The Real Martin Luther King Jr.

On January 20, our nation will celebrate the American hero Martin Luther King Jr. Schools and post offices will be closed, giving many of us a three-day weekend — a welcome respite from our busy lives. But what will we be celebrating?

If we are to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. the man, we need a return to the real King, not to the tissue-paper-thin image of him devoid of meaning or historical accuracy. Tributes and celebrations are all too often marked by false remembrance, in which radical and transformational leaders and movements are cynically turned into bland narratives of fairness and justice. When applied to King, this process does a disservice to his work and the issues he held dear.

King was an activist and an intellectual whose courage shone during one of our nation's most important moments. He was moved by religious faith and earthly fire. He was a believer in divine miracles and in progress through human endeavor. He was a religious figure and scholar who understood how the ills of society interconnect. He was a complicated man in a time in which the fundamental question upon which his activism began — justice for black Americans — was a simple binary. In the town where I grew up, Little Rock, Arkansas, there was one question with only two possible answers: Do you believe in segregation of the races — yes or no?

It is in King's extraordinary writings that we can find the man today. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written to a hostile white southern clergy, is a classic of American prose. It should be read by kids and adults everywhere this week. King argued for the sacredness of the inclusive "beloved community" of our human species and the importance of all of us. He stressed notions of love, power, and justice and their relationship to the nature of social existence — a message echoed in progressive strains of Buddhism and Catholicism.

It was through his conception of beloved community that King led the Civil Rights Movement, maybe the most important movement in our country's history. In this struggle, he also inspired a generation of activists. In response to the Vietnam War, he called our government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." The elite howled and The New York Times excoriated him for this "reckless" connection of racism and militarism. King died in 1968 while in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers, yet many believed his decision to link war with racism led to his murder.

The realization of beloved communities of human joy, plenty, and safety, King preached, is frustrated by three things: poverty, racism, and war. On January 20, we should remember that these three evils still exist today. Last week, the US Census Bureau reported that nearly one in three Americans experienced an episode of poverty between 2009 and 2011, a scandalous proportion. As to racism, the legacy of the death of Oscar Grant remains with us, and the educational opportunities for black Americans continue to deteriorate, as our privileged starve the public education system in the guise of standing up to teachers unions. As to war, our culture of endless conflict continues to cost us dearly in lives and money. King fretted about the diversion of resources from human improvement to war. Last year, a Harvard researcher calculated that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually hit $6 trillion.

This Martin Luther King Jr. Day also comes on the heels of the death of Nelson Mandela, another hero who is being sanitized by contemporary culture. Mandela was praised by all the world's leaders, yet, in his struggle against apartheid in South Africa, he was no pacifist. Despite tremendous pressure, he refused to condemn the actions of apartheid's opponents — even when those actions included violence. Yet at his funeral, world leaders tried to remake him in the image of their sanitized version of Martin Luther King. Mandela's funeral was surreal, as he was joyfully praised by leaders of nations who had branded him a terrorist and funded the apartheid system that kept black South Africans in slave-like conditions. Luminaries such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, a supporter of apartheid in his college days, and one of our American princes of impoverishment, Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz, made the pilgrimage.

Whitewashing the misdeeds of the elite — and the responses of historical heroes — is nothing new, of course. It's worth revisiting Tom Paxton's satirical ballad "What Did You Learn in School Today," which Pete Seeger sang at a historic Carnegie Hall concert fifty years ago. Paxton's lyrics described what kids were being taught at the time.

I learned that Washington never told a lie. I learned that soldiers seldom die...

I learned that war is not so bad. I learned about the great ones we have had...

I learned that policemen are my friends. I learned that justice never ends...

I learned our government must be strong. It's always right and never wrong...

An understanding of history and what to honor and what to remember is not an empty intellectual enterprise. As Guardian columnist Gary Younge wrote from the Mandela funeral, "The past has a legacy and the present has consequences: our understanding of how we got here and why is crucial to our decision about where we go from here next and how." Understanding who our heroes really were and what they actually did is, indeed, critical.

The question is not whether to praise King; the question is what we commemorate. For me, it was his commitment to direct action with his eye always on the prize of a beloved community, a place where joy and a healthy life for all can be created. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," he wrote in his Birmingham letter. This is the message to be celebrated and taught to our kids.