On MLK in 2015

Growing up in Georgia, the idea of Martin Luther King Jr. was a powerful force. He was a unifying figure, canonized in literature and lesson, and a source of pride for the greater Atlanta area. I don't recall ever hearing about him from my grandparents (or really anyone that was a contemporary of his; he would be around 83 this year), but I do remember the shock when Cedric The Entertainer's character made a disparaging comment about MLK in the movie Barbershop.

After that, I realized that MLK wasn't a real person for us. He was a hero, a saint, a martyr....but not a person. And his accomplishment is much more complex than we heard about in school. See this excerpt from an interview he did that I read about here:

KING: But I do not think violence and hatred can solve this problem.
WARREN: Yes.
KING: I think they will end up creating many more social problems than they solve, and I'm thinking of a very strong love. I'm not, I'm thinking, I'm thinking of love in action and not something where you say, "Love your enemies," and just leave it at that, but you love your enemies to the point that you're willing to sit-in at a lunch counter in order to help them find themselves. You're willing to go to jail.
WARREN: Yes.
KING: And I don't think anybody could consider this cowardice or even a weak approach. So I think --
WARREN: -- yes --
KING: -- that many of these arguments come from, from those who have gotten so caught up in bitterness that they cannot see the deep moral issues involved.

MLK's choice of non-violence was not because it was the best method of achieving integration, but instead because it was the best method of ending segregation. We haven't completed the former work yet, and the latter work continues to be a struggle. Below the jump is a map of Atlanta using 2010 census data; you can see the fault line between the green of blacks and the blue of non-Hispanic whites, with stark sections of people who identify as Hispanic or Asian.

MLK's interview discusses residential segregation as a peer of educational integration. Busing doesn't fix all problems.

Here's one more blog post on MLK's true legacy:

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

[...]

I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents' vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.

This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.

[...]

They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.
Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.
If we do it all together, we'll be okay.

 I didn't hear this discussed. MLK's enemy was taught to me as a certain type of white person (usually named Bull Connor), not the general sense of all southern whites. The latter case is scarier to talk about, because it would have - accurately - caused me to question the actions of the older generations. The bottom line is that southern white people (my people), as a whole, didn't solve the problem of segregation or rid the nation of slavery on their own. It took blood, tears, and pain to bring my ancestors and their peers around, and that's a legacy that I live with - not in any sense of guilt, but instead with solemnness.