Pierce: The Version of Martin Luther King the White House Is Peddling Is a Crime Against History
...Watching SHS, functioning as the official voice of a president* who started his road to the White House by spreading lies and slander about the first African-American president, reading those words in her dead-eyed Weekend-Anchor-in-Fort-Smith voice was enough to make me feel radically non-non-violent, which really is not the proper way to feel on this solemn occasion.
At this point, I think it’s time to give White Martin a rest. In his death, the country that did so much to hinder his work in life fashioned up White Martin to make him useful in death. His work on economic inequality and against the atrocity that was the war in Vietnam was soft-pedalled into oblivion and replaced by an almost fanatical devotion to one line in an epic speech he gave in 1963, that one about the content of someone’s character. White Martin was a conciliatory figure, instead of the Martin Luther King, Jr. whose house was bombed, whose phones and hotel rooms were bugged, and who was violently driven out of Chicago when he tried to lead an open housing march. If Martin Luther King, Jr. was so damned conciliatory, why did someone shoot him in the head?...
The 50th anniversary of his murder comes at a propitious time. His true spirit is walking the streets again. It walks with the people who march against murder under color of law. His true spirit walks with the teachers who march for the means to teach children properly. He walks with the schoolchildren who demand that something be done about this country’s insane affection for its firearms. He walked with everyone who marched on the day after this ridiculous president* was born. He did not walk with Sarah Huckabee Sanders to the podium in this White House for the purposes of profaning his memory. Even in death, he’s smarter than that....
His whole philosophy was based on breaking unjust laws. His whole career was made up of acts of lawbreaking. That’s who he was. That was his job. That was his mission, and that should be his memory. Non-violence is not the opposite of anger. It never has been. It is the repurposing of anger to constructive purpose, and that constructive purpose was the destruction of systems of oppression. If that’s a profound contradiction then, dammit, this country came into being as a profound contradiction. "How is it," sniped Samuel Johnson, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberties from the drivers of negroes?" We are a people of contradictions. So was Martin Luther King, Jr. We should make the most of that.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19686338/martin-luther-king-assassination-white-martin/
This one brought me to tears.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I shall kick it now and then read it.
Amen! 
All colors. Every sex. 
I am proud to be a long-time subscriber to Esquire and hope to be able to support it for many years to come.
MLK got in "good trouble." Dotard, not so much.
Living, breathing history. He stood on the front lines and took some heavy blows, but he moved mountains.
"Good trouble," indeed! 