My 9-year old daughter came home this week raving about her class and their discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr.
She declared that she loved learning about his life and that she was thankful to him because without King, no change would have been possible in America on the question of race. I am a historian of African-American history specializing in social movements, so I quickly moved to correct her. Of course change would have happened, even if King had never lived! I described to her other leaders. I reminded her that movements don’t function because of just one great man. I told her that King was not a perfect person, and that even he had come short of meeting all his goals. In the end, I even resorted to reminding her that I wrote a book on a movement that took place 35 years before King was even born.
Clearly my daughter didn’t care. She insisted that her school would not be integrated, and that her whole world would not have been the same without King’s leadership.
After thinking about it for a while, I realized that most people feel the same way about King that my daughter does. King has become the single greatest icon of the civil rights movement—his words are studied, his great marches are remembered, his name marks our boulevards; his shadow, now literally cast in stone, looms large on our national consciousness. He has become the benchmark for great leadership, so much so that nearly every leader that has emerged after him is compared to him, and found wanting.
As an icon, King is often thought of as flawless, so that we rarely reflect on his failures as a movement leader. Our collective memory of King only touches on the high points. The images we remember are the moments of his greatest triumphs as a leader: the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the Birmingham Campaign that same year, and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. Each of these efforts resulted in positive change, clear victories in the courts or in the halls of Congress.
We tend not to remember the moments when King faltered or searched for the right direction. We don’t recall the indecision about what to do next after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the challenge of the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement campaign, or his unfulfilled Poor People’s Campaign — cut short by his tragic assassination in 1968. These moments are forgotten when King is not remembered in his broader context.
It is especially telling that Chicago, Illinois was the site of one of King’s most difficult campaigns. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were drawn into the struggle in the urban North after the Los Angeles riots of 1965. While the southern movement had been making strides in dismantling segregation and disfranchisement, the problems of black residents in the urban North and West had not gained sustained national attention. At the invitation of activists in Chicago, King moved to that city.
While in Chicago, King and the SCLC hoped to draw attention to poor and inequitable housing conditions, pointing to the fact that although the city did not have formal segregation laws, de facto housing patterns left many of the city’s African Americans in slum conditions. King also worked to stem gang violence, holding workshops on nonviolence. King had a young leader in his organization, Jesse Jackson, spearhead Operation Breadbasket in Chicago: an effort to call on local businesses to hire black employees on an equitable basis.
But King’s efforts in Chicago did not meet with immediate success. Local white residents resisted calls to integrate their neighborhoods. King described one march on the city’s west side, saying that he had “never seen as much hatred and hostility on the part of so many people.” City leaders attempted to defuse protests, coming to agreements to address unfair housing conditions, then later refusing to make good on their promises. The majority of the nation turned a blind eye to the inequities of black urban life, feeling no moral call to transform black life once southern segregation had been dismantled. Instead, many in the national media pointed to theories of black pathology rather than addressing the systemic problems King had decried.
In the long run, King’s turn toward Chicago would make a difference. In the decades following his death, black organizations would use their newfound political leverage to elect black mayors in the cities of Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. However, black communities still suffer from the highest rates of joblessness and King’s vision of stemming poverty and violence has not yet come to pass — as news of the Chicago’s 2012 murder rate make clear. And more than four decades since King’s death, most urban neighborhoods can largely still be described as “black” or “white.”
On the night before his assassination in 1968, King spoke to a packed house in Memphis, Tennessee about the movement for freedom and their place in human history. He spoke about the highlights of their efforts, but he focused primarily on what more needed to be done. He spoke of the injustice of poverty, poor housing; the lack of jobs. He reminded his audience that although black people might have been poor, collectively they had power. He called on them to “develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” banding together to invest in companies that respected workers rights and boycotting those who refused to pay a living wage. He recalled their victories dismantling the laws of segregation but called their current struggle a “human rights revolution.” He insisted that this struggle against poverty, violence, “hurt and neglect” was the continuation of the long struggle for civil rights, arguing that all God’s children had a right to live in peace, dignity, and respect.
He concluded his speech remembering the first attempt on his life when he was stabbed in 1958 at a book signing. He reminded the audience of how close he had come to dying that day, but said that he was glad that he had lived to see all that the movement had accomplished. Then he seemed to speak of his own coming death, saying that God had allowed him to go to the mountaintop and see over into the Promised Land. Warning that he “might not get there with you,” he promised that we would reach the Promised Land and complete the struggle — the struggle for nonviolence, the struggle for shared prosperity, the struggle for universal justice.
In the almost forty-five years since King’s assassination, we still find ourselves at a racial crossroads. Some might argue that we have reached the Promised Land with the dismantling of the legal barriers that kept African-Americans from realizing their full citizenship. Some might argue that the election and successful reelection of the first African-American president is the realization of King’s dream.
But this year, as we celebrate the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d like for us to remember the shortcomings as much as we glorify his success. After all, these struggles have lessons to teach, and might provide insight into the things that we still must do. They hint at what King might have done had he lived.
Blair L. M. Kelley is an associate professor at North Carolina State University. Follow her on Twitter at @ProfBLMKelley