Fifty Years

It was fifty years ago today that Martin Luther King was assassinated while working for the rights of striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

In the subsequent five decades, we have seen many hard barriers to African Americans and other minorities weaken or crumble.  King's work unleashed opportunities for not only African Americans, but women, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, immigrants and LGBT people.  His vision of a pluralistic America that valued everyone is increasingly the vision of Americans. 

In the 1980s, most conservatives argued against making his birthday a national holiday.  They lost that battle.  They have been losing the battle with King's legacy ever since, so they have tried to re-write his legacy.  King - they argue - wants a race-blind America.  Any efforts to help disadvantaged Americans must be contradictory to King's "I have a dream" speech, and his desire for people to be seen for the "content of their character."

This is both ahistorical and an incomplete understanding of King's work and life.  King stood between radical and potential destructive forces on one side and reactionary and actually destructive forces on the other.  He offered America a middle road between the volcanic, simmering anger of African Americans and the violent repression of much of American society.  He offered communication with Lincoln's better angels of our nature. 

But he was emphatically a rabble rouser.  He attacked poverty, the Vietnam War, sexism...He worked his whole life to tear down the ediface of WASP male rule that this country was built upon.  He desired, though, not merely to tear down, but to build something worthy of our stated creed as a country.  He aspired to an America the word "equality" meant something.  Where "freedom" had a positive meaning rather than simply being a negative invocation of what someone couldn't do to you. 

Donald Trump explicitly argues for a return to a time before King's life and death.  His policies are designed to attack the idea of a plural, multicultural, tolerant America.  Trump's generation is the final generation who saw King as a radical "outside agitator" and not the living expression of a better version of America.  There are still people younger than me who see King as the socialist, racialist agitator.  There are still people who would tear down his work in every generation.

Not as many though.  A fewer each year.