If Martin Luther King, Jr. hadn’t been taken from us 41 years ago, one can only imagine the way his head would spin at popular and political misremembrances of his legacy and memory.  I thought of this most recently while driving outside of Milwaukee, when I found myself doing a triple-take at one of the billboards commissioned for the National Black Republican Association’s (NBRA) “Martin Luther King was a Republican” ad campaign.  The reductively ahistoric message on display perhaps should not be surprising in our current era of seemingly endless, offensively shallow political posturing and manipulation.  Nonetheless, this seems over-the-top. (For the NBRA’s campaign video on this issue, click here.)  At its base level, the NBRA’s claim can be said to be true: King did, history tells us, emerge from the Republican Party to become the preeminent figurehead of the civil rights movement.  Yet that assertion contains only the most rudimentary kernel of historical truth, and it deserves dissection.

Firstly, party labels mean little when applied retroactively beyond the last thirty to forty years, a period in which both of the two major American parties completed some important positional shifts that began in the early twentieth century on many ideological and policy issues.  These political transitions within the parties (transitions which, a friend crucially and correctly points out, are never fully completed, and rarely occur wholesale in diametric opposition across party lines) were notable across the political spectrum, but particularly—and most relevant to our purposes here—along racial and socio-economic frontiers.  Though it’s true that the Republican Party of the post-Civil War United States was the party of liberal advocacy (indeed, even radical in the sense of the “Radical Reconstruction” of the 1860s and ‘70s South), one doubts that Republicans of that era would find much in common with today’s GOP that has gone to such extreme lengths to suspend and dismantle the promising victories toward social and economic equality that the civil rights movement achieved.  (This is, after all the, the party that brought us, among other things: hyper-incarceration of the nonwhite poor; the revocation of improved-opportunity efforts such as affirmative action and minority-owned business set-asides; taxation plans that robbed American cities of their economic base; and the exacerbation of the American wealth gap, with those at the lowest rung of the economic ladder sacrificed at the neoliberal altar.) 

In the hundred-odd year interregnum between the Radical Republicans and the New Right, Republican politics in regard to racial and economic justice shifted dramatically: gone was the avowed interest in aid to the underprivileged, replaced by a free-market (il)logic rooted in a devastating, neoliberal ethic of “bootstrap” agency and opportunity.  At its most extreme, this shift was exemplified in the political career of Strom Thurmond, who moved from Democrat to Dixiecrat to Republican as party ideologies in reference to civil rights and an equitable social contract changed.  (It was largely the adoption of a civil rights plank by the Democratic Party in the prelude to the 1948 presidential election that spurred Thurmond to rescind his party membership.) Indeed, it was often in direct pandering to racist ideologies that party politics were formed, most notably evidenced by Richard Nixon’s racially-coded “Southern Strategy” in his efforts to win the presidency.  Thus appears a picture of a Republican Party molding itself—and being carefully and discriminatively shaped by public and party-leader opinion—in an increasingly regressive fashion in terms of race and racism as the twentieth century wore on. Therefore, to leave uninterrogated the assertion that the King born in 1929 into a Republican family (during an era when Republicans could still stake a claim to the memory of Lincoln and emancipation, and when the Democratic Party, for many blacks, persisted in memory as the party of the Ku Klux Klan) held the same Republican political ideologies as the King assassinated in 1968 (a wildly different era in which Republicans had not only turned their back on the majority of African-America, but also were waging war on efforts toward government-supported equal rights), is to deny the massive change that the meaning of that label underwent and, bizarrely, to also forget the ideological history of the “Grand Old Party.”

Yet, one doesn’t even need extreme examples to see the tides of change in this regard: it can be seen simply enough in African-American voting patterns, which have swung markedly toward Democrats since the middle of the twentieth century.  Largely, this has been a swing wrought by the Republican Party’s own doing: the racial coding implicit in many of the New Right’s political initiatives—wars on affirmative action and nonviolent crime (drugs, predominantly), what amounted to a war on the poor as part-and-parcel of Reaganomics, and the expansion of the carceral state, to name a few—finished the job of alienating African-Americans that had begun in the preceding decades.  The very fact that the NBRA feels compelled to attempt this manipulative takeover of King’s legacy is testament to the fact that Republicans have—for the most part, and with good reason—lost the black vote.

In fact, if one assumes that the corollary to the NBRA “MLK was a Republican” campaign is an unspoken avowal that “MLK was not a Democrat,” the latter would arguably be a more compelling representation, both at the time of King’s assassination, and if we are attempting to grasp the meaning of his legacy in relation to our own time.  Within the confines of the two-party dominance of the 1950s and 60s, King rarely made any sort of appeals or grounded any struggles too deeply in a political ideology creditable to either the Republican or Democratic parties.  He chose, rather, to push both parties from the left with appeals to morality, equality, human rights, and social justice—and was rewarded with palpable feelings of hatred from leaders of both parties.  Indeed, from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson, King attempted to force presidential hands on matters of social equality and justice, and frustrated the ambivalent attitudes toward all of them in his efforts.  Though our triumphalist and revisionist history of the civil rights era today includes a mirage depicting government actors eventually realizing the self-evident injustice of the American racial caste system, it would be more accurate to say that King, his fellow civil rights and Black Power leaders, and those at the grassroots realized the achievements that they did—with precious few exceptions— in spite of, rather than because of, those government actors.  Political leaders’ resistance to King extended to many broader American publics, and even to those within civil rights circles: when he eventually spoke out against the Vietnam War (“If America’s soul becomes poisoned,” one example reads, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam”), King was condemned from a myriad of political directions, including from some of those who had been closest to him in previous struggles. 

Today, when the NBRA invokes the ahistoric image of King as a devout Republican, it stands as such a wildly unrealistic notion that—were it not such a profound misappropriation of his legacy—it would seem laughable.  In fact, that neither of today’s political parties can stake a credible claim to carrying the legacy of King’s politics is a fundamental reality that members of either should be able to realize with minimal self-reflection.  The iconography of American triumph suspends King in a very particular time, place, and condition: with arms outstretched before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, leading a people down the road toward a dream rooted in American ethics and promised by American politics.  Yet, omitted in this vision we perpetuate of King are his radical ideologies and condemnations of the moral failure of American government.  One doubts that the MLK who called for a “radical reconstruction of society” to fix “America[‘s]…interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism,” would be much in allegiance with a Democratic president who advocates social justice through health care while disavowing the possibility of de- and reconstructing a broken system; even less so with Republicans who unashamedly put profits before people and attempt to shout down—both literally and figuratively—the debate over health care that would save or improve thousands upon thousands of lives domestically, yet harbor no qualms about funneling billions toward destroying or ending similar numbers of lives overseas.

King the radical labor advocate (he was, lest we forget, assassinated while in Memphis helping the city’s sanitation workers in their demands for better pay and working conditions); King the radical anti-war critic; King the radical anti-capitalist…King the radical anything is simply not a notion that fits into how we wish to commemorate the civil rights era, for the very reason that it implies that there was—and is—more work to be done than desegregating institutions and ensuring voting rights.  The radical reconstruction of American society that King saw necessary has yet to commence, and within the schema of the modern American two-party system, his ideologies are barely represented within the political discourse.  Until they are willing to reckon with the real legacies of King and consider his radicalism, both Republicans and Democrats would do well to refrain from claiming him as one of their own.