The Commodification of a King — (Transcribed) Keynote Speech, Martin Luther King Jr. Day — University of Michigan-Flint
Good morning everyone, and thank you so much for joining me on this glorious day to remember one of the most revolutionary civil rights icons in history, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I want to especially thank the staff and student organizers of this event. Dr. David Luke reached out to me months ago about serving as a keynote, and along with student leaders, had the amazing idea to incorporate students into this discussion that will take place in about a half hour or so at the conclusion of this address.
Once again, my name is Dr. Sy Stokes and I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan — Ann Arbor. I also serve as a lecturer for the School of Education where I teach a course titled, “Race, Racism, and Anti-Blackness in Higher Education.” In the first week of class last week, I actually used a lot of Dr. King’s work to help students learn about the history of racial formation in the United States and how it affects our education system. So, to speak with all of you today, to honor his legacy that has altered our universe beyond measure, is an incredible opportunity that I am eternally grateful for.
To begin, I want to give an overview of what I will be covering. For the first part of this keynote, I will focus on the commodification of Dr. King’s legacy, and how his name has been invoked in ways that would disappoint no one more than the man himself. Second, and in relation to the discussion I will have with students leaders later on, I will focus on the importance of student activists throughout the civil rights movement who actually criticized Dr. King in his early years for not being radical enough, and in the process, made him a better activist and leader for the movement.
THE COMMODIFICATION OF KING’S LEGACY
Now to begin this first half, I want to draw attention to Dr. King’s own words. When Dr. King’s name is invoked, people often turn to his “I Have A Dream Speech,” delivered on August 28th, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. During this momentous occasion, Dr. King envisioned a world where his four children could “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But need I remind you that this was a dream, and a dream that has still remained unfulfilled long after his passing. A dream he knew would be difficult to fulfill because, as he states in his 1968 book, Where We Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, “Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community” (King, 1968, p. 22).
He devoted much of his time to criticizing who he referred to as the “white moderate.” In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he states:
I must confess that over the past few years I’ve been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I’ve almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive piece which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to “wait for a more convenient season.” (King, 1963, p. 97).
He knew no such season existed, as he emphasized that “There is only one thing certain about time, and that is it waits for no one. If it is not used constructively, it passes you by” (King, 1968, p. 136). The reason I use these direct quotes, and why I will continue using these quotes throughout this keynote address, is to demonstrate that these words are not merely my interpretation, not merely a matter of opinion, not something that can be reduced as a passionate plea with a personal agenda. Rather, they are Dr. King’s own words that have been intentionally forgotten and replaced by inaccurate translations of his dream.
So to the people who invoke his name, but have no intention of carrying on his radical vision, I have a message for you:
To the political moderates, regardless of race, who condemn the rioters destroying property after they watched another one of us murdered by police. The political moderates who use Dr. King’s nonviolent strategy as an excuse to criticize the justifiable rage we feel. I remind you that although King never agreed that violence was the answer, he was equally critical of the people who criticized violent methods but did nothing to advance the movement themselves. He reminds us that
…it cannot be taken for granted that Negros will adhere to nonviolence under any and all conditions…Violence has already been practiced too often, and always because remedies were postponed… Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility. (King, 1968, p. 22).
We are one and a half years from the Summer of 2020, what many have referred to as the Second Freedom Summer, which was led by the Movement for Black Lives who forced this nation to reckon with the abuse that Black and Brown people endure by the hands of law enforcement. We are also one year from January 6th, when white supremacists scaled the walls of the U.S. Capitol and were met with far less force than the Black and Brown nonviolent protestors who marched in cities across the nation just a few months prior. Yet, even to this day, Black and Brown activists are painted as irrational, immoral, and violent beings who must be policed. To the political moderates — if you discount the Black Lives Matter movement entirely, solely because you disagree with the actions of a few, you never cared about the movement to begin with.
To members of the school boards across the country who are waging an imaginary war against Critical Race Theory, a framework that has never seen the light of day in a K-12 classroom; the school board members who invoke Dr. King’s name to hide behind a Black face like contemporary Blackface; who use his line, “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” to argue against teaching Black history to our children; I remind you that Dr. King wanted nothing more than for children in America to be taught the accurate history of this nation that was built by our enslaved African ancestors. Within the first few paragraphs of his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait, Dr. King tells a story:
Not all history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet this boy and this girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers and purchasers of board-of-education books. (King, 1963, p. xii).
He goes on to describe how Black girls and boys in Harlem and Birmingham did not learn about racism from their history books, but because they — at such a young age — had already experienced the perilous force of racism that was obstructing their path toward freedom.
He highlights how our history books “have only served to intensify the Negro sense of worthlessness and to augment the antagonistic doctrine of white supremacy” (King, 1968, p. 42). To make matters worse (and in relation to something I fought for as a student activist a decade ago and what my father fought for in the 60s while he was a student at Howard University), colleges and universities — who are often the last line of defense in providing students with access to ethnic studies curriculum — refuse to establish African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latinx Studies departments, leaving students with deplorable levels of racial literacy that they ultimately bring into their professional careers as our future doctors, lawyers, and politicians.
In the same vein, to the members of leadership at colleges and universities, who hire a token person of color to performatively portray a commitment to diversity but do nothing to provide resources and support to ensure their success, I remind you of Dr. King’s quote,
This is why many liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing integration in merely aesthetic terms, where a token number of Negroes adds color to a white-dominated power structure. They say… “Our university has no problem with integration, we have one Negro faculty member and even one Negro chairman of a department” (King, 1968, p. 93).
He knew one drop of color in a sea of whiteness was nothing to celebrate.
To the white supremacists who cry “cancel culture” despite being invited to speak at hundreds of college campuses across the nation, I remind you that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were denied from speaking at many universities because of their political views — an ironic twist to our contemporary circumstances where higher education administrators welcome white supremacists to college campuses so students can “see both sides of the political spectrum.”
To the politicians who release statements and organize events to honor Dr. King, but do nothing to help advance racial justice beyond performative gestures, I remind you that he criticized politicians during the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963:
With the dawn of 1963, plans were afoot all over the land to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, the one hundredth birthday of the Negro’s liberation from bondage. In Washington, a federal Commission had been established to mark the event. Governors of States and mayors of cities had utilized the date to enhance their political image by naming commissions, receiving committees, issuing statements, planning state pageants, sponsoring dinners, endorsing social activities…But alas! All the talk and publicity accompanying the centennial only serve to remind the Negro that he still wasn’t free, that he still lived a form of slavery disguised by certain niceties of complexity. (King, 1963, p. 12).
Dr. King saw right through the performativity and demanded proactivity. He would be ashamed of Republicans and Democrats on the Hill today who are blocking the “Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act” from passing, a bill named after someone he once mentored. I could not imagine how he would feel if he knew that nearly 60 years later, we are still fighting for the same rights he was fighting for in 1965.
To the politicians who cry communism and socialism when people demand universal healthcare, housing for all, and adequate wages, I remind you that King was, above all, an anti-capitalist, and more aligned with what would be considered a socialist agenda in today’s day and age.
He recognized that “there is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will” (King, 1968, p. 187). He understood that any economic agenda committed to racial justice will only be successful if it involves billions of dollars dedicated specifically to Black people who have been expected to win a race where white people were given a 300-year head start. He demanded that that we needed the equivalent of a Medicare for housing. He demanded a guaranteed living wage for all citizens. He even called on President John F. Kennedy to pass a Second Emancipation Proclamation. But most importantly, he demanded that this be accomplished through the lens of equity rather than equality:
It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. But this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis. (King, 1968, p. 95, emphasis in original).
He exposed the American Dream to be a myth of meritocracy. Contrary to the uneducated claims that he advocated for colorblindness in his “I Have A Dream” speech, he actually stressed the importance of making race salient in every facet of life. He knew that if you claimed to not see color, there is no way for you to ever see justice.
But instead, Dr. King was subjected to illegal F.B.I. wiretaps; was the victim of a political defamation campaign that was carried out by the likes of U.S. presidents, federal agents, and the press; was labeled a communist when he fought for basic rights; and was the victim of assassination attempts to him and his family by white supremacist vigilantes. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I., created an entire portfolio targeting Dr. King. Through the illegal wiretaps, he acquired evidence of King’s extramarital affairs, going so far as to send an anonymous package to his home that threatened to reveal the findings to the world, and he urged Dr. King to commit suicide rather than risk public shame and damage the movement. No politician, no federal agency, no corporation should ever invoke the name and legacy of a man who opposed everything they stood for.
STUDENT ACTIVISM
And with that message, I transition to the end of this keynote which is dedicated to student activists. After Dr. King was released after eight days in Birmingham Jail in 1963, he could no longer ignore the young people on college and university campuses that had become the driving force of the movement:
I had decided to put into operation a new phase of our campaign, which I felt would speed victory. I called my staff together and repeated a conviction I had been voicing ever since the campaign began. If our drive was to be successful, we must involve the students of the community. In most of the recent direct-action crusades, it had been the young people who sparked the movement. (King, 1963, p. 113).
He knew the power of the student voice and understood that the movement would not succeed without them. The primary reason he was even in jail was because many student activists in the late 50s and early 60s, most notably Lonnie King and Kwame Ture (who at the time went by the name Stokely Carmichael), criticized Dr. King in the early stages of the movement for making grandiose speeches without putting his own body on the line like many of the students across the nation were doing. He knew they were right, but was often stuck in the balance between trying to maintain the movement’s appeal to the white masses and serving as a voice for the most disenfranchised Black people in the country. Furthermore, student activists were frustrated with the fact that all of their efforts were being credited to Dr. King by national media, despite the fact that he often had nothing to do with their successful demonstrations. They were also frustrated that they were fighting over the same sources of funding, most of which were awarded to Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) rather than the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
However, despite the justifiable criticism he received from student activists — particularly those who aligned with the ideologies of the Black Power Movement — his perspective allowed him to recognize that “It was the people who moved their leaders, not the leaders who moved the people” (King, 1963, p. 162). As a leader himself, he knew student activists motivated him to be better, and he eventually treated them as his equals. Dr. King shared a story in one of his books about a talk he gave in Chicago, where young activists from the Black Power Movement were the only audience to ever boo him on stage. He wrote,
In all the speaking I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time that I have been booed was one night in a Chicago mass meeting by some young members of the Black Power movement…But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young people. For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream…They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare. (King, 1968, p. 46).
When we look back on this era in history, we forget that it was the student activists who held one of the greatest civil rights icons accountable for upholding the promises he made. They did not fear him. They did not blindly follow him with unwavering loyalty. They saw him as a leader who was not immune to critique. They did not ignore his imperfections because they knew Dr. King, and all Black people for that matter, had the potential for greatness.
Nonetheless, Dr. King was a man of many flaws, too many of which were used to discredit the entire movement, but some of which were valid and can be used as lessons for how we can strengthen our movement today. One of his most notable flaws was his reluctance to promote Black women into leadership roles. Coming from the patriarchal structure of the Black church in the 60s, he never truly embraced Black women like Ella Baker, who founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), or Fannie Lou Hamer, who also helped lead SNCC, and along with Ella Baker, formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). This flaw of Dr. King’s would ultimately serve as a detriment to the broader civil rights movement regardless of how successful it became.
But today, the Movement for Black Lives — which was created by three Black women, two of whom identify as queer — has firmly established an intersectional political agenda that includes trans, queer, gender nonconforming, intersex, and differently abled Black people. #BlackLivesMatter has inspired student activists across the nation to emulate this same inclusive model within their own campus organizations, a level of progress that many people from Dr. King’s era never reached.
As we continue to create history in our current civil rights era, we must remember the urgency of now, while also carrying enough patience and perspective to pursue a dream that may never become a reality in our lifetime. We must remain hopeful but promise that our hope will not lead us back into complacency. We must illuminate the beauty of the struggle itself rather than allow pessimism to cast a shadow over our journey toward liberation. And most of all, we must remember who we are — a generation that is fortunate enough to have the wings of Dr. King’s legacy carry us into new horizons.
Link to Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1cPDuFSN34
21:25–40:30 — Keynote Address
40:30–1:22:00 — Panel with Student Leaders
