Every third Monday in January since then gives us reason to revisit the life, deeds, and words of Dr. King. As a millennial growing up in the Northeast, I learned about the civil rights champion—and, by proxy, the civil rights movement as a whole—via his speech at the March on Washington in 1963. The famous “I have a dream” refrain served as a staple of my grade school education. But it wasn’t until much later that I learned about the King whose politics extended far beyond the image of the man in popular imagination. In years past, I’ve used MLK Day to re-read his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—where he takes to task the “white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice”—as well as his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, where he reckoned with the achievements and the limits of the movement he led. In 2018, as I was helping to launch the Sunrise Movement, I published an article about King’s commitment to economic justice and his sympathies to democratic socialism.
But one thing that is so valuable about MLK Day is that it provides an opportunity to reflect not only on the legacy of King himself, but also to hold up other heroes of the civil rights movement. There are countless leaders in the movement who helped bend the moral arc of the universe a bit closer towards justice, and this holiday is theirs, too. Here at the Whirlwind Institute, Mark and I have each written about movement leaders who, though less widely known as King, are icons in their own right. Two that we would like to shine light on today are Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Read the rest at Dispatches from the Whirlwind
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