Message from Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama: There's more to the dream than this

Now that the election results are in and Barack Obama is our new president, many people in the United States are viewing the election as the crowning achievement to the civil rights movement. I believe that nothing could be further from the truth. Obama is one of many leaders throughout history, that will be thrust in the limelight and have his every move, thought and word scrutinized by an American public that still today, demonstrates its intolerance on a daily basis. Since Barack Obama's victory at the polls, we have seen an increase in violence towards immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States.(See:http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=e364948690a6224ef864120ae2543f6f)


While Obama and King are two very different leaders in two very different times, lessons from Dr. King are still relevant today and my hope is that Barack Obama will use that to guide him through the difficult times ahead. Great leaders inspire other great leaders, just as Mohandas Gandhi inspired Martin Luther King Jr., so have many other leaders around the world and throughout time done the same. An argument has been made that perhaps the civil rights movement should have groomed multiple leaders instead of just one in Martin Luther King Jr. While I understand that Martin Luther King was a leader that emerges just once in a great while, I am inclined to agree with the multiple leader approach. However, this is not to say that Martin Luther King Jr. did not directly affect new leadership because as I stated before, he was a great leader that not only inspired but put lessons into practice that new leaders could use. He took Gandhi's practice of non-violent resistance and made it his own because the lessons he learned from Gandhi were molded by him to fit his struggle. One example of King's implementation of non-violence that was unique to the civil rights struggle in the United States was when the civil rights movement leadership in Montgomery, Alabama turned themselves in to the police in mass as a result of the mass indictment by the Montgomery Police Department. It was nonviolent disobedience but it was actually something new as Stewart Burns explains in his book, To the Mountaintop, "But it was disobedience turned into its opposite, mass civil obedience-an imaginative leap of collective action, contrived in grassroots spontaneity, that even Gandhi had never tried". Mohandas Gandhi did not know Dr. King but he would affect the civil rights leader in such an intimate manner that it would seem that part of his spirit lived through Dr. King. In this same manner Dr. King's spirit lives in great leaders that he may have never met.

It is up to generations following Dr. King to not only learn from his methods but continue the struggle towards complete equality for all people because civil rights is simply not just a black and white issue. We must mold his approach and his lessons to our struggle because while King's struggle might have the same purpose as people of color today, the enemy of we are fighting, the methods we are seeing are much different. The forces of injustice are much more devious and underhanded than before so we must be creative if we are to defeat such a cunning adversary. Bus boycotts, sit ins, mass incarcerations may work to combat a blatantly racist society but today, things are not that way save for some parts of the country. Many people believe that racism does not exist anymore and hold up Barack Obama as living proof, so the challenge is demonstrating to people that not only does racism still exist but that we all are part of the system that perpetuates it's existence.

The reality is that since Dr. King was the only recognized leader of the civil rights movement, his becoming a martyr may have ultimately hurt the movement more than people have come to realize. This is because with the principal leader being killed and no one to step in his place immediately filling the void and thus not losing the momentum of the civil rights movement, his death brought about the commemoration of the movement as if the civil rights struggle was itself dead. To a certain extent it did die because after Dr. King's death, his message was considerably toned down to appease the masses as Dr. King being the great "American" hero. His rhetoric was toned down so much that Martin Luther King Jr. is known more for his message of non-violence and not for his more effective non-violent resistance. Resistance, even though it is non-violent is still resistance to something and in this case it was against what the United States stood for. So to commemorate Dr. King as an "American" hero as if his ideals were the entire country's ideals all along is misleading.

Vincent Harding in his book, The Inconvenient Hero touches on this when he explains how the public today perceives Martin Luther King Jr. as a, "great orator, harmless dreamer of black and white children on the hillside". It seems that in order to accept Dr. King into the national fabric of our society, his reputation had to be softened and that could only be achieved after his death and with time. Harding also elaborates on this point as he wrote, "It appears as if the price for the first national holiday honoring a black man is the development of a massive case of national amnesia concerning who that black man really was". King's untimely death not only did not allow him to speak for himself anymore but it also did not allow for the defense of the civil rights movement which came immediately under attack after his death.

Perhaps if there had been multiple leaders, the resistance aspect of the movement would not have lost momentum and greater progress could have been made towards racial equality. Instead, we live in a society where many believe racism does not exist while the system of inequality remains intact. I believe that Martin Luther King Jr. was leading up to this point towards the end of his life when he speaks of the "triple evils" that Harding also mentions in his book. In fact, Harding quotes from Dr. King directly saying, "the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together". The civil rights movement in the latter days of Dr. King's life was preparing to educate the public on how racism against any ethnic group was tied into economic inequality and how that inequality was perpetuated by war; In short, the system of racism in all it's forms was still stubbornly in place. Martin Luther King Jr. did not have the opportunity to bring that message into the national consciousness and without the momentum of the civil rights movement, convincing people of the existence of systemic racism in today's society must start from square one because the message is now falling on deaf ears. Especially now that the nation has elected a black president, it will be that much more difficult for people to acknowledge a blatantly racist system.

Another important aspect of Dr. King to remember is that his opinions were not popular during the time he was alive and that although loved and even revered by many white people today, many of his opinions are still not popular with the white majority, such as the aforementioned, "triple evils". Therefore it only stands to reason that to continue his vision and his struggle is to embrace ideals that will not be popular in American society today. To continue his vision is to display a courage and commitment that speaks out against the racist system of today because to even state that racism still exists is an unpopular opinion. The fact remains that there is an ugly undercurrent of hatred and paranoia of people from the Middle East in the United States and that there is a condescending attitude and hatred towards people from Latin America and as evidenced from the catastrophe from hurricane Katrina, the United States still has a long way to go towards fully integrating the black community if not only economically then spiritually and politically. From illegal immigration and manipulation of the fear of terrorism to past and present economic exploitation along racial lines, American society is far from achieving the goal that Martin Luther King Jr. had in mind.

Racism is making a comeback in the mainstream media under the guise of comedy, patriotism and fear and although racist attitudes never really left, it is becoming overtly popular again. More than ever, we need to learn from Dr. King to lead our own movement of today and groom the leaders of tomorrow and while President elect Obama is just beginning his journey, he is already affecting the leaders of tomorrow.