King tamed: smoothing the sharp edges - an analysis of Martin Luther King Jr. to clear away the myths of a one-dimensional man

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 24, 1997 by Joan Connell

Now that he is safely dead

Let us praise him ...

Dead men make

such convenient heroes:

They cannot rise

to challenge the images

we would fashion from their lives.

--Carl Wendell Himes Jr., 1977

In the 29 years that have elapsed since his assassination, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has taken his place in the American pantheon: He is a holiday. He is a hero. Above all, he is known as the Man Who Had A Dream.

And yet that metaphor, which has consistently been linked with King since his birthday was proclaimed a national holiday in 1983, has obscured both the contradictions of King's character and the sharp edges of his difficult and demanding theology.

King Day observances focus on the triumphant 1963 March on Washington, when the dream was one of many metaphors King invoked as he called the nation to account for its materialism, intolerance of minorities and injustice toward the poor.

But absent from most observances are images of an anguished King, only a few weeks after the March on Washington, when four little girls were blown to pieces in the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Or King the revolutionary, who saw the civil rights movement as the vanguard of a worldwide struggle for social justice. Or King the prophet, who condemned the war in Vietnam from the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church in 1967, casting the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence" in the world.

"We have domesticated him, cultivated him. We've made him into somebody who is acceptable, a kind of nice man who did some nice things some time ago," said Calvin S. Morris, dean of Atlanta's Interdenominational Theological Center and a former director of the King Center, a nonprofit library and archive in Atlanta.

If King the prophet has become a casualty of popular culture, some are still dedicated to communicating his radical message: to lead the nation and the world to repent of racism, materialism and violence; and to build a "beloved community" and cultivate a compassion that leads each person to work for the good of all.

Such a message, says civil rights activist Vincent Harding, makes King an "inconvenient hero," an insistent moral voice that calls a violent and divided world to do far more than dream.

"For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man," said Harding, professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology at the University of Denver.

Harding and Morris are among a number of scholars, social activists and old soldiers of the civil rights era determined to wake the nation from the collective delusion that King was some sort of amiable dreamer, who assembled the multitudes in the 1960s and secured justice once and for all.

King's heirs, who since his death have closely guarded access to his papers, made headline0 Jan. 9 with the announcement of a multimillion dollar publishing agreement with Time-Warner that would make the civil rights leader's life and work more available to the public.

"The media has only played the top40 version of his work," said Dexter King, the civil rights leader's third child and current chairman of the King Center.

As part of the arrangement, which includes books, CD-ROMs and a Web site, Stanford. University historian Clayborne Carson will write an "autobiography" of King, based on his sermons, correspondence, published writings and recorded statements.

"It will offer the closest approximation of the memoir Dr. King would have written had his life not been cut short by assassination," said Carson, senior editor of The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., a massive 14-volume project that promises to be the definitive scholarly work on the life of the civil rights activist.

Carson said the misconceptions that have resulted from the "iconization" of King had become so prevalent they prompted him to write a popular "autobiography" of King -- much as Alex Haley did for Malcolm X -- that would present the man, in his own words, in all of his complexity.

"He has become a mythological figure rather than a flesh-and-blood human being," Carson said. "Just as George Washington gets boiled down to the cherry tree, King gets boiled down to the `I have a cream' oration -- not the entire speech, but the last few sentences have come to symbolize the entire man. For 90 percent of Americans, that's the image. In turn, that image becomes not only King, but the entire black freedom struggle. There is a real need to remind people of the rest of King's life."

To historian Carson, who has sorted through more than 100,000 papers in the King archive, the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner was a man of many dimensions.

"He was a theologian who could discourse on Reinhold Niebuhr, but he was also a person who could go into a black church and move an audience. He combined the qualities of the intellectual leader and mass leader to a degree that has not been matched by any other American in our time," Carson said.