“Dead Men Make Such Convenient Heroes”: The Use and Misuse of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy as Political Propaganda

In American history and memory, few figures stand as prominently as Martin Luther King Jr. In the minds of countless Americans, he remains the consummate activist for civil rights and social justice. In recent years, King was honored with a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and in 2016, the Treasury Department announced that King would join Harriet Tubman and opera singer Marian Anderson as the first African American to grace American currency. He has continued to be dramatized in theater, television, and film, notably in Ava DuVernay’s Academy-Award nominated 2014 film Selma. But perhaps the most telling indication of his stature is the manner in which he is called upon, again and again, by proponents of varying political parties and ideologies as somebody who would, were he alive, support their candidacy, position, or initiative. Like many of the nation’s founding fathers, and Abraham Lincoln before him, King inhabits a role as one of America’s commanding moral figures and his supposed endorsement carries great political heft. The objective of this article is to document and discuss how the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has become political propaganda. It shall supplement the very fine work of Jeanne Theoharis, which has laid out the uses and misuses of civil rights history as a whole, by focusing on the one man who was “so regularly invoked, distorted, or misappropriated that it seems necessary to set the record straight” (Theoharis, 2018, p. xxiv). As Jason Sokol has already demonstrated in his brilliant The Heavens Might Crack, King’s legacy has been shaped, and reshaped, to disparate ends ever since April 4, 1968. “They did not all celebrate the same King,” Sokol wrote, “and few of them celebrated the whole King. But they didn’t need to,” King was fashioned into a hero for their causes, and his death only amplified that dynamic (Sokol, 2018, p. 8).

While attention is paid to what King himself said about these matters—as his political leanings were a matter of some controversy even in his own lifetime—this is not to be a partisan effort and will not posthumously assign King membership in a political party or align him with a particular ideology. It is based on the supposition that no one person, group, or cause owns King’s legacy, but it will confront the myriad ways in which all three have distorted or misappropriated that legacy toward their own personal and political ends, for as political scientist Brandon Terry wrote, King has “become an icon to quote, not a thinker and public philosopher to engage” (Terry, 2018, para. 8).

Before the bullet of James Earl Ray brought about an effort, in earnest, to canonize Martin Luther King Jr.—a process made complete by his literal embalming in stone on the National Mall—the man, now a static and stoic hero, had become a embattled leader of a fractioned civil rights movement. Segregationists and assorted racists referred to him as “Martin Luther Coon,” and no more enlightened was the epithet “Burrhead,” reserved for him by J. Edgar Hoover, who had long recorded, then leaked, the seediest aspects of King’s private affairs. He hoped that Americans would react with requisite disgust, as former first-lady Jacqueline Kennedy later admitted to, after being made privy to some of the more salacious details. Kennedy’s sentiment did not make her an outlier. Two years before his assassination, a Gallup Poll found that 63% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with the 33% who viewed him favorably (Drier, 2016). As Theoharis reminds us, the negative opinions toward King were not solely the result of uber-villains like Bull Connor or a rogue Hoover, but “the work of a legion of people who red-baited, collaborated, and looked the other way” (Theoharis, 2018, p. 174). Even in hindsight, such results should not surprise. Speaking at the 50-year commemoration of the Selma marches in 2015, President Obama noted that at the time activists “were called Communists, or half-breeds, or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse” (Obama, 2015, para. 15). The accusation that King was a Communist would have extraordinary staying power. When Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina undertook a 16-day filibuster to delay the 1983 vote to establish a federal holiday in King’s honor, he claimed King’s “action-oriented Marxism” was “not compatible with the concepts of this country” (Helms, 1983).

Prominent African Americans also reserved criticism for King. In the early 1960s, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were losing patience for a leader who they felt held his popular acclaim above direct action, derisively referring to King as “De Lawd.” A still more stinging rebuke was laid down by Malcolm X, who, in a 1963 interview with Louis Lomax, referred to King as a “modern Uncle Tom” for his supposed obedience to White liberal doctrine (Lomax, 1963). Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. also came to reject King’s nonviolent activism, proclaiming to a cheering crowd in Harlem, that “the day of Martin Luther King has come to an end” (Powell qtd. in Johnson, 1968, p. 1). More moderate voices of the civil rights movement also had their concerns. Thurgood Marshall, the legal mastermind of desegregation, called King a “first rate rabble-rouser,” and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive Roy Wilkins judged King a “careless, unsophisticated country preacher” (Wilkins qtd. in Lewis, 1998, p. 208). Criticisms were especially vocal after King’s famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, precisely 1 year before his death. Believing there was “at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America,” King watched as the war dashed the hopes and new beginnings of the movement:

Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war . . . And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. (M. L. King, 1967a)

In the days that followed, 168 newspapers denounced King’s speech. Other civil rights leaders, most notably Wilkins and Whitney Young of the National Urban League, questioned its content and criticized its tone. And some of King’s closest advisors, including Andrew Young and Bayard Rustin, warned King against a direct confrontation with President Johnson. At the White House, Johnson is reported to have exploded in rage at “that goddamned nigger preacher” who had the audacity to level criticism after Johnson had lent his support to landmark civil rights legislation. King rejected the criticism: “I think I have a role to play which may be unpopular”; King told advisor Stanley Levinson, “Someone of influence has to say that the United States is wrong, and everybody is afraid to say it” (King qtd. in Garrow, 1987, p. 443). Only SNCC, whom the year before had become the first and lone civil rights organization to publicly condemn the war, gave King their unalloyed support. The reconsideration of King’s reputation began almost immediately upon his death, the look and feel of his funeral procession carefully cultivated. King’s mahogany coffin proceeded ruefully through the streets of Atlanta, carried on a farm wagon pulled by a brace of plow mules. The purposefully worn wagon was meant to be symbolic of the impoverished across the nation, and characterized the struggle that King had waged on their behalf throughout his life. Given the tragically recent funeral procession of President Kennedy, which in turn, was famously inspired by that of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier, one immediately senses the desire by those closest to King to place his memory within the realm of these men upon whom Americans had also laid the mantle of martyrdom. This was evoked in the language of Harry Belafonte, when he said of his close friend, that, in life, he had been “stoned, stabbed, reviled, and spat upon” (Belafonte qtd. in C. S. King, 1969, p. 334).

Another aspect of King’s funeral was one of much contention; President Johnson held exhaustive conversation with his aides on whether he would be in attendance. In the end, he did not attend, nor did the other living president, Dwight Eisenhower. Wrath was reserved, also, for those public figures who did attend, but whose presence was perceived as an empty gesture. “I hated those smiles,” the Assistant Attorney General Roger Wilkins admitted, “a man was dead.” “The white politicians started to come. And they came. And they came. And a lot of people—both black and white came to see the show—like to a carnival” (Wilkins qtd. in Sokol, 2018. pp. 47–48).

Those who had admonished King in life now lay hosannas at his feet. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had a tentative commitment to civil rights, attended King’s service in Atlanta and, a few days later, held a memorial in Central Park during which he compared King’s sacrifice to that of Christ. He was not the first, nor the last, to mark that perceived parallel. Whereas his most ardent critics had ridiculed his connection with his followers—Hoover worried about his ascent as a “Black Messiah”—supporters equated him with the divine. Now a widow, Coretta Scott King remembered the crowds that followed her husband everywhere as “when Christ went to Jerusalem, and the people glorified him” (C. S. King, 1969, p. 170). King’s assassination was, to Ralph Abernathy, a “crucifixion,” and during a homily Pope Paul VI called him “a defenseless Christian prophet” whose “cowardly and atrocious killing” was akin to the Passion of the Christ. In private, King had long feared that he would meet a premature end at the hands of violent bigotry, and for those closest to him, his death must have seem a dire prophecy fulfilled. Over a 10-year period between 1978 and 1987, Evangelical Lutherans, and Episcopalians made formal efforts to incorporate King in their liturgies. And over that same time period, King’s favorability ratings rose precipitously. By 1987, 76% of White Americans viewed King favorably, a figure that has climbed to 94% in more recent polls. By 1999, a Gallup poll found that to Americans, King was the second most admired individual of the 20th century, behind only Mother Theresa (Hoffman, 2000). The canonization of Martin Luther King was complete; indeed, rendered as the Christ-like martyr who redeemed our country’s original sin, he had become an unassailable hero to Americans, White and Black, liberal and conservative.

The effort to transform King’s legacy into a force for social and political conservatism began in 1983 when President Reagan was compelled, despite his own stated reservations and reluctance, to sign into law the federal holiday observing his memory. Speaking at Riverside Church soon after, from the same pulpit from which King anathematized the war in Vietnam 16 years earlier, preacher Charles Adams wondered aloud,

Could it be that Mr. Reagan understood that the easiest way to get rid of Martin Luther King Jr. is to worship him? . . . The best way to dismiss any challenge is to exalt and adore the empirical source through which the challenge has come. (Adams qtd. in Dyson, 2000, p. 283)

Adams’s suspicion was confirmed when, in signing the bill, Reagan draped King’s holiday in nationalism, extolling it as yet another example of the American exceptionalism that ran through his inaugural address 2 years earlier. “As a democratic people,” Reagan asserted,

We can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognize a grave injustice and took action to correct it. And we should remember that in far too many countries, people like Dr. King never had the opportunity to speak out at all. (Reagan, 1983)

The same martial national spirit was evident during the ceremony marking the installation of King’s bust under the capitol rotunda in 1986; that ceremony featured a rendition of “We Shall Overcome” performed by the Marine Corp band. It was enough for former King speechwriter Vincent Harding—the primary author of “Beyond Vietnam”—to declare a “national amnesia” in honoring this prophet of nonviolence (Harding, 1987). Absent from both occasions was the King that had linked racism at home to militarism and imperialism abroad. He sought to force America to face all its interrelated flaws, exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society, and suggesting that radical reconstruction of that society may be necessary.

Central to the conservative effort to co-opt King’s legacy is the contention that the singular objective of King’s activism was “not to change laws, but to change people, to make neighborhoods of enemies and a nation out of divided races.” Those are the words of Carolyn Gaddis, writing for the Heritage Foundation in 2006, declaring that “it is time for conservatives to lay claim to the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” (Garris, 2006, para. 2). She echoed the words of Robert Woodson who, speaking at a Heritage Foundation seminar celebrating “The Conservative Virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King” in 1993, said that “Like Abraham Lincoln, [King] believed that the best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend” (Bennett & Woodson, 1993, para. 15). In this analysis, racism was not the result of structural inequality that required legal and legislative reform, but an individual and moral failing rooted out by King’s faith-based appeal. King, Gaddis argued, believed in self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, and that these qualities made him “fundamentally conservative.”

Conservatives like Reagan, and those at the Heritage Foundation, preferred the King perpetually frozen in 1963, celebrating the man who had “a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed . . . that all men are created equal” (M. L. King, 1963). It was this speech that in the early 1990s was weaponized for a variety of conservative causes, most notably the fight against affirmative action initiatives. While King argued, in a 1965 interview with Alex Haley, that “all of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for centuries of exploitation and humiliation,” that did not stop Shelby Steele from using King’s message in his best-selling 1990 book, The Content of Character, to support his critique of affirmative action as a social program that intensifies rather than eases racial differences and inequalities (M. L. King qtd. in Haley, 1965; Steele, 1990). Nor did it prevent conservative pundit William Bennett from citing the speech in 1993, decrying the modern agenda “that insists on counting by race” as moving further away from King’s true vision (Bennett & Woodson, 1993, para. 33). So endemic was the use of King’s “dream” in this manner that in his book on King, published in 2000, Michael Eric Dyson proposed a 10-year moratorium on the speech so that a more proper appreciation of King’s radical vision could be realized (Dyson, 2000).

Even at the time, however, the address had been judged strikingly conservative, a middle-class demonstration that cut across racial lines. John Lewis—whose own far more forceful speech that day had been censored at the request of the march’s architect, A. Phillip Randolph—remembered it dismissed as “a candy-coated conciliatory gesture to white America” (Lewis, 1998, p. 230). Despite the soaring rhetoric of his speech, King had long found himself frustrated with the fixed and rigid conservatism of well-meaning moderates who “could not be committed to anything that involved a structural change in the architecture of American society.” Writing in Why We Can’t Wait the following year, King surmised, with his usual rhetorical flourish, that “any evil defacing the nation had to be extracted bit-by-bit with a tweezer, because the surgeon’s knife was an instrument too radical to touch this best of all possible societies” (M. L. King, 1964, p. 134). While the Reagan-era conservatives who cited his speech two and three decades later held fast to their deep faith in the genius of the founding fathers, and the power of individual will and compassion to iron out the inequities in our society, King had, by 1964, become convinced that the nation had structural faults that had to be deliberately excised. Those who opposed what King worked toward in life would intentionally and continually withhold this emergent radicalism from mandated public remembrances of his legacy.

For Steele, Bennett, and other social conservatives, the desire to co-opt King’s legacy was equally clear. Once derided as a serial philanderer, King’s personal conduct was now lauded, his image that of the committed family man. At the Heritage Foundation seminar, Robert Woodson lamented the secularization of King’s message. He blamed contemporary civil rights leaders for extolling the fallacy that young black Americans should be exempt from personal responsibility, that children born out-of-wedlock and Black-on-Black violence was permissible because they were victims of society. “We need to understand,” he warned, “that the fundamental basis upon which we deliver this nation is to confront this cultural challenge . . . This is the legacy of Dr. King” (Bennett & Woodson, 1993, para. 20).

Other conservatives claimed King fit within “America’s Republican tradition.” Writing for the American Conservative website, Bradley Birzer of Hillsdale College posits that the movement for Black equality worked because it had embraced the nonviolent movements of the Western tradition, one that reaches back to Socrates, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas (Birzer, 2016). William Bennett agreed arguing that it was King’s embrace of the philosophical tradition of the west—based in Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Rosseau—that led to the liberation of all Americans, regardless of race. “Through the western tradition,” he asserts, “Jim Crow was destroyed and American history was transformed” (Bennett & Woodson, 1993, para. 37).

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein argued that, among other participants in the civil rights movement, King was “often backward looking and even conservative” because they invoked commitments from the nation’s past, as opposed to relying on the judiciary and the Supreme Court (Sunstein, 1995). In the smoldering year after King’s assassination, SNCC activist turned Black Power acolyte Julius Lester was quick to remind America of just this fact, writing that King believed in America “as if he were one of the signers of the Constitution. He loved America as if he had sewn the first flag. And he articulated a dream for America more forcefully than any man since Thomas Jefferson” (Lester, 1969, p. 85). But while the public intellectual Cornel West stated that King, despite the racism of the founding fathers, was convinced that “the ideals of America were sufficient if only they were taking seriously in practice,” he also carefully, and crucially, noted that King’s Christian love ethic applied “only to individual relationships—not to group, nation, or class conflicts” (West, 1999, pp. 432–433). By 1967, King himself confided to journalist David Halberstam that he had his doubts as to the ability of America and its people to bring about substantive change, admitting, “I think you’ve got to have a revolution of the entire society, a revolution of values” (King qtd. in Halberstam, 1967).

Yet, King’s status in the conservative vanguard is secure enough that the last two decades have seen multiple attempts by politicians and pundits within the Republican Party to claim that King was a Republican himself, and certainly would remain so today. In 2006, the National Black Republican Association ran political commercials and placed billboards in several states—Georgia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.—that claimed King was a Republican. That claim was bolstered during the 2008 election season when King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, made comments to a meeting of that same organization confirming that her uncle was a Republican and voted as such (A. King, 2013). Emboldened by Alveda King’s statements, another conservative group, the Houston-based Raging Elephants, conducted a similar media-blitz. This spurred a strong rebuttal from King’s son, Martin Luther King III, who released a statement through the King Center in Atlanta:

It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest that he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states. (M. L. King III qtd. in Farrington, 2008)

King’s friends and associates offered similar rebuttals, including Southern Christian Leadership Conference co-founder Joseph Lowery, who called the claim “purely propaganda and poppycock.” Alveda King, for her part, later expressed regret for her statements, writing that she spoke without having all the facts, and acknowledged her uncle’s efforts to remain impartial to all political parties and their candidates for office.

Similar responses followed in the wake of subsequent attempts to appropriate King’s tacit support, including in 2012 when the campaign of Charlotte Bergmann, an African American woman running for the congressional seat in Tennessee’s 9th district, sponsored billboards plainly stating King was a Republican. In December of 2015, and in the midst of his own presidential candidacy, Ben Carson went on New Hampshire radio, and touted the lineage of African Americans in the Republican Party, including Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and Martin Luther King Jr. In the spring of 2018, former White House strategist Steve Bannon claimed, in a televised interview, that King would be proud of President Donald Trump regarding the record low-rates of unemployment for Black Americans (Maitlis, 2018), and during an appearance on Face the Nation early in 2019, Vice-President Mike Pence quoted King’s “I Have a Dream” speech while defending the president’s continuing fight to secure funding for a wall along the country’s southern border (Cobb, 2017).

These politically motivated claims were made despite King’s own clearly and repeatedly stated record on the matter. Whenever pressed on his political affiliation, King claimed an objective impartiality. In King’s view, Black Americans had been regularly betrayed by both of the major parties. Democrats had betrayed them “by capitulating to the prejudices and undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats,” and Republicans had betrayed them “by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing, reactionary Northerners.” This coalition, King contended, was responsible for the defeat of every bill and every move toward progressive legislation in the area of civil rights (M. L. King, 1956). In a 1958 speech at historically black Bennett College, King told the audience that he was not there to tell them how to vote, only to exercise that right responsibly:

I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either party. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this, that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely. (M. L. King, 1958)

King was not an outlier in this regard, as SNCC would, upon its establishment, likewise declare political neutrality on the same grounds. What was most important was access to the ballot in order to challenge authority in whatever form, to be a “thorn in the flesh of the American body politic” (Lewis, 1998, p. 284).

While King came to respect John F. Kennedy, and was impressed by his “incisive mind,” he steadfastly declined to publicly support his candidacy for president in 1960, even as his father—a lifelong Republican—wished to deliver a “suitcase of votes” at Kennedy’s feet following the Senator’s politically savvy phone call to Coretta Scott King after her husband’s 1958 arrest following a sit-in at an Atlanta department store. While many historians and King experts assert that it can be safely assumed King voted for Kennedy in 1960 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the closest he ever came to endorsing a candidate was an impassioned take-down of Johnson’s opponent, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater:

On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible . . . a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater. (M. L. King qtd. in Carson, 1998, p. 247)

King was joined in his denunciation of Goldwater by notables, including Wilkins, Whitney Young, Rustin, and Randolph. It was Wilkins, in particular, who had called for a moratorium of civil rights demonstrations out of fear such “disturbances” would tip the election in Goldwater’s favor. To the surprise of John Lewis, this call was supported by the action-oriented King, whom only a year before had endorsed the Children’s March in Birmingham, during which children as young as seven faced-down police dogs and fire hoses (Lewis, 1998, p. 284). Ultimately, less than 6% of Black American voters would cast their ballot for Goldwater, leading King to remark that “the illustrious ghost of Abraham Lincoln is not sufficient to winning Negro confidence, not so long as the party fails to shrink the influence of its right wing” (M. L. King, 1967c, p. 155).

During the next election cycle, King would unsparingly disparage another Republican president hopeful, California Governor Ronald Reagan, but his criticism was based on Reagan’s “war hawk” support of the conflict in Vietnam, and not on his party affiliation or any specific ideology (M. L. King, 1967b). King’s unequivocal condemnation lent certain poetry to Reagan’s role in signing Martin Luther King Jr. Day into law 16 years later.

At a press conference, a month before the King holiday became law, Reagan had done nothing to dissuade the allegations of Helms and others that King harbored communist sympathies, even suggesting that FBI surveillance files—sealed until 2027—would provide greater insight on the matter. By the time his conservative disciples such as Carson and Pence looked to follow in Reagan’s footsteps, fewer political allowances were made. According to journalist Vann Newkirk, their efforts were consequences of King’s canonization, as they were doing only what the current construction of his legacy demands. “Across the ideological spectrum,” he wrote, “politicians must seek to fit themselves under the aegis of the Kingian legacy.” Democratic politicians are not immune to such demands. Hopefuls in that party, Newkirk notes, also “must employ King in order to make the case that each of their disparate platforms is the natural heir to his legacy,” as rapper and activist Killer Mike did while campaigning for Senator Bernie Sanders preceding the 2016 presidential elections (Newkirk, 2019, para. 3).

Even the nation’s first African American president was scrutinized whenever he cited King, or if he was perceived to have not cited him enough. Throughout his two-term presidency, Obama routinely praised King; he delivered a tribute in October of 2011 at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, and alluded to King in his second inaugural address in 2013, and again later that year to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. However, when the then-Senator Obama accepted his party’s nomination for president in 2008, and referred only to a “young preacher from Georgia,” he was chided by Cornel West and Julianne Malveaux, the latter remarking, “I think the brother dropped the historical baton. The fact is that he basically perpetrated a whitewash of our history” (Malveaux qtd. in Dagbovie, 2018, p. xiii). These comments presaged a long-standing tension in the Obama administration, the president noting in private his frustration with critics—West primary among them—who claimed he was not “black enough.” Obama was restricted in his comments on racial matters by his “Double Consciousness” as the nation’s first chief executive of color, and in this instance, by the strength of King’s legacy, and who gets to decide when and how it has been properly tended to (Alter, 2013).

King’s legacy has been brought to bear in almost every contemporary controversy that touches upon race. When the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement emerged in response to the fatal use of police force against African Americans, conservative pundits, including Mike Huckabee, Bill O’Reilly, and Sarah Palin, all evoked King’s name in attempting to undermine the movement. “All lives matter,” Huckabee offered, “That’s the whole message Dr. King tried to present, and I think he would be appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some life over others” (Huckabee qtd. in McDonald, 2016). For these pundits, the debate over BLM was also a referendum on the politics of respectability. King wore a suit, and a crisp white shirt, he had a serious, professional comportment. This in contrast to how they perceived the lawless, riotous protestors in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere (Smith, 2018). Reverend Barbara Reynolds, herself a civil rights activist in the 1960s, lambasted the young protestors in the pages of the Washington Post, stating, “Trained in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., we were nonviolent activists who won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by delivering a message of love and unity. BLM seems intent on rejecting our proven methods” (Reynolds, 2015, para. 2).

Activist Reverend Osagyefo Sekou has strongly countered that “those who invoke Martin Luther King to criticize Black Lives Matter misunderstand the life and legacy of America’s favorite civil rights leader” (Sekou, 2017, para. 1). In invoking King’s “proven methods,” for example, Reynolds neglects to consider the long commitment to civil disobedience exemplified by King on the battlegrounds of Birmingham in 1963, and the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 2 years later, the kind of direct action that had initially drawn the ire of Roy Wilkins. A half year after BLM protestors shut down the Oakland Bay Bridge on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2016, Atlanta’s African American mayor Kasim Reed reprimanded protestors in that city, intoning that “Dr. King would never take a freeway.” But this claim is contradicted by the Poor People’s Campaign, organized by King in the last year of his life, which called for a massive protest in Washington, D.C. during which all thoroughfares leading to the Capitol building would be blocked. King would not live to see this occupation, which was led and realized by Ralph Abernathy in June of 1968 (Sekou, 2017). And while King never condoned the riots that had spread through the country in the late 1960s, he noted in a prophetic televised interview with Mike Wallace that he understood the rage at their genesis. “I think we’ve got to see,” King began, “that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?” (Wallace, 1966). Similar comments made by those in the BLM movement support Sekou’s conclusion that “Black Lives Matter is not a rejection of King and the civil rights movement but an extension of their radical legacy” (Sekou, 2017, para. 19).

The debate surrounding BLM stimulated countless editorials and think-pieces on what King would have thought of the movement, all which only served to emphasize that King could no longer speak for himself. He cannot offer an opinion on the tragic deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and so many others. He cannot have a position on Muslim bans or border walls. Nor could Coretta Scott King speak for herself when her name was drawn into a political debate between senators Elizabeth Warren and Mitch McConnell over the confirmation of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. None of which stopped Michael Eric Dyson from using an afterword of a second book on King’s legacy, published in 2008, to conduct an imaginary interview with the leader on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Dyson used the opportunity to enlist King’s support for the LGBT community and for federal protection of same-sex marriage, to criticize Islamophobia and the war in Iraq, and to fight for universal health care, and wage equality. Dyson’s work concludes with King awarding to then-Senator Barack Obama the kind of political endorsement he so adroitly avoided giving in life (Dyson, 2008). Published that same year, by King’s friend and advisor Clarence B. Jones, What Would Martin Say? likewise imagined King’s stance on contemporary issues such as affirmative action, illegal immigration, and the War on Terror (Jones & Engel, 2008). As the poet Carl Wendell Hines Jr. wrote of King in 1976, “Dead men make such convenient heroes. For they cannot rise to challenge the images that we might fashion from their lives” (Hines qtd. in Zeppard et al., 1976, p. 4).

Based largely on King’s conviction that the evil of racism could not be routed out without first addressing America’s massive economic inequality, Douglas Sturm has identified him as a democratic socialist, as has fellow political scientist Peter Drier. These conclusions are well-grounded—King advocated for democratic socialism in several speeches—still; Drier is also not immune to imagining what stances King would take on a host of contemporary issues. Drier has King standing with Walmart employees and fast-food workers fighting for a living wage. He would also stand side-by-side homeowners facing foreclosures, and protesting the abuses of Wall Street banks. He would lobby for more stringent gun-control legislation, call for dramatic cuts to military spending, and the reallocation of public dollars to education and health care (Drier, 2016; Sturm, 1990). Historical liberties, notwithstanding, Drier must be bemused by the regular commercialism surrounding the annual observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which finds King’s name being exploited to hawk everything from Nordstrom’s to McDonald’s. The most notorious example, however, came during Super Bowl LII when a commercial for Ram used King’s “The Drum Major Instinct” (a speech critical of materialism) to sell pickup trucks. As far back as 2001, former NAACP chief Julian Bond was disgusted that “in America even the most sacred icons of the civil rights movement are not immune to exploitation and commercialization” (Bond qtd. in Farhi, 2001, para. 8).

There is no natural endpoint to this article as so many of the issues presented are ongoing, and many more of the familiar “ . . . if King were alive today” refrains are certainly to come. Few pundits or politicians, whatever their platform or party, are without guilt in ascribing to King some affiliation or position he did not hold in life, but for the reasons discussed here that has been made possible. Given what he stood for in life, and the manner in which he has been immortalized, perhaps the temptation is simply too strong. We can do no better, despite Ram’s best efforts, than to remember King as he had hoped—“Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. Say that I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things shall not matter” (M. L. King, 1968).