Martin Luther King, Jr., Shape-Shifter

Martin Luther King, Jr., Shape-Shifter January 17, 2017

According to the Washington Post:

Ohio’s governor says Americans shouldn’t focus so much on the highest-level people when there are ways to tackle many societal problems at the local and individual levels.

Republican Gov. John Kasich (KAY’-sik) spoke Monday in Atlanta at the King Center on the holiday honoring its namesake, Martin Luther King Jr.

Kasich says King got the attention of people in power through a “bottom-up” approach worth emulating. Kasich says efforts such as addressing drug use and improving education need people committed at the community level.

I agree that action at the community level is important on any issue, including things like drug use and education. But I am all sorts of tired of seeing the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., used in convoluted and ahistorical ways. King was a radical. He was widely disliked, not just in the South but by whites nationwide. Simply inviting him to visit your town could mean putting your life at risk.

But can we talk about bottom-up for a moment? Because it wasn’t the local cops who protected the Little Rock Nine or flanked Ruby Bridges as she walked to school through screaming mobs. It was federal marshals who did this—because the local cops refused. The local cops were on the other side of the picket lines. When King came to Chicago, he was attacked by white mobs hurling projectiles at him. He wanted to end housing discrimination in the city. The city’s white residents objected—strongly. What does working bottom-up mean in a context like this, exactly? Daley only came to the negotiating table to end the explosive protests. Ultimately, the challenges King faced in Chicago led to the creation of the Fair Housing Act, a federal law.

I worry that using King’s memory to underscore an argument that “Americans shouldn’t focus so much on the highest-level people” because “there are many ways to tackle many societal problems at the local and individual levels” obscures the role federal intervention played in achieving the objectives of the civil rights movement. While King engaged in community activism, fixing problems at the local level isn’t always an option—it was the local level that was a problem. The most lasting successes of the civil rights movement were put in place by federal legislation or Supreme Court decisions, not through changing the minds of local whites.

In his remarks, Kasich participates in a line of conservative thought that that downplays the importance of federal intervention in favor of local solutions, but the successes of the civil rights movement—the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act—were imposed top down. Without federal intervention, it is probable change would have happened much more slowly, if at all.

I’m completely behind Kasich arguing, say, that local and state officials matter, and that voters should pay attention to more than just federal races. Amen. I’m totally with Kasich in arguing that we need community commitment to things like drug abuse prevention and quality public education. Absolutely. It’s downplaying the role top-down intervention played in the civil rights movement on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that bothers me, especially in the wake of the gutting of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Interestingly, there were other civil rights figures who focused on bottom-up change, arguing that top-down change was unhelpful, or that it would never happen. These individuals tended to argue for finding strength in community, for solving your problems yourself, without asking the government to do it for you (so to speak). But these civil rights figures are the ones white people erased in their ironic eagerness to make King the non-confrontational face of the civil rights movement.

They’re the scary ones.

I’m not trying to pick on Kasich here. He was the only Republican presidential candidate who refused to fall in line behind Trump and I don’t think he was trying to silence anyone. My concern is less with Kasich than it is with a general pattern of remembering Martin Luther King Jr. Day in a way that erases important aspects of the civil rights movement. It’s worth paying attention to what the civil rights movement tells us about the limits of local action in defense of minority rights, and the need for federal intervention. If we have a federal justice department that signals an unwillingness to review cases where white police officers shoot unarmed black men, how far will local action by Black Lives Matter get in fixing endemic police bias?

The more common erasure, of course, comes from those portraying King as a moderate, non-divisive civil rights figure when he was anything but. All in all, I’m starting to think that official Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations should consist of nothing more than reading King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail out loud.

[Note: This post was edited for clarity.]


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