Historians fear MLK’s legacy being lost
From AP:
Nearly 40 years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., some say his legacy is being frozen in a moment in time that ignores the full complexity of the man and his message.
[...]
King was working on anti-poverty and anti-war issues at the time of his death. He had spoken out against the Vietnam War and was in Memphis when he was killed in April 1968 in support of striking sanitation workers.
King had come a long way from the crowds who cheered him at the 1963 March on Washington, when he was introduced as “the moral leader of our nation” – and when he pronounced “I have a dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
By taking on issues outside segregation, he had lost the support of many newspapers and magazines, and his relationship with the White House had suffered…
[...]
But he took on issues of poverty and militarism because he considered them vital “to make equality something real and not just racial brotherhood but equality in fact”…
[Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University] believes it’s important for Americans in 2008 to remember how disliked King was before his death in April 1968.
“If we forget that, then it seems like the only people we can get behind must be popular,” Harris-Lacewell said. “Following King meant following the unpopular road, not the popular one.”
Read the rest here.
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No doubt if King’s wider message were better known, he would not be so popular.
I find his message so close to CST. And I agree, with Blackadder. People want to make him someone easy to like. That was Dorothy Day’s greatest fear; becoming a Saint and therefore letting everyone else off the hook.
I fear that’s also what has happened to Jesus.
Fr. Neuhaus — who as a Lutheran pastor and activist in the 60′s — has a lengthy tribute to MLK (together with a review of several of his biographers). He questions the extent to which some of King’s companions/biographers have tried to present him as some kind of “revolutionary socialist in the Marxist vein”. For example some of his family are of the opinion that he was assassinated by the government because he was on the verge of bringing it to its knees (the ill-fated “Poor People’s Campaign” of 1968). Neuhaus suggests that King is in danger of being “appropriated” by the radical left as much as he is ‘tamed’ by the praise of the right.
He has some interesting stories — about his last meeting with Dr. King at lunch:
In New York, a few months before his death, we had lunch, together with Young and Al Lowenstein, an activist who would later be murdered by one of his protégés, and King turned philosophical about the limits of political change. It was a leisurely and convivial lunch. The restaurant had been alerted that “the famous Dr. King” was coming, and the waiter assumed that the white man in the clerical collar must be he, and so throughout the lunch addressed me as “Dr. King.” It both astonished and amused that one of the most famous people in the world was not recognized, and King enjoyed it immensely, taking the opportunity to smoke cigarettes throughout lunch, a regular habit that he usually indulged only in private. Among many other things, we talked about the abiding wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr and the need to recognize the distinction between the morally imperative and the historically possible, agreeing also on the moral imperative to press the historically possible.
and this, about the tendency of the media to emphasize the political ramifications of King’s message while ignoring the root:
I recall rallies when, in the course of his preaching, King would hold forth on the theological and moral foundations of the movement. The klieg lights and cameras shut down, only to be turned on again when he returned to specifically political or programmatic themes. “Watch the lights,” he commented. “They’re not interested in the most important parts.”
Probably more dangerous than his broader social agenda is the way that MLK’s religious impetus for his activism has been swept under the rug my contemporary progressives.
Blackadder, I agree 100%
Isn’t Fr. Neuhaus “stepping out of his range of expertise” on this one?
adamv – I agree.
From ‘The Right Side of the Web’:
In the 1960s, Neuhaus was an activist pastor at St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church, whose parish extended into the largely black ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. From the pulpit, Neuhaus preached against the Vietnam War and for social justice. Neuhaus took his anti-war and other progressive beliefs—which he grounded in Christian theology—out of the church and into the streets. In the late 1960s Neuhaus gained national prominence as the cofounder of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. Berger, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who, like Neuhaus, later became a neocon ideologue, joined Neuhaus on the national steering committee of the anti-war group. In 1970, Berger and Neuhaus published Movement and Revolution, a collection of essays on the progressive movement. Included in the volume was an essay entitled “The Thorough Revolutionary” written by Neuhaus. “A revolution of consciousness, no doubt,” wrote Neuhaus in his defense of “the Movement.” “A cultural revolution, certainly. A non-violent revolution, perhaps. An armed overthrow of the existing order, it may be necessary. Revolution for the hell of it or revolution for a new world, but revolution, Yes” (The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology, p. 282).
Neuhaus’ fellow revolutionary enthusiast Berger soon became disillusioned with the Movement, and by the mid-1970s both Neuhaus and Berger had dropped revolution—and progressivism—for the reactionary politics of the ascendant neoconservative camp.
So yes, I’d say as a “recovering progressive” Neuhaus is sufficiently acquainted to comment on radical politics.
I don’t think I knew that little bit of Neuhaus’ past. Very interesting.
So tell me… Did he and Michael Novak go completely crazy together, or separately? ;)