The King Celebration is Postponed. Was it all only a dream?

Tomorrow was to be the day the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr would be officially opened to the public. The long awaited dedication, finally set on a date that was to coincide with the 48th anniversary of King's delivery of best known speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, has been postponed due to the threat posed by Hurricane Irene. Dignitaries from the President to the surviving hero-footsoldiers of the Civil Rights movement were scheduled to address an audience estimated to exceed a quarter-million people.

As of this date, no new dedication date has been announced. I pray one is chosen soon. No event or symbolic ceremony is more needed at this moment than a recollection of the man who showed us how a revolution for social justice should be fought and why constant struggle for the progressive cause and the aspirations of a democratic society must be forever engaged.

Though the ceremony will not take place, maybe tomorrow we can take a moment to think about who King actually was. Not the gentle lamb of saintly martyrdom sacrificed for a dream shared by all—the otherworldy, transcendental, cuddly, safe King honored in the foggy softfocus style of postage stamps and middleschool textbooks.

Think instead of the fullblooded Martin Luther King, Jr., a direct action expert so dangerous that he was under constant wiretap by the FBI, continuously smeared and shunned by public officials of all stripes, routinely made the butt of vulgar racist jokes by nice middleclass white parents in front of their impressionable children. King who was jailed 29 times for his direct action campaigns. King who was assassinated while in Memphis to support a labor strike; assassinated by a known escaped felon under the very noses of the FBI who were busy doing 24/7 surveillance on King when they weren’t busy constructing COINTELPRO plots to extinguish King’s influence.¹

How would this real King—the man whose “I have a dream speech” was delivered during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, was planning a massive Poor People’s March on Washington, who had broadened the focus of his actions from strictly racial justice to include social and economic justice, who had begun to speak of both class and race as the crucial concerns of justice and equality, who had fought his own allies in order to take a public stand against imperialist war in Vietnam—how would this King assess the state of American progressivism and the progress of American social justice? What would this King do in the face of the gathering forces of authoritarianism and totalitarian capitalism? How would this steeled revolutionary respond to the frustration of the left, the abandonment of progressivism by masses of working class families, by Obama’s drifting focus on matters of jobs, justice, and labor rights? What action would he take to address the current attack on workers and labor and the vulgar renascence of savage radical-capitalist theory mere months following its disrobing catastrophic failure?

Think of how he would re-weave the story of the struggle of the working class into the fabric of the American promise. Think of how he would look past the childish resentments and false populism of the ‘grassroots’ right to see into the heart of working class rage, humiliation, and hurt that gives rise to reactionary ideologies and find the means to call us all to our common and morally mandated struggle for justice.

How would he push authorities to jail him and in the name of what illustrating issue? What direct action would he take to draw attention and public shame to the palpable and manifold injustices of our own time?

And then this:

Beyond encomium, what real action do we owe in celebration of this hero’s life and in debt to his sacrifice? What posture toward injustice does his witness demand of us? What are we called to do?

Here’s a clue from King’s own writings:²

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction.

¹ Indeed, the King family has long pointed to abundant evidence that the FBI had maintained assassination plans of their own in case King should suddenly become a “'messiah' who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement."

² Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958