Dr King and Our Authoritarian Crisis

Only when we refuse to accept the mythology around King and the Movement can we comprehend the legacy entrusted to us

At memorial celebrations across the nation this weekend, Americans will cross arms, grasp hands, and sing, “We Shall Overcome.” Many will bow their heads in prayer for our country. Some – and more than many of us care to admit – will look down to consider a question that has haunted them since last Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which coincided with the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Can America survive four years of authoritarian captivity?

Some of our fellow Americans spent the past year trying to dismiss this nagging question with the hope that things wouldn’t be as bad as it seemed they could be. But their hopes have been dashed. The White House is waging a propaganda campaign that openly lies about things everyone can see. Congress has funded a paramilitary force to occupy US cities and enforce the regime’s version of reality. Anyone who objects has been labeled a “domestic terrorist” and shown that they will be attacked, fired, defunded, arrested, or killed if they do not get out of the way.

America has descended into a full-blown authoritarian crisis faster than almost anyone expected.

Still, millions of people have resisted – not just at mass protests in the streets, but by telling the truth as journalists, standing for the rule of law as lawyers and jurists, refusing to bow to the regime as universities and corporations, refusing to obey unlawful orders, and practicing hope as people of faith and conscience.

We are in the midst of an authoritarian crisis and a majority of Americans are still resisting.

But for those who have not bowed, the question is often more pointed. We gather this weekend to remember Dr. King and the movement standing against authoritarians like Bull Conner, Jim Clark, and George Wallace in the South. As America marks its 250th anniversary, we recall the founders who reused to bow to a king. We remember the Union holding off the insurrection of the Confederates when, as Lincoln said, a great civil war tested whether this nation, “or any nation so conceived, can long endure.”

But can America survive authoritarianism when it has the power of the federal government?

This is the unuttered question that many Americans who have not bowed to Trump bring with them to this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We know because this is the question people on the front lines have whispered to us in quiet moments over the past year. We know because we’ve had to wrestle with this question ourselves.

It is an important question because, when we face it honestly, it can pierce through the mythology that keeps us from receiving the tradition that made Dr. King and offers us a way out of the authoritarian crisis we face.

We deceive ourselves if we believe King was able to face down Southern racism because he had the full support of the federal government. The fact that we are living in a national security state that has labeled people who resist authoritarian extremism “domestic terrorists” can help us understand the context Dr. King was born into almost a century ago. Most people know Dr. King was surveilled by the FBI at the end of his life, but in his new book Martyrs to the Unspeakable, James W. Douglass reveals that King’s family and community were marked as a threat to national security a dozen years before Martin was born.

According to US military intelligence in 1917, “Negro unrest” was one of four “principle domestic enemies” in the US during World War I. US Army Lt. Col. Ralph Van Deman argued that Black Americans who challenged racism were influenced by “foreign backed subversion” and should be monitored. “No one,” Van Deman argued, “was more influential in the black community than its ministers.” He directed a spy network to focus on Black churches, and in September of 1917 – 12 years before Martin was born – the US Military Intelligence Division opened a file on King’s grandfather, the pastor of Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. “It behooves us to find out all we possibly can about this colored preacher,” an Army official wrote in a top-secret telegram to the Army’s Southern Department headquarters.

This surveillance continued with King’s father, who succeeded his father-in-law as the pastor of Ebeneezer. Noting his participation in the National Negro Congress, Daddy King’s intelligence file labeled him a “Communist threat.” By this time, intelligence officers who were learning about the inner workings of Black churches understood that these were not corporations directed from the top-down, but democratic communities where organizing was often directed from multiple centers of power. They opened files on the financial secretarty and even the custodian at Ebeneezer also.

Before Martin King had finished school – long before he rose to national prominence as the local spokesperson for the Montgomery Bus Boycott – he was part of a community that was labeled a “domestic security threat.” No leader of the Southern freedom movement assumed that the federal government was on their side. Indeed, they knew that the federal government of the United States called them what they are calling Renee Good today.

Their government marked them as threats to national security.

It read their mail, tapped their phones, and infiltrated their organizations.

When Dr. King was organizing in the South, opponents used the lies that national intelligence agencies had developed to wage a propaganda war against him. They published pamphlets and posted bill boards across the South calling King a “Communist” and suggesting that his efforts to reconstruct America were actually foreign-backed attempts to destroy America.

Billboards like this publicly labeled King as a Communist two decades after national security agencies has marked his father as one.

When we gather to remember Dr. King and sing, “We Shall Overcome,” we must recall that he and others in the Movement knew what they were up against. They were not naive about the nature of power and evil in this world. They understood that the full force of the most powerful government in the world had been and could be turned against them.

Nevertheless, they believed. They hoped for a better America. And they gave themselves to a struggle that pushed us all toward freedom.

Only when we refuse to accept the mythology around King and the Movement can we comprehend the legacy they entrusted to us. They did not leave us a perfect union. They inherited from those before them and passed down to us a way to challenge injustice and become what we’ve never yet been through moral force. They showed us the way up and out of the mess we are in.

Another America is possible - even when those in power threaten to kill anyone who opposes them. We know it is true because Dr. King walked the way of love all the way, never allowing the powers who’d lied about him, surveilled him, and threatened him to turn him away from the faith that we shall, in fact, overcome. “I may not get there with you,” he said on his last night in Memphis, “but we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

It is the faith that has pushed this nation toward a more perfect union in the past, and it is the faith that we need now more than ever.