socialmedian: Misremembering Martin Luther King

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Misremembering Martin Luther King

Source: History News Network

Oct 05, 2009

Summary

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 b

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