I have not visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in D.C. Although I have been to Washington, D.C., many times since its installation, I have not been to the monument. I will go eventually; however, I have yet to reach that point.
My hesitancy is because I was in Ebenezer Baptist Church on Sunday Morning, December 22, 1963. On this day, the one-month anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, MLK told us that he had received more than the usual number of threats on the day Kennedy was shot, many telling him, “Nigger you will be next.”
King warned us that he might not live much longer, but we should continue the civil rights work. That day, King preached what I have called his “I Have a Hope” sermon. That was his refrain as he urged us that if he should leave us soon, he hoped we would continue the work.
He told us that at his funeral, please tell the preacher not to talk too long and make sure we never mentioned all the awards he had received. He had “a hope” that we would emphasize the ongoing work.
More specifically, he told us not to establish any memorials for him. Instead, he hoped we would make it about the ongoing struggle. I have not visited the MLK Memorial in D.C. because that sermon keeps ringing in my head. And I keep thinking about how, after his death, we did the exact opposite of his request.
The Civil Rights Movement ceased after King’s death, and the Black Power Movement ended by the mid-1970s, pushed substantially by the war on Black Power conducted by the FBI and other government agencies, which included nearly 300 authorized operations by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, including assassinations and the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO).
The war on Black Power created a big hill to climb, and we failed to climb it. Instead of pushing ahead with movements, we pursued symbolic projects—the MLK national holiday and the MLK Memorial.
Of course, we can honor our heroes however we like, and we can disregard their requests not to be honored. MLK is undoubtedly such a deserving hero. However, we pushed the honors at what cost or what benefit?
Robert E. Lee suggested that the South not erect memorials to him as it might antagonize the North. However, with assistance from the North, the South ignored this request and erected many monuments and memorials to Lee, even an Episcopal church. But these statues of the traitor Lee served as important symbols of the Lost Cause. King’s memorial may have a less useful function.
In the meantime, we endured a unique history of Blacks in America—four decades of no national racial struggle between the mid-1970s and the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid-2010s.
Sociologists Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey show in their book, Documenting Desegregation, the effect of this turndown of civil rights activities. The number of African American civil rights organizations grew in the 1960s and plateaued in the 1970s, while feminist social movement organizations grew substantially in the 1970s. Thus, the women’s movement moved ahead with activities and successes, while the Black rights movement stagnated.
In 1968 Richard Nixon ran on promises to end civil rights measures developed by the Johnson Administration, and staunch segregationist George Wallace ran as an independent and won five states. So as the electorate began to polarize around race after MLK’s assassination, the Black rights movement began to falter.
Perhaps Black rights activism during this 40-year hiatus would have helped staunch some of the right-wing anti-Black movements that developed over those years.