[ Politicians and celebrities routinely twist the message of the
civil rights icon, turning a radical legacy into revisionist history]
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‘HIS DREAM’S BEEN WEAPONIZED INTO HIS NIGHTMARE’: HOW MARTIN
LUTHER KING JR’S WORDS HAVE BEEN CO-OPTED  
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Andrew Lawrence
January 15, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Politicians and celebrities routinely twist the message of the
civil rights icon, turning a radical legacy into revisionist history _


Martin Luther King Jr., AP

 

Sixty years on, Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech remains a
rhetorical paragon, pushing the civil rights movement into the law
books while transforming the rabble-rousing preacher into a global
icon for freedom and equality. The speech did such a good job of
capturing lofty American ideals that King’s name is regularly taken
in vain.

Vivek Ramaswamy harks back to King while making the case for
dismantling critical race theory and DEI initiatives. (“What bothers
the heck out of me is right when we’re close to that promised land
… [we] then obsess about systemic racism and white guilt,” he told
NBC earlier this month.) Ron DeSantis claims King would have been for
book bans. (“He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of
their skin, but on the content of their character,” the Florida
governor said
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stumping for his Stop Woke Act in 2021, stressing a responsibility to
“protect our people and our kids from some very pernicious
ideologies”.) Nikki Haley, slow to concede
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civil war’s origins in slavery, says she was inspired by the civil
rights icon.

“It’s apparent that Dr King’s dream has been weaponized into his
nightmare,” says Hajar Yazdiha, a sociology professor at the
University of Southern California who studies race and equity.

These days, King’s words are being twisted with a straight face by
arch-conservatives seeking to unravel the very progressive measures
King fought so hard to secure before his assassination in 1968. In her
book The Struggle for the People’s King, Yazdiha traces this trend
to the institutionalization of Martin Luther King Jr Day under Ronald
Reagan. “He was opposed to civil rights, hated Dr King and blamed
him for his own death,” she says. When Reagan realized he couldn’t
stop Congress from passing the King holiday in 1983, he turned the
political defeat into a legacy-making opportunity. “He decides that
if he can link his legacy to King, he first of all can ward off claims
that he’s racist, and second – and this is really critical – he
makes sure that we remember a particular version of Dr King that is
colorblind, a vision of American exceptionalism, of states’ rights,
of the individual capacity to pull yourself up from your
bootstraps,” Yazdiha says.

[reagan signs bill surrounded by people]

Ronald Reagan signs a bill in 1983 making Martin Luther King Jr’s
birthday a national holiday, as Coretta Scott King looks
on. Photograph: Historical/Corbis/Getty Images

“So this has been a long game for conservatives. They’ve
understood that if they have to accept multicultural democracy,
they’re going to for their own purposes.”

As John Kirk, a civil rights history professor at the University of
Arkansas at Little Rock, puts it: “King as a person has become a
contested site of memory.”

The extent to which conservatives have manipulated King’s legacy is
sometimes astounding. The South Dakota state representative Brandei
Schaefbauer misquoted
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speech to justify her decision to vote against healthcare rights for
trans teens. The US House majority leader, Steve Scalise, who voted
twice against establishing the MLK holiday back in the day, now calls
King
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national hero. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind
the purging of the left-leaning Harvard president Claudine Gay
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makes regular references to King’s “colorblindness” while raging
against race-conscious policies.

For Donald Trump’s surrogates, invoking King has become the go-to
move. Kellyanne Conway said the first impeachment of Trump was not
“within Dr King’s vision”, while Trump’s attorney Ken Starr
cited the I Have a Dream speech in his defense of Trump on the Senate
floor. Mike Pence is a crafty operator in this area too, referencing
King in arguments for a border wall, against Black Lives Matter and in
the wake of the supreme court’s gutting of affirmative action.

Mike Huckabee is convinced King would hate the Black Lives Matter
movement, while his daughter, Sarah Sanders, implied that the reverend
doctor would have cheered the supreme court’s unwinding of
affirmative action. In case it’s unclear, King actually marched, got
beaten up and went to jail while pushing _for_ affirmative action
policies. But it’s no coincidence that Arkansas’ reigning
political dynasty is suddenly suggesting otherwise. “Very recently,
Arkansas moved from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party
Republican state,” Kirk says. “And now the Republicans of today
want to blame the Confederate Democrats; now they say, ‘All the
civil rights stuff, the oppression – wasn’t us.’” Claiming MLK
was like-minded only furthers their cause.

It’s not just politicians who are guilty of improper allusions to
King. In 2013, the conservative commentator Glenn Beck brought up
King’s name while defending the TV cook Paula Deen for using the
N-word. Late last year, the controversy-stirring podcaster Joe Rogan
ranted about how King wouldn’t have wanted California schoolchildren
to learn about antiracism. King’s own monument in Washington
DC misquoted him
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it first opened in 2011.

The beleaguered actor Jonathan Majors
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to have a thing for Coretta Scott King. During his recent trial for
misdemeanor assault and harassment, an audio recording was played in
which he was heard scolding
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ex-girlfriend for failing to be more like King’s wife. He made the
comparison again last week, this time to heap praise on his current
girlfriend, the actor Meagan Good.

[girl at podium as other kids watch from memorial stairs]

Elementary school students recite King’s I Have a Dream speech at
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Friday. Photograph: Andrew
Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

The bad faith allusions have all but reduced King to a depoliticized
mascot, revered by all, as if the FBI wasn’t closely tracking him
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until his death. “A 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most
hated men in America,” Bernice King tweeted in 2020. “Many who
quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate,
and may already hate, the authentic King.”

The disingenuous MLK shoutouts have the added effect of undermining
the meticulous efforts that Atlanta’s King Center, Morehouse College
and other institutions have made to showcase the breadth of King’s
views and activism. (He wrote five books, delivered thousands of
speeches…) It’s a complicated legacy. “We kind of like to
portray this as rightwing versus leftwing,” Kirk says, “but who
and what King was was very much contested within the civil rights
movement as well.” At one point in the 60s, activists within the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized many of the
non-violent protests in the south, referred to King pejoratively as
“Da Lord”. “They saw him as this conservative Black preacher who
wasn’t as radical as they were,” Kirk says.

By the end, King sat comfortably at the far left of the political
spectrum. He pushed to close the poverty gap, and the year before his
death, he gave a speech at New York City’s Riverside church titled A
Time to Break Silence in which he railed against the Vietnam war. “I
am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of
values,” he said, demanding the “giant triplets” of “racism,
extreme materialism and militarism” be conquered.

[king locks arms with others]

King leads a march of several thousand to the courthouse in
Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

The speech was widely derided. The NAACP scorned King for pivoting
from the civil rights effort to anti-war protests. Barry Goldwater,
the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, reckoned
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speech “could border a bit on treason”; 168 newspapers
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slammed the hour-long oratory. Tellingly, King read that speech from a
prepared text that he hoped to send on to publications because he
didn’t want to be misquoted.

Still: it’s unlikely the comedian Amy Schumer was aware of any of
that history when, in the wake of the 7 October attacks, she posted a
decades-old clip of King condemning antisemitism while implying that
he would have supported Israel’s bombing of Gaza. That
prompted Bernice King to post another clip
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father arguing for military restraint and calling on America to flex
its “moral power” instead. “We have much to correct,” the
younger King wrote in the caption.

Reclaim MLK
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campaign trying to reassert King’s radical legacy and showcase other
instrumental figures in the civil rights movement, including the women
and LGBTQ+ contributors who were overshadowed. It is just the first of
many steps required in the face of conservatives’ mighty MLK
misinformation machine. “We absolutely need to be countering the
revisionist history, which has been so consequential for rolling back
multicultural democracy,” Yazdiha says. “This doesn’t mean just
correcting the record. It also means holding [transgressors] to
account.”

_Andrew Lawrence is senior features writer for the Guardian US, based
in Atlanta._

* Martin Luther King
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* civil rights movment
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* disinformation
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* revisionist history
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