Of course I still can’t find one pretty good blog series I read a few years back, on how too many people have tried to turn Martin Luther King Jr. into a doll where you pull a string and snippets of the “I Have a Dream” speech come out. While deliberately glossing over most of the rest of what the man said, wrote, and did.

To the point now of trying to use their mythologized version as a bludgeon against protestors, which still makes my eyes bug out every time I encounter it .

The longer he’s been safely dead and unable to speak for himself, the more blatant it’s gotten. Another thing where I guess too many people greatly prefer the mythologized version, which is kinda predictable but still disturbing as hell.

Not even getting into some of the ways Malcolm X and some others have gotten twisted around in the dominant culture imagination. But, getting coopted as a talking doll to use against dissent, contrary to pretty much everything else the person ever said and did, isn’t really any less nasty. In some ways, the attempts at ideologically hijacking a murdered man are more disturbing than the straight up demonization.

Had to think about this some more, with one earlier reblog. Which also points out that it’s “part of a pretty vast propaganda campaign that’s existed since the late 70s to whitewash the history of the civil rights era”. To go along with some of the rest of the rightward political shove since then, I might add.

That’s the story too many people with some power are invested in believing. As most of the conspiracy even required. It’s a mess.

This is another place where I end up feeling like some kind of old crank, when I’m not even that old. I was born in the mid-‘70s, and this revisionism hadn’t yet caught on nearly as heavily when I was learning about the civil rights movement.

Most of the emphasis we got in school was still “he faced a lot of hostility in spite of the nonviolent methods, and then he got assassinated for his troubles”. I mean, that was still a somewhat glossy-faced official version presented at a child-appropriate level, but it was a lot closer reflection of what had really happened less than 20 years before.

I’m sure that a bigger factor influencing my understanding of this–among so many other things–was growing up around people who had been affected in some different ways at the time. Again , with Dr. King killed less than 7 years before I was born.

As I put it a while back, in the context of desegregation:

My parents were in school at the time. It still amazes me when people want to act like this was long enough ago that nobody is around to remember what really happened then.

And I have to say again that besides feeling like it was important to tell me about some of the things that happened then, my mother also pointed out some people who had been directly involved in the angry racist mob behavior at the time. As people to watch out for. Too many of them were also in positions of power, then and now.

What do you think those people have been teaching their kids and grandkids? Right.

And there are plenty of them still around, as the previous commenter points out. Besides the people they were hurling abuse at. This is recent enough history.

But yeah, we see what versions of the story these people have been pushing in the meantime. Not just the ones who personally participated in angry mob behavior back then, but also the larger subset who preferred to blame the people getting mobbed and killed for all the disruption going on. And the ones who weren’t around, but have been raised on that mythology–including the truly disgusting (and increasingly popular) bit where their Wind-Up Dr. King sacrificed himself to save us from racism. All gone before 1970, so you’re the Real Racists who need to stop causing trouble! 😩

So, here we are decades later, and they’re feeling freer to get louder about it again. I do get irritated when people do want to act like this is a sudden new thing, when they’ve been here the whole time and my mother was totally right about needing to watch out for these folks if you were in a position to get more deniably targeted. This current mess didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Another nasty consequence of the revisionism.