Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929. His day is observed as a national holiday celebrating the inoffensive, neutered hero of sweet peace and love on the third Monday of January each year. But that Disney ed legacy that has been hijacked to promote Donald Trump’s declaration to the country that he shares in “King’s dream of equality, freedom, justice, and peace,” and MLK Day sales of Ram trucks and mattresses. However, this sanitized, tied up with a bow image is not the one recognized by Americans alive when King was. Dr. King was feared and reviled by the establishment during his lifetime. His home was bombed. There were two other attempts to murder him, twenty- five years apart. He was jailed on mendacious charges twenty-nine times. When the FBI declared him a communist, and “the most dangerous Negro of the future of this Nation” they wiretapped his home and office. Nationally and locally Black pastors vociferously repudiated him from their pulpits. When President Kennedy became aware of the plans for the March on Washington, he tried to abort it. When that failed, he attempted to control it by positioning an administration official to the right of the Lincoln Memorial with an automatic cut-off switch in case King uttered an objectionable word. Fifteen years dead, 22 United States senators voted against an official holiday honoring him a er North Carolina senator Jesse Helms commandeered a 16-day filibuster against it. King stood for patience, middle-class respectability, and social justice especially for Blacks, which was intolerable to white Christian Americans. Alternatively, youthful Black urban radicals urgently demanded de ance and instantaneous relief. they charged the suit-wearing, calm-spoken civil rights leader as being irresponsibly passive and archaic in his attitude. Malcolm X called King’s campaigns “criminal” for not teaching his followers to defend themselves when they experienced brutal police attacks.
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