Expanding the Legacy of King
No other American has a national holiday to memorialize their individual legacy. Precious few are immortalized in stone in our nation’s capital. How many others have annual parades in their honor? There is no danger of Martin Luther King Jr. being forgotten by history. Yet the danger of forgetting the deeper legacy of his life and teachings remains constant. Dr. King’s moral philosophy was deeper than the vast majority of his celebrators know. His pioneering conceptions of democracy give life to a civic understanding that could seed hope for the future, if only Americans knew. And King foresaw the complexities of our modern racial moment in terms that could clarify our present struggles if only we were aware of them. We must not only recapture our understanding of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. — we must expand it.
Americans have long been keen to echo praises of King the humanist. Those great words of the I Have a Dream speech, that one day American children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” have been quoted so often, by social justice activists through the years all the way down to Josh Hawley speaking on the floor of the United States Senate against Critical Race Theory, that one might almost get the impression that this was the only thing Dr. King had ever said. But in an age of historic polarization it is worth remembering that it was also King who said that “we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding.” Do those who seek to co-opt King’s legacy for their own partisan agendas honor this moral call? King’s philosophy of Nonviolence is a moral philosophy, not just a philosophy of activism, calling upon us to wield love and understanding as the tools of social progress. How many who invoke King’s name truly remember that?
Yet Nonviolence also deeply informed King’s conception of democracy. We know that Martin Luther King Jr. strove for all Americans to have the right to vote. Yet as fundamental a civil right as it is, King would have disagreed with President Joe Biden who recently declared that “your highest duty as a citizen” is voting. Voting was not the end-all be-all of democracy to Dr. King. A person might vote to rob her neighbor of her rights as easily as she might vote to protect them. Desegregation was a vital part of the formula for equality that empowered all Americans to vote. But King’s conception of democracy hinged upon integration — a far more powerful ideal:
“Desegregation is eliminative and negative, for it simply removes these legal and social prohibitions…Integration is genuine intergroup, interpersonal doing. Desegregation then, rightly, is only a short-range goal. Integration is the ultimate goal of our national community.”
Scholar Danielle Allen asks “what exactly does King have in mind…by way of a potential transformation of a democratic social world…?” in her essay Integration, Freedom, and the Affirmation of Life. She gives the main answer soon after: “King seeks a transformation of humankind.”
To vote means nothing. To embrace your neighbor’s right to vote — that is a stride towards democracy.
These are King’s forgotten views. And we also forget how prophetically King spoke into the future.
In our present age certain leading journalists, intellectuals and activists of color express resistance to sharing certain spaces with white people. In contemporary America certain white Americans fiercely resist deeper reflection upon the history of racial injustice that has produced our modern conflicts. Therefore in today’s America it is worth recalling the fears of Dr. King, expressed towards the end of his life, lamenting the mire into which the Civil Rights Movement had fallen:
“The movement for social change has entered a time of temptation to despair because it is clear now how deep and systemic are the evils it confronts. There is a temptation to break up into mutually suspicious extremist groups, in which blacks reject the participation of whites and whites reject the realities of their own history.”
Let us not forsake true integration. Let us not forget our history. Rather, let us expand the legacy of Martin Luther King.
John Wood, Jr. is a national ambassador for Braver Angels, America's largest grassroots, cross-partisan organization dedicated to political depolarization.
