Martin Luther King

[beowabbit]

Mainly I want to call your attention to nex0s’ wonderful post about racism, which everybody (especially white people) should read, and to a speech by King that hawkegirl posted.

But reading nex0s post (and later the speech) led me to wonder how different the rest of the 20th century would have been if King had not been assassinated. Would his influence have increased or decreased? Would he eventually have developed on his own the sort of near-universal public reverence that martyrdom gave him? How much would he have been able to set the terms of public discourse? What else might he have accomplished? How might his own ideology and priorities and goals have shifted over time?

It’s common to think that assassination doesn’t work; that martyrdom galvanizes public opinion around a political figure. But it also silences a voice, and in King’s case it silenced a very eloquent voice. Sometimes it “works”: looking at recent Israeli history, it seems to me that Yigal Amir got exactly what he wanted after he killed Yitzhak Rabin. So I wonder how much more King might have accomplished had he lived.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think, sadly, if King had lived his legend would be less. King was a great civil rights and racial equality leader. But he was also fiercly anti-militarist and socialist. These views get glossed over in our historically enshrined retrospectives but they were core to his beliefs. I don't think people would have been happy or comfortable to have King haranguing them to bring the troops home, to bolster social programs for all poor people, to bring down the overbearing corporate capitalists. He would have made a lot more enemies.

But what do I know. If they can lionize Nixon and Reagan, who knows...

--wex

[necturus.livejournal.com]

It’s common to think that assassination doesn’t work; that martyrdom galvanizes public opinion around a political figure. But it also silences a voice, and in King’s case it silenced a very eloquent voice. Sometimes it “works”: looking at recent Israeli history, it seems to me that Yigal Amir got exactly what he wanted after he killed Yitzhak Rabin. So I wonder how much more King might have accomplished had he lived.

I think it's likely both Dr. King and John F. Kennedy would be remembered very differently had they lived out their natural lives. Assassination may silence voices, but it often burns their words deeply, perhaps indelibly, into our collective memory. When a person is cut down in his or her prime, what remains are memories of deeds well done, words well spoken, the makings of story and song, myth and legend, no longer limited by the presence of the actual human being and his or her human blemishes. He or she may become an inspiration, an example, a hero, even a saint. And it may be that he or she becomes a greater force for good in death than he or she could ever have been in life.

And yet it is true that Mr. Rabin's assassin got just what he wanted; so did Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist whose assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne touched off World War I.