Remembering the Real Martin Luther King

As we approach the 89th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birth, I’m once again bracing myself for vapid tributes and white-washed histories, as politicians and pundits whose ideologies run directly counter to King’s praise him while simultaneously sanitizing everything he actually stood for.

It’s a rare public figure who won’t share in the revisionist hagiography. To most Americans, King is the man who said “I have a dream” that children of all colors can “sit down together” as Americans and be “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” — in other words, he stood for what, at least until recently, we all — publicly — could agree on: racial equality under the law.

Unless you are a vehement bigot, the King we are introduced to in elementary school, the King of our national holiday, the King of postage stamps and presidential proclamations, is easy to agree with. And it’s also easy to confuse his commitment to nonviolence with a call to be nice, to avoid confrontation, to suppress anger over injustice.

But this is not who King was.

His call for nonviolence was as much an opposition to armed rebellion as it was to America’s militaristic foreign policy. “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to…