice, and anti-militarism that modernity has had to offer.

As a diasporic people, the black political tradition has long articulated its programs and philosophies within a framework that is transnational. Blacks, as a political community, have levied moral demands and imperatives on each other that are untied to national citizenship or cultural belonging, and instead grounded in the intensely humbling experience of existing outside, or on the margins, of humanity. Concretely, this has produced amazingly inclusive conceptions of humanity and stringent demands on one’s responsibility to the world that are unmatched within the dominant American ethos.

It is this experience that allowed King, in the last years of his life, to transcend American “strategic interests” in Vietnam and call for recognition of the Vietnamese as brothers in a common struggle against imperialism. It is this experience that allowed him to consistently remind Americans, deluded by their supposed exceptionalism, to recognize the genuine, meaningful ties that bond all human beings together. And unfortunately, it is King’s evolution within this experience that may have precipitated his assassination.

In 1999, a Memphis jury ruled that King’s assassination was not the work of a lone gunman, but instead a conspiracy by individuals who, to this day, remain unnamed. I imagine King was killed because his philosophical evolution combined with his international prominence made him too dangerous to those who would wish to maintain a brutal system of white privilege, imperialist exploitation, and unchecked capitalism. Those who conspired to murder him may never be uncovered or punished. However, we can see to it that we give King some justice by not sitting idly by as a more extensive and dangerous conspiracy to kill the true legacy of King is undertaken. Read A Testament of Hope, a comprehensive collection of King’s writings and speeches, not just the ones that fit into our rose-colored vision of history and quote King not just to talk about how far we have come, but also to comment on the long road ahead—with racial disparities just as entrenched, American foreign policy gone awry, and a vision of common humanity increasingly relegated to grainy protest footage from the 1960s.

Brandon M. Terry ’05 is a government and African and African American studies concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.