Elmer Smith: We're too careful with King's legacy

SOMEONE UTTERED Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s name in a political speech and you would have thought the KKK had desecrated his grave.

It sparked a red alert among keepers of the crypt who function to keep King entombed in a permanent dream state to be revered but not really remembered.

Hillary Clinton, a white woman running against Barack Obama, a black man, came under criticism for equating President Johnson's passage of historic civil-rights legislation to Dr. King's hard-fought victories in the civil- rights movement.

"Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," Sen. Clinton had said.

"It took a president to get it done."

The nerve of her to utter the great man's name without genuflecting. The idea that she would equate his accomplishments (shudder) with those of a white man was enough to make Rep. Jim Clyburn, a black congressman from South Carolina, rethink his neutrality in the Democratic presidential primary.

People need to be very careful how they talk about him, Clyburn warned.

The real problem is that we're too careful. We handle Dr. King's legacy as if it were so fragile that it might shatter if we examine it.

I say it's about time his incredible body of work was exhumed from that musty mausoleum we visit dutifully every January to lay our withering wreaths.

King would have scoffed at the idea that his work was diminished by the acknowledgment of LBJ's key role. In fact, King was the reason LBJ could cajole and strong-arm Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

King's repeated petitions and relentless protests created the atmosphere that allowed LBJ to break a logjam that had stymied JFK's weak efforts. It did take a president and LBJ was the only one willing to risk the political capital to do it.

JFK had kept King and the leaders of the civil rights movement at arm's length for fear that his very narrow margin of victory would evaporate if he were seen as too close to blacks.

Hillary Clinton's mistake was not the obvious link between King and LBJ. Her mistake was the way she used it to make an analogy between Obama's promise of change and what she claims is her ability to deliver.

The right analogy is between JFK's unfulfilled promise of a new day in civil rights and LBJ's ability and willingness to do the needed legislative legwork.

That contrast was clear to King. Yet, when he opposed the war in Vietnam, he did so knowing it would estrange him from the most powerful elected ally ever recruited by the civil-rights movement.

King was too committed to the causes that he lived and died for to hold his tongue. In his letters from a Birmingham jail, King flayed his "friends" who cautioned him to go slow on civil rights.

At the time of his death, he was on to the next phase of the movement, a phase that we choose to forget even as we remember the dream.

The sanitation workers strike he went to Memphis to support was part of his larger vision of a massive movement to end poverty for all Americans.

How many of us remember that King was in favor of a guaranteed annual income for the poor, the kind of wealth redistribution commonly linked with socialism?

How many remember that he was an advocate for reparations? King sought $500 billion in compensation over a 10-year period for the descendants of slaves.

Few of us remember his pointed criticism of a black middle class, which he said was "too often deaf" to the plight of poor blacks.

A lot of black and white supporters abandoned him at the end. Dr. King regretted every loss as they leaped from his bandwagon and onto safer ground.

But it did not change him.

The Dr. King I remember was not defined by hateful detractors or diminished by timid supporters. *

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