With protests mounting across the country to stop ICE and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies, many pundits invoke Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement on the “right ways” to protest. And yet, most distort the substance of what King did and believed. Here are five lessons on the actual King for this Juneteenth:
1. King didn’t feel sufficient and was terrified in each police encounter. From the Montgomery bus boycott to Memphis, King felt inadequate to the task. But he pushed forward. When the other ministers were too scared to speak at the first mass meeting in Montgomery, the 26-year-old King said he would. He was shaking. But he went anyway. Eight weeks later, his house was bombed with wife Coretta and baby Yolanda in it. Coretta managed to get them out safely. Martin’s and Coretta’s fathers both came down to urge them to get out of Montgomery—or at least for Coretta and the baby to leave. She refused. One of the greatest gifts both Kings possessed was the ability to move forward despite their fear. They had decided they would not be bound by the limits society imposed, but that didn’t make it easy.
King also knew what the police could do; he was arrested 29 times over his life and had to fight his fear in each encounter. Over the years, police took him for joy rides, put him in a half nelson and slammed him down on a counter, choked him, kicked him in the back, picked him up by his pants, shackled and chained him to a police car floor for hours, and tightened his restraints further when he complained they were too tight. King condemned the push for increased law enforcement in Black communities and particularly around Black protest. “Many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over Black Americans,” King stressed in a 1967 meeting with white politicians in Atlanta.
2. Coretta Scott King was his political partner. Coretta Scott was more of a political activist than King when they met in grad school in Boston. As a student at Antioch, she had supported the Progressive Party’s third-party challenge for the presidency in 1948, decrying segregation at home and Cold War militarism abroad and supporting Henry Wallace for president. Through her Progressive Party activities, she met Paul Robeson and Bayard Rustin years before meeting King.