King’s legacy endures in Age of Obama
WHEN President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Lincoln Memorial last night, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, he was inevitably compared to Martin Luther King Jr, whose oration that day framed the moral purpose of the civil rights movement.
But there are huge differences between the prophetic icon and the political prodigy that reveal the competing demands of the vocations they embraced. If we fail to understand the difference between them, we will never appreciate the arc of their social aspiration — or fairly measure their achievements.
Forty-five years after he was assassinated, King has become a global icon. His outsized legend eclipsed the life he lived and overcame his enemies’ efforts to erase him from memory.
King made a comeback in death from the defeats near the end of his life, as black militants made him seem increasingly out of touch. He is now viewed as the greatest black American. Only Obama has come close to King’s popularity. But the preacher’s bloodstained sacrifice lifts him above the historic pull of presidential swagger.
If King made history in the 1960s, Obama owns the 2010s, and the last gasps of the aughts. It has not been easy deciding the prophet’s orbit in the president’s universe. Obama has echoed King’s conciliatory words while sidestepping his majestic rage at the social ills that mock genuine justice.
How, then, are we to understand and enliven King’s legacy in the Age of Obama? It might help to remember that the role King adopted, and the one Obama plays, often puts them at odds. Prophets such as King not only tell it like it is, they tell it as it should be.
They tirelessly question both the fruit of our labour for justice and the tree on which it grows or withers. They tell hard truths at inconvenient moments and call on powerful figures and governments to act justly before divine judgment falls on all our heads.
This should not be mistaken for insults mouthed by fretful presidential naysayers who churn in resentment and noisy discontent. It’s easy to see how lesser gifted social critics and self-anointed defenders of the enlightened vanguard confuse prophetic declaration with pathetic denunciation.
King’s prophetic fury roared as he sought to correct a society that veered off its moral path. King spoke against poverty, racism, and militarism in his final days instead of fixing one man in his crosshairs, wishing to slap sense into him.
Most telling, King often criticised himself in public. Aware of his own shortcomings, he warned listeners at one sermon not to call him a saint, and again when he said, in his landmark Riverside Church speech opposing the Vietnam War, that he had to “move to break the betrayal of my own silences”.
Obama’s role is not that of prophet but of a conscientious politician. If pushed, he might become an inspiring statesman. Prophets have the ethical luxury to offer wholesale criticism of systems and orders. Politicians, particularly a president, are compelled by the interests of the state to preserve the union while toiling to fix what’s gone wrong. We can’t possibly expect Obama to behave like King.
But we can encourage Obama to measure his achievements against the template King laid. King’s words and deeds should be used to size up Obama’s political performance and press him to pay more attention to escalating black unemployment, racial disparities in education, and the gun violence that snuffed King’s existence. The issues King took on at the end of his life remain.
But a host of other issues have arisen. The US has crowded its prisons with black and brown bodies, many for non-violent drug offences. Making money off the often unjust and disproportionate imprisonment of black and brown folk is a prophetic priority that rings true to King. So is the witch hunt for immigrants who might be hiding out from the law. Scapegoating immigrants is no substitute for offering viable paths to citizenship and treating their children with compassion and justice.
King didn’t live long enough to witness the fierce debate over sexual orientation. Many black folk have used scripture to argue the immorality of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender sexuality — in the same way the Bible was used to suppress black social rebellion.
These same black religious folk have neglected bitter lessons about the denial to slaves of the right to marry, and the outlawing of interracial marriage well into the 20th century. The fight against sexual bigotry begins when we refuse anger at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folk for “stealing” our racial model and drawing what many blacks see as false comparisons to the civil rights movement.
If, as some say, the LGBT community ripped off black people to fuel their movement, King would likely be the first to say that he ripped off Mahatma Gandhi to fuel the US civil rights struggle.
Nearly a half-century after his death, King’s prophetic strength fuels the fight to bear witness to black suffering and tell the truth about black pain in love. King’s shining example also lights the path for millions who seek to be free from oppression — in whatever form it appears.
In the Age of Obama, King’s legacy is more critical than ever to remind us of what must be done to make our nation a reflection of our noblest dreams and our highest ideals.
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