Editorial – King’s legacy is often misrepresented

The portrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a peaceful, docile black man whose non-violent protests are the sole reason for the perceived success of the Civil Rights Movement, is a manipulative tool of white supremacy.
This portrayal of his legacy is often used to delegitimize today’s protests against a nation that continues to uphold a racist status quo. The idea that today’s Civil Rights Movement is too “violent” or “angry” to be effective is dangerous.
It creates this idea that black people must stay silent, smile, shake-hands and walk arm-and-arm with white supremacy in order for us to be granted our basic human rights.
“Martin Luther King wouldn’t support the Black Lives Matter movement, he didn’t see color,” says the white moderate.
We’ll never truly know what King would say about the Black Lives Matter movement, because unfortunately white-nationalism took him away too soon. However, to say he didn’t see color is a gross misconception. To say he believed that black anger should be ignored and invalidated is just plain false.
This is evident in his letter written during a stint in Birmingham Jail in 1963.
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is…the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice;who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,’” wrote King.
In truth King said the white moderate who believed they could “set the timetable for another man’s freedom” by constantly advising black people to “wait until a ‘more convenient season’” was the true threat to freedom and justice for all.
This is evident by the diminishment of his memory to exclude the more radical ideologies King held towards the end of his life. King had begun to openly protest the War on Vietnam, fight against the systemic impoverishment of people of color and most importantly understand and agree with the benefits of the radicalism seen in Malcolm X.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy has been stripped of the pure cultural importance and reduced to a mockery of the struggle that it has been to get to the freedoms we are given.
As an eboard, we ask that the FIU community respect King’s legacy by acknowledging that he did see color, that he did see white privilege and that he understood the path to equality was not and never will be a peaceful one. For white supremacy is not peaceful, it is not docile, it is not nonviolent and it has never asked nicely.