At a time of deep divisions, when Right and Left can’t seem to agree on basic facts to say nothing of values, the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has become just another thing that people on both sides of the political aisle fight over.
Of course, this requires selective editing in terms of which parts of Dr. King’s legacy each side elevates. The Right these days tends to gravitate toward the “I Have A Dream” speech, which is viewed by conservatives as advocating for the kind of colorblind society they endorse, yet they ignore Dr. King’s speeches lamenting the nation’s treatment of Black Americans. Meanwhile, on the Left, people gravitate toward King’s social activism, believing that it connects to their version of social justice today, yet they ignore King’s clear and unmistakable Christian views and beliefs, many of which would get him “cancelled” today by those same people.
In other words, where Dr. King sought justice and reconciliation, today’s Left wants justice without reconciliation and today’s Right wants reconciliation without justice.
Both sides have a piece of the puzzle, but in fighting over whether Dr. King would be a conservative or a progressive by today’s political standards, they are missing the point; we should look at the example that he and the Civil Rights Movement set to see what we could learn from them today. In other words, we should be looking to them to set the example, rather than trying to force Dr. King into a procrustean 21st century bed.
Take the controversial Black Lives Matter movement, which was born out of a genuine concern about police brutality yet quickly devolved into chaos, violence and confusion. Tragically, BLM took a historical moment when a majority of the country was willing to listen to the concerns of Black Americans and squandered it. As a result of the failed moral leadership, hearts have been hardened. We’re more divided now than we were before the movement began. How did that happen?
The Civil Rights Movement may not have been perfect, but it was far more successful at getting results for the concerns that it raised than the movements of today.
Why?
To answer this question, I spoke to Alveda King, Dr. King’s niece, who sharedwith me her thoughts on the differences between then and now. “The reason we were more successful [then] than we are today [is because] we were trained in nonviolent conflict, engagement and resolution,” Alveda told me. “We went by the rules. We read the Bible. We showed up dressed like we were going to church. [We] marched together, sang hymns together while we peacefully demonstrated.”
But we lost all of that in the 21st century, Alveda says. “We just started taking a knee without praying, cursing people out, all of those sorts of things, which does not give you a peaceful engagement.”
Indeed, 2020 was the opposite of peaceful engagement. At the height of the BLM protests, we saw a summer of riots. Few things contributed more to ruining the potential to address legitimate concerns than those incidents.
Recall that Dr. King was vehemently against obtaining justice through violence, even if the cause was legitimate. “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral,” Dr. King said in the lecture he gave upon receiving the Nobel peace prize. “I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.”
Violence is not practical because it is “a descending spiral ending in destruction for all,” said Dr. King. “It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”
Yet Dr. King also understood the conditions that create an environment that leads people to believe that violence is the only way to address their grievances. “I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air,” he went on. “Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.”
This is the piece that the Right is missing in seeking to merely put all that unfortunate race stuff behind us without truly listening to Black Americans, without doing the hard work of taking responsibility for the past and ensuring justice for the future.
What we are missing today, in our social media, hot take, clickbait driven world is the kind of nuance Dr. King was incapable of expressing himself without. Our society attacks those who have the ability to understand multiple sides of an issue, and it rewards those who are willing to separate and enflame.
Today’s world condemns any attempt to bring people together. We have a lot to learn from the Civil Rights Movement, which had two major goals: The first was justice. The second was reconciliation.
In his “Birth of a New Nation” speech, Dr. King said, “Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace. But let’s be sure that our hands are clean in this struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery, that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters.”
In a world that is in a perpetual tug of war between justice without reconciliation and reconciliation without justice, those of us who respect Dr. King and his legacy should understand that you cannot have one without the other. You need both. Justice without reconciliation is temporary and fleeting. Whatever gains are made will be easily reversed. And reconciliation without justice is fake and only serves to harden the hearts of those who are seeking justice. One does not work without the other.
As Dr. King so eloquently said, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
Darvio Morrow is CEO of the FCB Radio Network and co-host of The Outlaws Radio Show.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
