How we get Dr. King wrong: “We’ve deliberately dismembered him,” Michael Eric Dyson tells Salon
"The full story is: Here was a man who made most Americans, black and white, uncomfortable"
JOSH EIDELSON
“In the last thirty years we have trapped King in romantic images or frozen his legacy in worship,” Michael Eric Dyson wrote in his 2000 book “I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.” Since King’s 1968 assassination, Dyson argued, America has “sanitized his ideas”; “twisted his identity”; and “ceded control of his image to a range of factions …”
Fourteen years later, Martin Luther King remains sainted and distorted in American culture and politics. In an interview with Salon, Dyson revisited that argument, and offered criticism for Glenn Beck, Bill Cosby and Barack Obama. “We’ve deliberately dismembered him through manipulation of his memory,” said Dyson, a Georgetown professor and MSNBC commentator. A condensed version of our conversation follows.
You wrote, “We have surrendered to romantic images of King at the Lincoln Memorial inspiring America to reach for a better future,” while “we forget his poignant warning against gradual racial progress and his remarkable threat of revolution should our nation fail to keep its promises.” How did that forgetting happen?
Well, I think there’s a kind of a deliberate dis-memory on the parts of those who are most challenged by King’s vision, and the demands of his dreams — not the rhetoric that flows so easily from that mountaintop of holy sacrifice and that sunlit summit of expectations that he expressed in 1963. The rigorous demand for social justice that he articulated once he descended from that mountaintop experience, and revisited the valley where horrible crimes against black humanity were being committed. Where little girls were being blown to smithereens in church bombings. Where black people continued to be lynched in the Delta and murdered along the highways and byways of American culture.
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http://www.salon.com/2014/01/20/how_we_get_dr_king_wrong_we%E2%80%99ve_deliberately_dismembered_him_michael_eric_dyson_tells_salon/
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The segregationists, of course, hated him for his successful mobilizations against the Jim Crow system
But conservatives, more generally, began to hate him for his progressive views, even when they did not want to support the segregationists: King supported poor people's movements; he took aim against US support for the South African apartheid regime, at a time when Cold Warriors viewed South Africa as part of the bulwark against "world communism"; and finally he became to oppose the Vietnam war
Mainstream politicians, who typically want neither to be the first nor the last to adopt a position, were often uncomfortable with King because his organizing pushed people outside their comfort zones, demanding that change begin within some definite time-frame, rather than being delayed again and again to an indefinite future, along the vague lines of the Brown v Board of Education instruction to proceed with all deliberate speed
On the other side of the political spectrum, King's insistence on principled nonviolence aiming for ordinary political compromises was sometimes dismissed as namby-pamby reformism, given (say) the eternal procrastinations associated with Jim Crow
These divisions in views of King persisted long after his death. But in fact, he was excellent mass-movement leader with both rhetorical and strategic skills
