A civil rights icon. A peaceful warrior. A justice crusader of almost mythical proportions.
That’s largely the image of Martin Luther King Jr. in the modern public consciousness. From the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott to the “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington to his 1968 assassination in Memphis, King’s remarkable life story has cemented his place among the most revered figures in American history.
Today, at the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. Day becoming the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service, more than 80% of Americans in a Pew Research Center poll said King had a positive impact on the country.
Over time, “King has been transformed into something of a secular saint,” said Eric Arnesen, the Teamsters Professor of History at George Washington University.
But in some ways, Arnesen explained, the King holiday represents a significant shift in the civil rights leader’s legacy. King was a controversial figure in his time. His stances on racial equality and his opposition to the Vietnam War made him unpopular among large swaths of the country. Many white Americans considered him too radical. Some Black Americans questioned the effectiveness of his nonviolence philosophy. And the government targeted him for surveillance.
In 1966, two years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, 63% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him, Pew reported. Even establishing a King holiday was a struggle. President Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1983—“Not enthusiastically,” Arnesen added—but the holiday wasn’t officially observed until 1986, and it wasn’t recognized in all 50 states until 2000.
In a conversation with GW Today, Arnesen, a specialist in the history of race, labor, politics and civil rights at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, discussed how the holiday has contributed to King’s evolving place in history.
Q: How has the MLK Jr. holiday affected King’s legacy? Who is the King we celebrate on that day?
A: The holiday offers us a Martin Luther King Jr. who is both recognizable on one level but simplified on another.
The King that gets canonized is a King who represents our common humanity. To a large extent, it’s the King of the “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the 1963 March on Washington. That moment is fixed frozen in time; the image reduces King’s beliefs to formal equality before the law, memorable phrases about the American dream and a future where people would be “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But King was a complicated man. He was also deeply concerned about economic inequality and believed that addressing the racial crisis of the 1960s would require vast expenditures of money and a redistribution of wealth. By the time he died, he was a controversial figure. He had come out against the war in Vietnam, angering the Johnson administration. Some liberals—and even civil rights activists—were frustrated with him for merging the issue of civil rights and foreign affairs. He was criticized in the mainstream press for his alleged inability to control demonstrators.
On the left, Black Power activists dismissed the notion of nonviolence as passé. This was a time of militant and even armed resistance. The white left, which was also gravitating toward many of those same ideas, found King to be frustratingly out of step with the times.
So at the moment of his assassination, King was not all that popular on the right or the left.
Q: As a national day of service, many Americans volunteer within their communities on MLK Jr. Day. But from a historical standpoint, what do you think the holiday means today?
A: I would say it’s not clear what it means today. There is no single meaning. It means different things to different people. And it means nothing at all to large numbers.
For those on the liberal left side of the spectrum, those who still channel the spirit of the civil rights movement, the day represents the recognition that a struggle for civil rights had once taken place, and that King was a leading figure in it. This allows us a moment to pause, reflect, acknowledge and even celebrate those struggles.
Q: And for those on the right?
A: It’s a different legacy—a tougher legacy. Many staunch conservatives were opposed to the King holiday. In the years since, King has been, in a sense, useful for conservatives to say, “What are you complaining about today? Civil rights have been achieved. As a nation, we have removed the legal foundation of Jim Crow, of segregation, of disfranchisement. And it’s you liberals and leftists who insist upon saying racism isn’t dead and there’s a systemic inequality that needs to be addressed.”
But most Americans, I imagine, don’t have a clear sense of the history of civil rights. Their knowledge is filtered through what we get from the media during Black History Month or on King’s birthday. It’s a simplified, heroic story of personal virtue, courage and triumph.
Q: Is that necessarily the wrong impression?
A: It’s misleading in some fashion. Celebrating King as a secular saint often means we pay little attention as a society to the breadth of his thought—his critique of American institutions—and to the vast cast of characters who made civil rights possible.
King was one player amongst many. He was an important player. Maybe he was the most important player. But to a certain extent, the King story takes much of the oxygen out of the room. There is too little attention paid to [civil rights organizations such as] the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality, not to mention the countless grassroots activists who provided the day-to-day labor that made the movement possible. They remain largely unknown, except to historians.
Q: On the other hand, doesn’t the holiday introduce people to modern civil rights history?
A: Yes, the extent to which the holiday is a spur for people to think more seriously about civil rights history, to read more deeply, to watch actual documentaries, that’s a good thing.
The history is complicated, messy, dramatic, exciting—and important. And there’s space for more than one civil rights hero. If focusing on King then inspires people to read more about the deeper history, then, as a historian, I think that’s a positive outcome.
Digging Deeper
To learn more about King and the civil rights movement, Arnesen recommends the following resources:
David L. Chappell, “Walking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Random House, 2014)
“The modern civil rights movement neither began nor ended with the contributions of Martin Luther King Jr. Chappell explores the movement’s history after King’s assassination and reconstructs the political campaign for the King holiday.”
John D’Emilio, “Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin” (Free Press, 2003)
“Bayard Rustin, an activist from the late 1930s through the 1980s, was a proponent of nonviolence and key movement strategist who advised King and organized the 1963 March on Washington, among many other things.”
“At the River I Stand” (1993)
“A documentary on the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike that explores Black workers’ struggle for dignity on the job and King’s role in supporting the strikers on the eve of his death.”