Is Dr. King’s Challenge Alive in Our Hands?

What shall we do with Martin Luther King Jr.?

That may seem to be a strange question to raise about a man who has been dead almost 20 years and whose birthday we now celebrate as a national legal holiday. From one perspective, it would appear that we’ve already done all that his friends, family and supporters were pressing for; we can now place him in the national pantheon of heroes and leave him there--formally honored and celebrated, but essentially ignored.

This is the easy, undemanding thing to do with King now: smooth away his very rough and nonconformist edges, deny the continuing relevance of his hard and challenging words and deeds, refuse to remember the disconcerting power of his calls to active, dangerous civil disobedience in the cause of peace, justice and social transformation. In other words, we can fantasize him into nothing more than a kind, gentle and easily managed religious leader of a friendly crusade for racial integration in America.

Yet if we make such a choice, we would not only demean and trivialize King’s memory and meaning; we also would rob ourselves and our children of a magnificent opportunity to grapple with truth. To begin, we could face the fact that he was assassinated, gunned down before he was 40 years old, sacrificed to the violence he tried so hard to wean us from.

If we want to deal honestly with King and with our nation we could tell our children--and admit to ourselves--that the man who was shot on the motel balcony in Memphis was not the same man who had stood in the pleasant sunlight at the March on Washington in 1963.

He had been transformed by his own persistent search for truth. His concern for justice, his compassion for the poor, his commitment against war, his belief that Vietnamese, Russians and Cubans are no less children of the loving God than we are. All this had led him to become perhaps the most controversial--and, J. Edgar Hoover thought, “the most dangerous”--national leader in this land.

The Martin Luther King of 1968 was calling for and leading civil disobedience campaigns against the unjust war in Vietnam. Courageously describing our nation as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” he was urging us away from a dependence on military solutions. He was encouraging young men to refuse to serve in the U.S. military, challenging them not to support our government’s anti-communist crusades in the Third World that were really destroying the hopes of poor, non-white peoples.

This Martin Luther King Jr. was calling for a radical redistribution of wealth and political power in American society as a way to provide food, clothing, shelter, medical care, jobs, education and hope for all of our country’s people. Indeed, his last organizing action was an attempt to create what he called a “nonviolent revolutionary army” of the poor of all races--along with their friends of all colors and classes--to challenge the nation. He was convinced that this was the only way to turn his beloved America to a place where human compassion, rather than fiscal profit, would be the “bottom line.”

This was the Martin Luther King Jr. who was assassinated in 1968. Many of us who worked with him are convinced that his increasingly challenging words, actions and intentions in those last years were central to why he was assassinated--not because he believed in black and white children holding hands.

Now we face the question: What shall we do with this Martin Luther King Jr.? Can we hold our children’s hands and tell them about King’s last dreams for the eradication of poverty in America, for free medical care for all, for decent housing, for jobs and justice for all God’s children? Can we look at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and missiles silos and Nicaragua and tell our children that King wanted us to see our brothers and sisters among socialists, communists, Democrats, Republicans, among all people and nations committed to working for peace?

Can we hold each other’s hands, and, instead of asking “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” ask instead King’s question: “Where are our brothers and sisters who are locked out, pressed down, broken, homeless, jobless, denied dignity--how can we really be better off until they are?”

In other words, what shall we do with Martin Luther King Jr.? Is he a true hero who challenges all of us to reexamine our individual and collective lives, commitments and goals? Or is he a dead public-relations symbol, a faint echo from an embarrassing past, an object of pious prayers, unthreatening stories and easy words?

Strangely enough, fascinatingly enough, hopefully enough, the central question of his life or death is now in our hands. And it has become a question of our own life or death as well. For how we handle the fundamental human issues that obsessed Martin Luther King Jr. will largely determine not only his future as a hero but our own destiny as a human community.