Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a celebration that needs no introduction. Observing his immeasurable contributions to civil rights and racial equality in the United States, corporations, universities and governmental agencies throughout the country line up to wax compassionate on Dr. King’s life and legacy, share brief, uncontroversial quotations of the reverend and, if we’re lucky, reaffirm their own commitments to racial justice. Users on X, the social media platform formally known as Twitter, from President Biden to the official accounts of Sesame Street and the U.S. Department of Defense commemorate Dr. King as if he wasn’t among the most controversial figures in the country at the height of his prominence, according to Pew Research polling.
Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation — which heavily surveilled Dr. King and even sent him an infamous letter in 1963 urging him to commit suicide when they couldn’t prove their bogus suspicions of communist ties — chimed in. As the agency wrote on X, “The #FBI honors one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights movement and reaffirms its commitment to Dr. King’s legacy of fairness and equal justice for all,” effortlessly emulating comedian Jaboukie Young-White’s timeless parody of the progenitor of COINTELPRO: “Just because we killed MLK doesn’t mean we can’t miss him.”
Joining the chorus of performative observance is the University of Connecticut. Addressing the UConn community in an email, the Office for Diversity and Inclusion wrote that “King’s vision…can motivate us to lean on, support, and encourage one another, particularly in times when we are faced, day after day, with what King once called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’” ODI’s call for reflection of “what it means to commit to justice, equality, and shared humanity” is an important one. UConn itself is a far-cry from a community in which everyone is a civic-minded agent of social change, much less a steeled freedom fighter like Dr. King and many of his contemporaries.
While the ODI statement avoids the lazy cliches that most corporations use to pay lip service to Dr. King’s legacy — toothless appeals to colorblindness and peaceful political action being chief among them — it nonetheless offers the same selective reading of history that all other neoliberal institutions do when cherry picking the reverend’s words and values for their own agenda.
It is a disservice to Dr. King’s memory that he is upheld in the popular imagination as a singular fighter for “racial equality.” This image is convenient to conservatives who deny or underplay the existence of systemic racism to proffer “All Lives Matter” type criticisms of racial justice movements. So too is it convenient to liberals who think “justice” is a matter of making the Forbes billionaire list a bit more diverse, ignoring King’s later propensities towards democratic socialism and economic upheaval away from capitalism.
They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted… I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The most attractive reason for reducing Dr. King’s legacy to a malleable heap of platitudes and inoffensive quotes is that it allows powerful people to easily jettison the most threatening aspect of his politics: anti-imperialism.
By 1966, just three years after the March on Washington, Dr. King made important ideological connections between the civil rights movement and the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam. He articulates the germ of a truly internationalist framework no better than in his speech, “A Time to Break the Silence,” in which he recounts engaging with Black men in poor communities in the north about choosing non-violent change over violent resistance. Their response, “What about Vietnam?,” delivers him an epiphany:
“They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted… I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”
Dr. King crystalised the connection between anti-racism and anti-imperialism when he named the “Three Evils of Society” as “the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism.” Yet the institutions that dare utter his name and claim to honor his work are deeply entrenched in the war industry he so openly condemned.
As I’ve beat the drum on for years, UConn is a poster child for militarism, embodying what Senator William Fullbright dubbed the “military-industrial-academic complex.” Military recruitment, whether by weapons manufacturers or the Army itself, are a semi-permanent fixture at UConn, rendering war a desirable career outcome for a significant portion of graduates. UConn’s manifold connections to the occupation and genocide of Palestinians, through study abroad programs as well as through economic ties to arms manufacturers aiding in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza this very moment, render it especially complicit in the atrocities committed by the state of Israel and supported by the United States.
Even further, according to the Office of the Vice President of Research, roughly $35.6 million of research grants in 2022 were sponsored by the war-making Department of “Defense,” amounting to over one-eighth of total research funding. The OVPR’s annual report from 2022 openly acknowledges that UConn is “also a strong partner with the Department of Defense, Raytheon Technologies, Electric Boat, and other collaborators in research that advance or support our national security.” Although historical revisionists try to paint the genocidal U.S. war in Southeast Asia as the tragic mistake of a clumsy empire, it was in reality bolstered by the same appeals to national security vis a vis the containment of communism.
If they have the confidence to quote Dr. King, UConn and all universities would be wise to heed his caution: “when scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.” Appealing to a legacy of racial justice and anti-imperialism while acting in the exact contrary manner is nothing short of a travesty. In order to meaningfully honor Dr. King, UConn must cut its extensive ties to the military-industrial complex.