Fifty years on and Martin Luther King Jr is an icon, the Civil Rights hero, the non-violent activist, the man with a Dream who preached from the mountaintop. We respect him, honour him, hold him up as one of the towering figures of our time. My ten year old, born continents and decades away from Jim Crow and Ebenezer Baptist knows who he is, what he did.
But King was a prophet, and so we run the risk of neutering him if we try and freeze him in sanitised amber. He’s an icon now, but fifty years ago many people hated him, firebombed his house, kept detailed FBI files on him. Today we don’t commemorate a man who died peacefully of old age, we remember a man who was gunned down at the age of 39.
He was murdered in Memphis, in town to support a sanitation workers strike, part of his attempts to establish the Poor People’s Campaign against poverty. We tend to see King purely as a Civil Rights leader but that ignores his work against militarism and economic injustice. His legacy is more complex, more vital, more relevant than we find comfortable.
Because we can’t commemorate King’s death without hearing the cries of Black Lives Matter, without being outraged at children going to school hungry, without acknowledging police brutality and cultures of violence. It’s possible to see a long way from the mountaintop.
There are prophets in the world. History teaches us that we don’t always put them on pedestals until after we kill them. May the lesson of MLK50 be that we hear the words of those who see further, who see the truth; hear their words and act on them before we murder another generation of prophets before erecting statues in their honour.