As we honor the late Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 20, which also happens to be Inauguration Day, it seems particularly appropriate to reconsider King’s vision for our nation. Often, he is simplified and sanitized into a moderate leader and inspirational speaker who dreamed about white children and black children holding hands.
He did, of course, have that dream and it was a good one. However, especially in the last few years of his life, he spoke out against poverty and militarism, and he challenged the USA to become better. He strongly criticized the war in the Vietnam and advocated for a war against poverty at home.
These goals would be much more difficult to achieve than integrating schools and buses. As the late activist and scholar Vincent Harding insightfully argued in an important book first published in 1996, Martin Luther King was an “inconvenient hero.”[1]
At the dawn of 2025, King’s vision is as inconvenient, important and meaningful as it has ever been.
Anti-War Stance
Harding—who along with Andrew Young was one of the key close advisors to King who helped him formulate his anti-war and anti-poverty stances—focused on two major examples in his assessment.
First, he discussed King’s most famous statement against the war in Southeast Asia, which was his April 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech at the Riverside Church in New York City. Taking a strong public stand against the war was a tough decision for King, because he knew that President Lyndon Johnson would be unhappy. Johnson had been helpful in passing civil rights legislation, so King had reason to avoid being critical of the president.
With support from Harding and Young, Dr. King decided to go ahead with his speech. It did in fact anger President Johnson and sparked a broad wave of criticism from a wide range of public figures including other civil rights leaders. For King, a Christian minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner, opposing what he viewed as an unethical and unjust war outweighed any need to stay on President Johnson’s good side.
Fighting Poverty
The second major example of an “inconvenient” priority in King’s last years, according to Harding, was fighting poverty through the Poor People’s Campaign. He hoped this movement would bring together people from all ethnicities and parts of the country to put non-violent pressure on the government.
These two examples were very much related for King, as he contended that the USA could not properly address poverty without reducing its military spending.
Planning for the Poor People’s Campaign was just getting underway when King was tragically murdered in Memphis in April 1968. Young and others decided to move forward with the campaign, and helped organize demonstrations in Washington in the summer of 1968.[2] Unfortunately, they did not have much success convincing President Johnson or Congress to take any initiative to reduce military spending in favor of social programs.
Redeeming the Soul of America
In the final year of his life, King began to realize the enormity of what he hoped to see in the USA. Redeeming the soul of America would require a rejection of racism, militarism, violence, and even corporate capitalism. It would require a massive non-violent movement against our own government, who King believed was responsible for war in Vietnam and not interested in a rejuvenated war on poverty.
This conclusion—that to move forward in pursuit of his vision the movement would no longer be supported by the US government but would instead be protesting the US government—is what Harding means when characterizing King as an “inconvenient hero.” It is, after all, quite a complicated situation when a government establishes a federal holiday in honor of a person who was striving, at the end of his life, to challenge much of what that government represented.
MLK Holiday
In 1979, Jimmy Carter became the first US president to call for a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King. Carter himself knew that King’s true legacy was a challenging one. Speaking at King’s own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Carter observed that King “called out to the best in people and spoke of the America that had never been, of the America we hope to be.”[3]
Congress responded to Carter’s advocacy for a holiday and within a few years had passed a bill creating Martin Luther King Day. President Ronald Reagan signed that bill into law in 1983.
Harding celebrated the establishment of a holiday for his late friend and colleague, of course. But he had concerns that Reagan and other powerful people in Washington perhaps only wanted to honor the moderate, inspirational King who dreamed of children of all ethnicities holding hands. That motivated Harding to first publish Inconvenient Hero in 1996.
Harding’s fear that the USA was forgetting King’s real dream—the dream that our nation would move away from fighting wars and instead refocus on fighting poverty and racism—only increased in the early years of the 21st century. With terrible conflict raging in Iraq and economic catastrophe enfolding at home, Harding released a revised and expanded version of his book in 2008.
An FRCC Connection
That same year, Front Range Community College held a Black History Month event at our Boulder County Campus featuring none other than Vincent Harding himself. Harding, who taught at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, accepted an invitation from one of his PhD students, FRCC’s own faculty member Catlyn Keenan, to be the guest speaker.
It was a memorable event, as a jam-packed community room at FRCC’s campus in Longmont anxiously awaited the arrival of the famous civil rights leader, whom Professor Keenan was transporting. It turned out that a giant sinkhole on Interstate 25 would delay Harding’s appearance by over an hour.
Songs and Poetry
Getting occasional updates from Professor Keenan via cell phone, the evening’s emcee (yours truly) attempted to entertain the boisterous crowd. Thankfully, the wonderful local minister Glenda Robinson and her choir from Boulder’s 2nd Baptist Church was on hand to keep people’s spirits up.
Unsure what else to do, DeRoche finally agreed to an audience member’s request to speak. Strider “Arkansas” Benson looked like an unlikely orator, but he turned out to be amazing! He had been one of the earliest and most courageous white people to march and protest along with Martin Luther King, and he shared extremely powerful poetry about his experience with the FRCC audience.
Thanks to the combination of Strider’s poetry and the choir’s music, the time passed quickly and before we knew it, Harding arrived. He was spellbinding, of course, but his key message was that the crowd was really the star of the show.
A Powerful Message
“You are the answer you have been waiting for,” he essentially said. “Power to the people” was the point of the evening. Harding’s words reminded us that King’s final vision called for a grassroots movement for real change.
It had taken an “inconvenient sinkhole” to teach us how King had been an “inconvenient hero.” Vincent Harding passed away in May of 2014, but his influence lives on through his writings and the ongoing work of his students such as Professor Keenan.
A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart
On January 9 this year, the nation mourned the death of Jimmy Carter, the president who had initiated the movement for a Martin Luther King holiday. The Reverend Andrew Young, still going strong at 92 years “young,” opened the ceremony with a prayer and shared memories of Carter in his eulogy.
“Dr. King used to say that greatness is characterized by antipathies strongly marked,” commented Young. “You’ve got to have a tough mind and a tender heart. That was Jimmy Carter.”[4]
This description of Carter is another nice way of reminding us that truly honoring the legacy of King is a complicated challenge. As we honor him on January 20, he remains as inconvenient as ever.
Upcoming MLK Day Events
Minister Glenda Robinson, who did so much to make our 2008 Black History month celebration at FRCC’s Boulder County campus a success (and has been with us many, many other times over the years), will be participating in two big events for MLK Day this year.
On Sunday, January 19, she will be at the Boulder Jewish Community Center’s MLK event. The keynote speaker will by Sheyann Webb, who was 8 years old at Selma in 1965 and became known as “Dr. King’s smallest freedom fighter.”[5] On Monday, January 20, Robinson will be part of the MLK Day celebration at Silver Creek High School in Longmont.[6]
FRCC is also supporting two MLK Day community events this year:
- The Justice Everywhere march and gathering at Colorado State University in Fort Collins
- The Freedom Intersections Convocation at CU Boulder
Attend one of these events, or another in your community. Let’s use the day to renew our commitment to do the work as a nation that King hoped we would strive to do.
[1] Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero Revised Edition (Orbis Books, 2008).
[2] Andrew DeRoche, Andrew Young: Civil Rights Ambassador (Scholarly Resources, 2003).
[3] Carter quoted in Harding, Inconvenient Hero, 1.
[4] Jimmy Carter Funeral: Andrew Young shares memories | Watch
