In the wake of the racial justice uprisings of 2020, right-wing backlash instigated a powerful moral panic around racial education. Across the United States, state governments and school districts have since institutionalized legislation to limit and even prevent altogether instruction on the complex truths of the racial past.
Counterintuitively, some right-wing strategists have sought public support for these restrictions by leveraging a powerful symbol of the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, according to a 2021 analysis by NPR, during a Republican news conference addressing the alleged threat of critical race theory (CRT) in schools, half of the conservative speakers deployed Dr. King’s (decontextualized) expression of a “desire to be judged ‘by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.’”
Despite Dr. King’s long-documented struggle for critical education, he has now been weaponized against this very cause. How did we get here?
My book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement, reveals that contemporary political misappropriations of Dr. King are not new, nor anomalous. Tracing forty years of the political uses (and misuses) of the memory of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement, I show how groups with divergent—even oppositional—aims have strategically leveraged this collective memory. And I argue that these misuses of Dr. King’s legacy have devastating consequences for multicultural democracy, rolling back civil rights and criminalizing dissent.
In honor of this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m excited to share a few central insights from this research. First, I want readers to understand that the political misuses of Dr. King are not accidents. They are intentional political strategies. Political distortions of Dr. King’s legacy date back to battles around the proposed King national holiday in the late 1970s and early 1980s when—after years of contention—then-president Ronald Reagan signed a bill designating the third Monday in January as a national holiday. Though this was ostensibly a progressive act, in reality Reagan despised Dr. King, opposed the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, and assured allies behind closed doors that the nation would remember a selective version of King, one that emphasized colorblind individualism and American exceptionalism.
As Reagan declared just before signing the holiday into law, “Dr. King had awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind… As a democratic people, we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice and took action to correct it. And we should remember that in far too many countries, people like Dr. King never have the opportunity to speak out at all.”