MLK Had a Dream - Not a Magic Spell

(EDIT, January 20, 2025: I hope this blog is re-read on the day we inaugurate a President who was literally endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, and who did nothing to disavow that endorsement.)

Each time an act of racial injustice or controversy erupts in America, a certain type of people will look at the chaos and fury of the protests and claim, "Dr. King would not approve. They should be more like Dr. King."

We often emptily invoke MLK's name in an effort to suggest racism isn't as big a deal as people think. We make him to be the great crusader who quashed racism, that the "I Have a Dream" speech was the magic spell that cured bigotry forever. We tell ourselves these things not out of reverence for Dr. King, but so we don't have to face the fact that racism and oppression are still very real and powerful monsters. We tell ourselves racism in modern America is an invention of the liberal media, or some other such boogeyman, designed to divide us. 

So, when protests turn violent, no matter who's at fault, we use a cliche we've invented that goes: "be like Martin Luther King!" 

Yet we have no idea what we mean by that. If it simply means, "be more peaceful and you'll cure racism," our ignorance is blatant as we forget that King, a peaceful activist himself, met his end in an act of racial violence - proving racism did not end at "Free at last, free at last..."

The Forgotten Murder of Alberta King

Bafflingly, few Americans realize that Alberta King - mother of Martin Luther King, Jr - was shot to death just six years after her son, as she sat her Atlanta church's organ, on June 30, 1974. She was 69 years old. Her killer was Marcus Chenault, a member of an extremist wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites. When I first learned of this event, I was stunned that I hadn't previously known it. Upon reading of this murder, I assumed that the heinous nature of the act, and its high-profile victim, would have seared it into American consciousness as much as the assassination of her son in 1968.

In the wake of the chaos that's erupted (that is, simply re-awoken from its troubled, fitful, one-eyed sleep) in the past two weeks after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, I think I've figured out why the murder of Alberta King is not a more widely known crime, unjustly relegated to an obscure footnote in the history of American race relations.

Every time a high-profile injustice is committed against a Black person, and the unsolved issue of racial oppression again rises in heated debate, violence, or social uprising, there are invariably a vocal number of Americans who dismiss racism as a dying issue. There are countless people who, whether too cowardly, too weak, or too deluded to face such a remaining struggle, have developed the revisionist notion that, with two events, racism in America was forever destroyed. Those two events being:
the Emancipation Proclamation, and the "I Have a Dream" speech.

Any further escalation of tensions or oppression is labeled by these kinds of thinkers as liberal agitation designed by some unseen blue-haired septum-pierced boogeyman out to divide the country. And to prove their point, these people will almost always quote from Martin Luther King's famous speech. They will cherry-pick their favorite lines or exalt the speech as if it were a magic spell Dr. King cast on the country that forever ended racism.

Despite the fact that King was later shot and killed - by a racist.

And it's in the recent inevitable rekindling of these revisions to history that I've realized why the murder of Alberta King is such an obscure event in the grand picture of racism in America.
It's the same reason so many white people often fail to mention her son's murder - simply put, it doesn't fit their narrative. That narrative being that Dr. King crushed all prejudice with his marches and his speeches, therefore there's no need to talk about it anymore, not again, never.

The addition of Alberta King's murder to her son's story is too awkward of a detail, too lengthy and dark of an afterword. The story of Martin Luther King works better, revisionists may reason, if it ends panning away from his lifeless body on that balcony in Memphis to an epitaph of hope, despite his murder. A story is strange when there are too many more events to absorb after the climax. The flow of the story is affected. Maybe the shooting of Alberta King dashes the hope otherwise found in the coda to the life story of her son. It's too painful. It rends the heart. It's a reminder we're too fragile to take, a thought we're too ashamed to consider: that a mother's death at the hands of racial madness would suggest the work for which her son died was left incomplete, despite how amazing his work truly was - a telling sign that even with all that the Civil Rights Movement accomplished, minorities are still blatantly oppressed in the United States.

We've left the murder of Alberta King as a footnote. We might even have the audacity to say, "but she was shot by another Black person, therefore it's not the same kind of racism." But her violent death, like the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, must be remembered as another bloody and horrific day in the history of American race relations. We must unearth this woman's death from the archives to which we've relegated it, and display it as it is - a glaring reminder that racial division and the bloodshed it causes is alive and well, breathing fire, no matter how many MLK quotes we handle with carelessness once every January, twice every February.