The Martin Luther King Who Haunted Me
Martin Luther King, Jr., has haunted me for much of my life. I can remember my father telling me the story of the time that he met King in the mid-1960s. My parents were working in inner-city Cleveland and King had come through to meet with local leaders. Dad was invited to join the meeting.
I remember being in awe of the fact that my father had actually seen the man in the flesh. I would have been very young at the time. I was born in 1965. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968. So I was at most one or two years old.
I studied King’s letter from a Birmingham jail when I was in high school. My English teacher, Mr. Chamberlain, did not mention — and probably wasn’t aware — that Wyatt Tee Walker, King’s chief of staff, released the letter to the public but did not think it wise. As was often the case, those closest to King had a very different picture of him than did the general public.
In my senior year, I lauded King as a faultless example of martyrdom and selfless sacrifice. I finished the public speaking assignment with a rousing declaration that now it was “us to up.” In my memory, King’s assassination and my faux pas still intertwine.
At the small liberal arts college I attended in Harrisonburg, Virginia, King figured prominently. I learned that King only came to embrace nonviolence after Fellowship of Reconciliation staff Bayard Rustin and Glenn Smiley schooled him during the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott. They convinced King and his long-time friend and confidant Ralph Abernathy to move toward conflict, not away from it. As a result, King and Abernathy demonstrated their courage to the nation by publicly marching toward their arrest without fear.
I learned that King’s commitment to nonviolence shifted over time. Moving from Montgomery’s passive resistance to Selma’s more aggressive direction a decade later, he planned on disrupting entire cities by 1968.[1] I was beginning to realize that King was not, as philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West reminds us, a Santa Claus.[2] King had a spine. He stood up and pushed back. Despite the opposition of the NAACP and other major civil rights organizations, King planned on rallying 10,000 college students to oppose the Vietnam War. He refused to join the anti-Black Power bandwagon, instead decrying the white backlash against it. Toward the end of his life King even declared, “we don’t want to be integrated out of power; we want to be integrated into power,” suggesting that “temporary segregation” might be required for African Americans to achieve the power required to fully realize justice.[3]
And so, by the time, I was a junior in college, I thought I had a lock on King: a brilliant strategist, incredible orator, heroic leader, the founder of the civil rights movement. It was a comforting and comfortable image. That year, on January 20, 1986, two days after my 21st birthday, the country celebrated the first Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday.
I kept that image of King as a flawless hero through the time of my graduation from college and as my wife of only six months and I moved to New Orleans. King’s shadow loomed large over our assignments in health care and community organizing. Debates raged hot and heavy over what kind of nonviolence was most appropriate — one that confronted the powers through public agitation or one that sought reform through legislation and advocacy. I thought of King when I was arrested for an act of civil disobedience. I called on his example when I stood in court.
His example helped.
Then something happened. On October 11, 1991, a committee of scholars concluded that King had plagiarized portions of his dissertation at Boston University. When the New York Times announced the news, I felt betrayed and discouraged. This was not the King I thought I knew.
We left New Orleans two years later, bringing two sons with us — one just over two years old, the other only eight months. As a parting gift, we received a drawing of nonviolence heroes that featured King. I was not sure how I felt about the gift.
We had left the Crescent City so that I could direct what would become an anti-racism training collective. Between 1993 and 2006, my colleagues and I led more than 400 training events of a half-day or more in length for organizations across the country. King followed us everywhere. Workshop participants always included his August 28, 1963, speech in the civil rights timeline they created. Female activists and authors from Diane Nash to Ella Baker, Septima Clark to Lillian Smith, and Daisy Bates to Anne Braden rarely appeared.
I began to realize that something wasn’t right. The way we told the story of the civil rights movement had been mythologized and warped. It had become a story of one man, one speech, one event. The accepted narrative started in Montgomery, jumped to King’s role in the 1961 Freedom Rides, shifted to his leadership of the Birmingham campaign, crested with his “I have a dream speech,” applauded the passage of the 1963 civil rights act, gave a standing ovation to his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, felt self-satisfied by the 1965 voting rights act, and wept when James Earl Ray shot him.
But I had started to read more about the civil rights movement. I knew that civil rights activists had honed strategies in the 1940s in New York City.[4] Many historians started the story not with Montgomery but with the 1944 Supreme Court ruling in Smith V. Allwright that ended the all white democratic primary in the South. I knew that a young woman by the name of Barbara Rose Johns, who was only 16 at the time, led a walk out from the segregated R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1951, an act that would become the first of the five cases combined to form the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, case. I knew that black power advocates like Gloria Richardson, Stokely Carmichael, Grace and Jimmy Lee Boggs, and Fred Hampton were far more concerned with building up their local communities than in tearing down white ones. And I knew that Martin Luther King had very little if anything to do with any of these activities.
I learned that the civil rights movement was full of people that no one had ever even mentioned to me. And I began to wonder who else stood in the shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr.
And so in 2008 I quit my job,moved to Chicago with my family, and went to grad school where I read a lot more about King — and about the many people who had been obscured by his shadow.
Some of the stories that I learned about King fascinated me. I discovered just how nefarious the efforts were of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO initiative to undermine the civil rights movement in general and Martin Luther King, Jr. in particular. As historian Sylvester Johnson reminds us, “By 1968, … the FBI had persuaded the African American author Carl Rowan to denounce King…. [Rowan] charged that King was egotistical and was now attempting to create anger among Blacks to antagonize” white liberals.”[5]
And I learned just how deep was the antagonism among key figures in the black freedom struggle. Malcolm X at times called King the “Reverend Dr. Chicken Wing.”[6] King returned the animosity. As James Cone writes, “[King] saw Malcolm as a hot-headed radical with a dangerous emotional appeal. King was troubled both by Malcolm’s separatist solution to the problem of white racism and by the method he chose to achieve it.”[7]
But not all were that fascinating. Other stories were simply tawdry, sexist, and deeply troubling. I learned that King was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife Coretta, that he had a raunchy and sexually explicit sense of humor, and that women like Septima Clark and Ella Baker who tried to work in his organization kept bumping up against entrenched patriarchy, sexism, and male dominance.
I learned that I did not like this Martin Luther King, Jr. I did not like this man at all.
I think I was a little angry at King for letting me down.
Then I came to the University of Montana in 2008, and I started teaching civil rights movement and African-American history.
I began the first week of my class by noting a number of traps that students fall into when studying African-American history. One of them is the superhero trap. This is what I told my students:
This trap reads history as if African Americans were super heroes had no faults or foibles. This is the trap that gives us MLK who was a saint and not a human. In the face of undeniable racism in this country that has so often stereotyped and caricatured African Americans as less than human, this reaction is understandable. In pursuit of historical accuracy, however, I will avoid making African Americans into superheroes. I will talk about King’s incredible oratorical skills, his passion for justice, and his ability to build bridges across racial and gender lines alongside his depression, his infidelity, and his paternalism.
By that time, I knew enough about King’s story that I was no longer worried that I would fall into this trap. In fact, as I began to teach the civil rights movement, I came across new stories about King that I had not previously been aware of, ones that demonstrated the fullness of his humanity. I learned of King’s decision to turn back a massive crowd of nonviolent marchers on Tuesday, March 9, 1965, so as to avoid violating a federal injunction, a decision that left many activists feeling betrayed and cynical even while paving the way for the Voting Rights Act passed later that same year.
I was not sure what to think of Martin Luther King, Jr.
And then I taught one of my favorite courses — one called Prayer and Civil Rights. In it, my students examined the role that religion played during the black freedom struggle.
They looked at public prayers offered in the midst of demonstrations. They examined the songs that civil rights activists sang to both mock their antagonists and keep up their spirits. They listened carefully to the evidence of mass meetings, mass arrests, and mass resistance. They also encountered the full breadth of civil rights actors, a list that includes Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, Fred Shuttlesworth, Fannie Lou Hamer, Andrew Young, James Foreman, Ruby Sales, Jonathan Daniels, Ruby Bridges, James Bevel, Robert F. Williams, and many others.
Toward the end of the course, I also had them read a short account of a night that King was despondent during the stress and strain of the Montgomery bus boycott. This is how historian Harvard Sitkoff describes the encounter:
On January 27, [1956] the night after he was jailed, a telephone call awakened him late at night: “Listen, nigger, we tired of you and your mess. If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we gonna blow your brains out and blow up your house.” Click.
Wracked with fear, King could not sleep. His apprehension became unbearable. “I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer. I was weak.” He wondered how, without appearing a coward, he could give up his leadership role and leave Montgomery.
Sitting alone at his kitchen table, his knuckles pressed to his temples, King experienced the dark night of the soul. Bowed down over a cup of coffee, he began to pray, confessing his weakening, his faltering, his loss of courage. Suddenly, he felt something stirring within; he heard an internal voice. He believed it was Jesus telling him to fight on: “Stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And low, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.” The voice “promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No, never alone. No, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”
The revelation immediately assuaged King’s uncertainty. His frightened despair vanished. For the first time, God became profoundly real and personal to him. King now knew “I can stand up without fear. I can face anything.” [8]
It is a powerful story, one that King often included in his sermons. He told it many times. It provides evidence of his showmanship. In his sermons he would draw the story out and segue into song, near sobbing as he concluded. [9] It shows his willingness to explore his inner struggle in public forums and his deep faith that — despite everything — he was called to do the work that he did.
When we examined that story in my class, I remember again being aware of the power of the moment — and that my assessment of King had, to a degree, shifted. I was still deeply troubled by the sexism and infidelity evident in his life. It was as inexcusable now and it was then. It is a legacy that must be faced, especially now as we become ever more aware of the breadth of sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace and throughout society. We cannot make saints of those who have not acted with integrity, who oppress even as they make free.
As I listened to my students talk about King’s midnight encounter with the divine, I also realized that I was ready to let the full legacy of King be what it was. I was ready to recognize the amazing flights of oratory, his strong and deliberate sense of call, his unmistakable commitment to raising the possibility of changing a racist society, his contributions to bringing about some of those changes.
King once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
His words, his clarity, and the evidence of his failure to live them out continue to haunt me. But at this juncture, it is a friendly ghost. One with whom I am familiar. A spirit that has the power to startle me from my own quiescence, failure to act, and recognition that the image of a flawed King may be the most compelling one possible. In that imperfect image we have the opportunity to see ourselves and so find inspiration, to discover again a source, however flawed, of the possibility of standing up, pushing back, and calling for justice.
I am grateful for the King who haunts me.
[1] Ira G. Zepp, The Social Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. David J. Garrow, (New York: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1989), 236.
[2] Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cornel West, The Radical King (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 74.
[3] Michael G. Long, Billy Graham and the Beloved Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 133–134.
[4] Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
[5] Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 358–359.
[6] Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004), 45.
[7] James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America (New York: Orbis Books, 1991), 75.
[8] Harvard Sitkoff, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 38.
[9] Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Howard University Press, 2008), 124.
