The Danger of Worshiping Saint Martin

Dr. King, center, commences a march

White people love trotting Doctor King out of retirement whenever civil unrest happens in America. Like, say, now. We love pictures of him crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge, linking arms with a mixed-race coalition, resolute and heady. We especially love tossing orphaned quotes around heedlessly, stripped of context: “content of our character,” perhaps, or “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” We love that.

Having grown up surrounded by anodyne White suburbia, in neighborhoods and schools with minimal diversity, I was exposed to a sanitized, low-risk version of Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard some of his speeches, like “I Have a Dream,” or “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” soul-stirring examples of rhetoric which fired a boy’s imagination. I grew up never not knowing who Doctor King was, for which I’m certainly thankful.

However, the version of Doctor King I knew was sanitized and made into a simple morality narrative. This version challenged racism, embodied in naked bigotry of Jim Crow segregation and Bull Connor crackdowns, and won. The stories placed an individual of surpassing morality and personal rectitude, against a system so riven by internal rot that its defeat was written into its structure. The end was always inevitable.

In short, the schoolbook version of Dr. King I learned was a saint.

This version excluded the great complexity of King’s struggle. For instance, I too saw the pictures of King crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Not until college did I see photos of what happened next: Alabama police hitting his marchers with batons and loosing German shepherds on protesters who’d already fallen. I learned in fourth grade that King received the Nobel Peace Prize. In college I learned America protested this award.

Nor did King’s complexity end externally. He also had significant problems within his own soul. Famous for his forward-thinking engagement on racial issues, King had retrogressive attitudes about women, and held organizational positions vacant for years rather than let women take charge. This gendered thinking manifested in his now-extensively documented adultery, and accusations of far worse.

Dr. King depicted as a literal saint,
“Martin Luther King of Georgia”

Further, as Ibram Kendi demonstrates, the centrist, cooperative King beloved by White moderates, from early in his career, is often at odds with the frequently darker, more confrontational King of his later career. Early King often soft-pedaled White abuses, and urged Black Americans to live up to impossibly high White standards to achieve an ever-elusive level of acceptance. He later acknowledged this mistake, but it was already written down.

Even his strengths were far from perfect. While he made great inroads on American racism, and saw many forms of outright oppression banned, he didn’t really end racism, it just went underground. Plus, his concerns didn’t end with racism. Later in life, he described the Giant Triplets of Evil: Racism, Militarism, and Materialism. Remember, he died in Memphis, where he had gone to organize a labor union; his economic concerns remain largely untouched.

This places an important rift between Saint Martin, the man whose bold stands make clear moral lessons for today’s children, and Dr. King, the man whose struggles remained largely unresolved upon his death. The schoolbook version of King, trotted out in Internet memes whenever Black Americans become restive, is definitely the sainted version, always beneficent, never ruffled. The real man became frequently angry and frustrated.

Sainthood can provide powerful instruction in moral goodness. When somebody has accomplished something so outstanding that their work becomes memorable after their deaths, we can study what they achieved, and how. Then we can mimic them until we internalize their moral strengths and become able to act independently. That, presumably, is why churches canonize saints and other holy figures.

But sainthood also freezes people in moments without context. The rush to canonize, say, Mother Theresa, came sideways on important questions raised in her journals, published only posthumously. We now know, as her contemporaries didn’t, that she struggled with deep doubts, wondering not only whether God noticed her actions, but even whether God existed. Her records show she didn’t find the answers she sought in this life.

Freezing Dr. King this way, eliminating his dark side and ignoring the fights he didn’t win, teaches today’s audiences the wrong lessons. It makes us perceive setbacks as permanent, doubts as disqualifying, and sins as irredeemable. If even Dr. King, the great saint of my childhood textbooks, could hold awful opinions, and lose his most important battles, it means my efforts, however thwarted, still matter. That’s much more valuable to me than Saint Martin.