Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to warn us

America lionized MLK as a national hero while managing to obscure his legacy

Few figures in U.S. history are as widely recognized as the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But while every American has heard his name, and most celebrate today’s annual holiday commemorated in his honor, disturbingly few realize the profundity of his remarkable legacy.

Even his supporters tend to water it down.

What MLK stood for

Dr. King is reduced by most historians to being a leader of the civil rights movement, when in fact he was a visionary whose contributions to America stretched well beyond any single set of issues. Beyond serving as a spokesperson and standard bearer for a movement seeking equal rights long guaranteed under the Constitution, he also emerged as a leading champion of the poor, and a notorious critic of America’s military industrial corruption and imperialism.

In addition to risking arrest and state violence on behalf of people denied basic rights for centuries, Dr. King also embraced even more severe risks by publicly speaking out against Washington’s war on Vietnam. By doing so, he joined dissidents from Muhammad Ali to Daniel Ellsberg who also challenged the war machine at great cost to themselves and their families.

King’s actions exemplified a willingness to share burdens, to stand in non-violent solidarity with vulnerable people despite the risks that came with doing so. His words expressed the moral philosophy that drove him to such prolific action:

“I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America, who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”

A letter that Dr. King wrote while detained in a jail in Alabama came to represent among the most crucial texts in American political history. It explained the moral bankruptcy of observing injustice without stepping forward to challenge it. That so many Americans managed to ignore those crucial lessons is a tragic shame.

In time, it would lead to another.

Dr. King explained a theory of justice defined by a recognition of intersections and how the whole can grow worse than its sordid parts. Observing the corruption that enabled white supremacy in his era, he described militarism and capitalism as evils intersecting—enabling, and also enabled by—racism.

While his words reflected on America at a particular point in time, Dr. King’s greatest legacy may ultimately prove to be timeless. It has also been ironically lost on most of his supporters, who lionize the man and his memory, but overlook how his words apply to our world today. 

What MLK warned us about

Did MLK envision specifically how the future might grow besieged by a combination of the evils that he identified? He didn’t specifically describe the global climate crisis, but he did specifically address each of the precursors that contrived to engineer it over the decades following his assassination.

He warned America about the intersections between the three social factors most responsible for the climate catastrophe that has come to threaten all life on Earth: capitalism, militarism, and racism.

Capitalism plays an obvious role, particularly in driving corporate resource extraction. How much oil might remain in the ground today without the profit motive enticing capitalists for the past two centuries to sell every drop they could extract?

Militarism not only consumes fossil fuels, but also enables the corporate resource extraction sought by capitalists, particularly when local governments object to foreign exploitation. The history of Iran in 1953 offers a case study that is both illustrative and frighteningly prescient.

Tehran antagonized Washington by nationalizing its oil fields in order to prevent foreign exploitation. A retaliatory CIA coup proved successful, in the sense that it removed a democratically elected leader and replaced him with a puppet more friendly to Wall Street. But when that dictator’s brutality inspired a revolution 25 years later, in 1979, the ultimate beneficiaries were right-wing theocrats who describe America to this day as “the Great Satan.”

The CIA’s machinations in Iran in 1953 demonstrated this pattern of coups serving Wall Street. In that respect, it offers an apt illustration of the militarism that MLK decried.

But it was also historically devastating, establishing a pattern while he was alive that Washington continued to repeat over and over again—from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the Middle East—over the ensuing decades, long after MLK was taken from us.

Finally, racism plays the role of both cause and effect. America could not wage wars for profit without denigrating the people down range from the Pentagon’s ordnance. And they ultimately pay the greatest price for its corruption.

From the “gooks” murdered by the millions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to the “towelheads” subjected to military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan a generation later, the Pentagon’s targets share a disturbing pattern of being dehumanized by Americans.

It’s a pattern from which other countries have learned well. When Israel escalated its genocidal violence in Gaza last fall, many authorities—including military and elected officials—explicitly referred to Palestinians as animals.

What King confronted

Most Americans who casually celebrate a holiday today forget the dramatic risks faced by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some might remember how authorities released dogs on marchers at the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Some might recall the beatings that MLK endured by police, his time in jail, or the death threats targeting him & his family.

But most forget that he was a target of a thoroughly documented FBI plot that continued for years. It included not only invasive surveillance, but also blackmail aimed to drive him to an early grave.

What does it reflect when federal government agencies threaten and intimidate peaceful people in retaliation for raising their voices? It suggests that America’s commitment to First Amendment principles—and the democracy they were designed to protect—was never as robust as we might wish.

It suggests that the crisis confronting democracy in America started long before the corporate political parties more recently decided to abandon primary elections, presidential debates, and the last remaining vestige of popular control over our government.

What MLK confronted was not only the racism long embraced by the South, but also the corruption of northern institutions dedicated to preserving capital, even if it meant embracing Jim Crow. And while his contemporary successors learn of his struggle through the lens of its widely celebrated victories, few remember how many goals of the civil rights movement were never satisfied—or how the few victories it did secure in his era have eroded in the time since then.

What would MLK do today? 

Celebrating today’s holiday sincerely would require not only remembering Dr. King, what he stood for, and what he endured, but also taking some action to challenge injustice inspired by his example. There seems no more important question to ask ourselves on this holiday than what he would do, were he still alive.

I can’t claim to predict where this life might have led Dr. King had he been allowed the opportunity to enjoy it. But, given his words, his actions, and his legacy, I can at least confidently predict one thing he would not be doing: supporting the fraudulent co-optation of Black America on which the corporate Democratic Party relies.

Dr. King would find little common ground with the Congressional Black Caucus, or the corporate leadership of the party that it plays a crucial role in enabling. He would not be giving paid speeches to Wall Street banks. And he would not be lavishing praise on the first Black president for riding his coattails to a political victory and then abandoning everything that he stood for. He certainly would not welcome that president empowering the agency that vilified him from public accountability for its latest generation of civil liberties violations.

Assessing the voices active in American politics and culture today, there is one who not only evokes Dr. King routinely, but also stands firmly in his footsteps as a radical agitator and thorn in the side of the bipartisan establishment. He cites a prophetic tradition of inspired resistance to oppression to the very same social forces that Dr. King described as “intersecting evils.”

His name is Dr. Cornel West. And unlike either Biden or Trump, he’s willing to show up in public and defend his ideas.

That willingness to boldly announce and defend our ideas might be the most important lesson that we today can learn from Dr. King’s largely forgotten legacy.

Paid supporters can access video from a September 2019 speech at the Youth Climate Strike in San Jose. In addition to citing Dr. King, I explained how his prescient formulation of the intersecting evils applies to the global climate crisis. Applying his intersectional approach, I also highlight why any meaningful solution for climate justice must ultimately include more than the radical changes to energy policy on which climate justice organizations are tragically and myopically focused.