“Turning King’s Dream into a Nightmare”

On MLK day I have adopted the practice of posting excerpts and full text from some of King’s lesser-known speeches to try to recapture the radicalism he represents in the face of his domestication at the hands of American elites and authorities. This year, I’m going to do something different. Chris Hedges has written an article that says many things I emphasize about King and his legacy, and I’m going to post excerpts from it with a full-text link at the bottom. Hedges explores the connection between King and Malcolm X and outlines the ways that, towards the end of his life, King began to approach some of Malcolm’s beliefs and discuss the idea that, rather than depending on white people to help them, black people needed to find ways to liberate themselves. Hedges engages the work of James Cone, whom I have cited elsewhere on this blog. Cone’s recent work on King and Malcolm X is definitely on my “to read soon” list.

Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day to celebrate ourselves for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social reformers, once they are dead, are kidnapped by the power elite and turned into harmless props of American glory. King, after all, was not only a socialist but fiercely opposed to American militarism and acutely aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice without economic justice was a farce.

“King’s words have been appropriated by the people who rejected him in the 1960s,” said Professor James Cone, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York and who wrote the book Martin & Malcolm & America. “So by making his birthday a national holiday everybody claims him, even though they opposed him while he was alive. They have frozen King in 1963 with his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. That is the one that can best be manipulated and misinterpreted. King also said, shortly after the Selma march and the riots in Watts, ‘they have turned my dream into a nightmare.’”

Read the rest of this article at Common Dreams.