Has America Betrayed The Legacy Of Martin Luther King?

“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell…”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King Memorial is a colossal block of granite, devoid of the emotion of the man it was meant to pay tribute. It’s hard to imagine how it could have been worse or how one of America’s most incandescent souls would have reacted to it. It’s big. There is that.

The last time Dr. King planned to return to the Washington Mall was as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, before his life was cut short on that shabby balcony at the Lorraine Motel. He was in Memphis in the spring of 1968 to support black sanitary public works employees as they demanded equal and fair pay.

Ironically, the MLK memorial was not built by union labor, it appears to have been built by what can only be called slave labor. As detailed by the Washington Post, workers were shipped over from China without pay to back up sculptor Lei Yixin as he chipped away at a giant chunk of rock from Greece.

I very much doubt that King would have minded the ethnicity of those workers. He wasn’t very big on patriotism as Edward Rothstein points out in his excellent critique of the memorial’s flaws. I do think that it’s safe to say that he would have objected quite strongly to the idea that those workers were being paid in “national pride” and cigarettes.

I’m not sure he would have liked the monolithic sculpture much either. It depicts King in a rare stance – arms crossed, closed-bodied, reserved. It seems at odds with most of the images we have of him: open and expansive, ready to embrace the very least of us. A better man than we with a much larger heart.

It’s hard to imagine what King would make of American policy today. The War on Poverty has been superseded by a War on Drugs that has destroyed the slight progress we as a country managed to eke out in the 1960s, and now “a black child in American is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent who’s locked up”.

In addition, we have been gruesomely successful at trashing the foundations of our economic stability. Unions are under attack, wages are stagnant, and the middle class is practically moribund as Elizabeth Warren so poignantly described in her UC Berkeley Graudate Council Lecture in 2007. In her own words from a follow-up interview, “… we are mortgaging our very future in this world, and that the America that I knew, that I grew up in, will be something that will be confined to the history books.” Eugene Robinson stated that “… we’re not advancing toward the fulfillment of King’s dream. We’re heading in the opposite direction.”

America might go to hell if we continue to we say and do nothing. There is something worth saving here and the greatest memorial to the good Reverend Dr. King would be to fight for it.

We should fight against those who use the law as an arbitrary weapon pointed at black Americans. We should fight against those who think women who raise children on their own deserve no support. We should fight when people try to return our classrooms to the Iron Age. We should fight when the planet is cannibalized to fuel our addiction to status and small glass orbs that screw into our lamps.

A fitting memorial to Dr. King will come from not from a block of stone but from our hearts. Every time we speak up for another who cannot make themselves heard we honor him. There can be no other in King’s America. That is his true legacy.

Aine Farrell lives and writes in Baltimore, MD. She is obsessed with all things political, issues of social justice, and cultural memes. She once cooked Julia Child a chicken, which was well-received.