17 January 2022

The Complicated Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Right's Revisionism and Deceitful Appropriation of His Message

On this Martin Luther King Jr. day we are once more reminded of the massive revisionism taking place within Right-wing circles. I've written about this repeatedly and focused deliberately on these points back in 2012 and 2014. This revisionism is something I noticed years ago and was left somewhat stunned to hear figures like Glenn Beck and Charles Colson attempt to appropriate the King legacy and argue that somehow his ideas were resonant and representative of their own. It was a re-writing of the history and yet few seemed to notice.


King was opposed by Evangelical figures in his day. Identified as a theological liberal (which he was), a communist (which he wasn't), he was denounced and decried as being divisive and harmful to American society. The Church leaders who supported him were not Evangelicals, Confessionalists, and conservatives, but liberals and progressives.

He was also criticised for his personal immorality. Rumours and stories floated about regarding his marital infidelities and perversion – and many of these stories were true. In many respects King was not a person to be admired by the Christian community. In terms of Christian ethics, he was in many ways a rank hypocrite and deserves condemnation for his shameful conduct.

This does not excuse the opposition to him. Rather than being rooted in genuine Biblical doctrine and ethical concerns, the reaction was largely fed by a corrupt and immoral Establishment class and yes, a great deal of racism. Conservatives opposed integration and resented King and his movement.

I remember this did not change in the 1970's or even into the 1980's. He was loathed and spoken against in the Fundamentalist and Evangelical circles I inhabited and grew up in. My wife who grew up in the same circles but on the opposite side of the United States had the same experience and the same memories.

Now it would be one thing if Evangelical leaders repented of past words and deeds but that's not what happened. By the 1990's the rhetoric suddenly changed. Why? There are several factors and one has to remember the time.

The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1983 and slowly the states began to adopt it although many remained resistant right up until the end of the 1990's. It's hard to even imagine that today as things have changed a great deal. Fundamentalist Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina still opposed mixed dating and marriage into the 1990's and George W Bush created a scandal when he visited there during his 2000 campaign. I can assure you a great deal of the opposition to the King holiday and the resistance of accepting of him as a cultural hero remained within Right-wing and Evangelical circles – though you would never know that today.

By the 1990's, the cultural tide was changing. Mixed-race couples used to get shouted at and insulted back in the 1970's and 1980's, but by the 1990's, that kind of response was going out of style as they say. Some Blacks were becoming prosperous. Oprah Winfrey (right or wrong) was a respected cultural icon and sports figures like Michael Jordan were popular and respected by the mainstream and the middle class. Society was changing its attitudes about race and the Evangelical community realised that after the disasters of the 1980's – the failures of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, to keep their movement alive they would need to change the narrative and expand their numbers. The Black Church (viewed as a potential ally in the culture war) was sitting there, comprised of vast numbers waiting to be tapped, and as the Democratic Party was shifting away from working class interests into an embrace of identity politics – which yes, included minority issues, but it also included sodomy and other moral issues opposed by the Black Church. Many believed it was time for the Evangelical movement to win these people over to the Republican side.

As a quick aside, it's interesting to note that the Black Church has been and remains largely friendly toward feminism and as the Evangelical movement sought out the Black Church, they too were embracing feminism at a rapid pace. Interviewing a Black female 'pastor' on Evangelical radio would have been unthinkable even in the 1990's. Today no one raises an eyebrow and the norms of career-focused women and single motherhood are part of the Evangelical mainstream.

In terms of strategy, Evangelicals didn't repent of their opposition to King and his ideals, they simply changed the narrative and pretended that they had supported him all along. And by the 2000's, they dared to argue that King was on their side and stood for the principles they did. Men like Glenn Beck and others wove together an impossible tapestry suggesting that their libertarian notions of rights and freedoms, combined with the opportunities of the free market (and maybe even their international militarism) were somehow consonant with the message of King. It's a case of gross revisionism and yet by promoting any Black person that would embrace the Right-wing line into media stardom they've been able to give the narrative a degree of credibility. As far as the Black Right-wing figures that have embraced and promoted this trickery and deceit, what can we say? They're either very ignorant of their own cultural past or they're simply rank sell-outs and have no integrity.

Some have realized that perhaps the Democratic Party's positions are not in the best interests of their community – at certain points. And undoubtedly the DNC is corrupt, self-serving, deceitful, and when it comes to the Black community – it's often patronising. The Right has used the abortion issue to reach out to the Black Church and with some success. The success is limited however by the fact that Black intellectuals and others on the Left will point out that abortion can't be viewed in isolation from its other social factors. This is not to excuse it but to focus solely on abortion is to turn a blind eye to other deep and pervasive social problems. As always, the Right attempts to oversimplify issues and frankly a lot of the time that kind of approach works with the public – all the more in this age of social media and mass distraction.

Would King stand with the Republicans today? Of course not. And these Right-wing figures have also chosen to ignore a key component to King's legacy, the one point that (I think) he truly deserves some serious admiration. In April of 1967 he came out publically in opposition to the Vietnam War and spoke in unabashed terms regarding US imperialism, and he rightly identified the United States as 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today'.

He connected the causes and criminality of the war with economic inequality, US poverty, and at other times connected these notions together with the larger questions of race, militarism, and materialism. As a result he called for economic redistribution, and for a complete change in America's value system.

He even specifically attacked US policy and the nation's murderous and destructive tactics within Vietnam. He criticised civilian deaths and argued the US was spiritually killing itself.

Did the Evangelical movement support him? Did the Right? No, in fact they all turned against him more than ever and he also lost a lot of Democratic support as well. Billy Graham who had never actually supported him (despite the attempts made by some to suggest so), turned overtly hostile to him.

A year later he was dead and I am among those who believe that while he was greatly opposed by the political Right in the United States – and particularly by J Edgar Hoover of the FBI, it was the anti-Vietnam posturing that finally turned Establishment hostility into a call for his death. Given the context of 1967-1968, there was a real fear that the Civil Rights movement could merge with the anti-war movement. Others like Hoover believed that King was a communist, and while he wasn't, he certainly had some professed communists near to him. They believed the movement was receiving funding and support from the Soviet bloc, which in fact it was not. They feared him and viewed him as an existential threat to American society and they wanted him silenced.

An examination of the King assassination reveals many inconsistencies and requires an undue degree of credulity if one is to believe all that is found in the official account. Even King's own family didn't believe that James Earl Ray was the assassin. King's story in this regard parallels the other dubious narratives regarding the Kennedy brothers and some of the other assassinations of the period. To accept the official stories is to beggar belief.

King is rightly viewed as a hero by the Black community and there are aspects to his message and character that can be admired by all. One need only to look at the alternatives represented at the time by movements such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers – groups who mocked and ridiculed King.

As with many things, the King legacy is a complicated one. He was a complicated man and yet I certainly understand why he is looked up to. Though it must also be said that had he not been gunned down his legacy might be very different.

But the notion that somehow his beliefs and mission resonates with the Right is not just ridiculous, it's a lie. No one else that was actually part of the movement would agree with the Right's narrative. You certainly don't see Jesse Jackson giving credence to the notion while appearing on FOX. While corruption ensued in the movement and there's no doubt that figures like Jackson, and Al Sharpton are highly corrupt – nevertheless, they do represent something closer to his legacy and represent his values. These are figures hated by today's Right and the truth is they hate King and would hate him if he were alive today. This revisionism is a sleight-of-hand trick that they've managed to pull off.

And given that Christians are actively promoting and participating in this lie, what does that say about them?

See also:

https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2012/01/civil-rights-and-evangelical.html

https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2014/03/revisionism-manipulation-and-distortion.html

https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2021/11/justified-cynicism-regarding-gops-2021.html