Ed Kilgore:
I don’t have anything terribly original to offer this King Day about my hero’s historical significance. He held up a mirror to America and asked us all to live up to our own professed civic and religious values. For that he was feared and despised in the most “patriotic” and “Christian” part of the country—or at least among a majority of the white citizens of his home region—and was probably the most inevitable martyr of the twentieth century.
King matters today because so many Americans still want to deny the existence of injustice and inequality, and make the poor and the powerless offenders against the pride and self-satisfaction of the privileged. That these same people sometimes perversely pretend to be King’s disciples, suggesting he would today be in a rapture of color-blindness that would keep him from seeing anything other than a blessed land of opportunity, is all the more reason we need a day set aside each year to remembering what he actually represented. And it wasn’t some abstract, negative idea of “freedom” or “equality” that accepted mass unemployment or low wages as the product of a divinely instituted marketplace.
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