1) Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, the 1970 debut album of spoken-word poet and Soul-singer Gil Scott-Heron, is most famous for gifting the world “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” But that’s not even the most incendiary cut on the album: track 7 “Evolution (And Flashback),” for example, broods over the then-recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, both of which had occurred within the last 2-to-5 years respectively. Of Dr. King in particular, Scott-Heron recites somberly, “Martin is dead/With Martin as our leader/We prayed, and marched/And marched, and prayed/Things were changing/Things were getting better/But things were not together.” His verse on Malcolm says something similar.
In either case, Scott-Heron treats both Malcolm X’s and Dr. King’s then-recent murders not as some holy martyrdom (as they tend to get treated today) but as a fatal disruption, a dream deferred, progress arrested, ideals unrealized, a project left unfinished. He is not here to to celebrate King’s life or vision, but express his anger over all the racial progress that was left unfulfilled by these vicious murders. Such was the sense among Black Americans more broadly in the immediate aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination.
2) The white-washing of Dr. King’s life and legacy among white-Americans, however, had already reached an apex just 14 years later in 1984, when the Irish Rock band U2 released their era-defining hit “Pride (In The Name of Love),” from The Unforgettable Fire. The new federal holiday Martin Luther King, Jr. Day had just been signed into law by President Reagan the previous year, and as a result Dr. King’s death was no longer treated by most white-Americans as a tragic waste or fatal arrestment of the Civil Rights movement, but as some Christ-like sacrifice that somehow brought about the fulfillment of the “I Have a Dream” speech, rather than its violent demise. This is the era when the Civil Rights movement began to be spoken of by most white-Americans as being in the past-tense, as a great accomplishment that was definitively completed, and not an ongoing concern or unfinished project that they still needed to actively contribute towards. Then as now, everyone acted as though they would’ve totally marched with Dr. King a generation earlier, while continuing not to march in the present.
U2, perhaps unwittingly, helped to cement this narrative by implicitly associating the Memphis murder of MLK in verse 3 (“Early morning, April 4th/shot rings out in the Memphis sky…”) with the betrayal of Christ by Judas in verse 2 (“One man betrayed with a kiss…”). Now, U2 would later record a much more nuanced, darker-edged take on Judas Iscariot in 1991’s “Until The End of the World,” wherein Bono identifies more with the betrayer than the Savior; one can’t help but wish that U2 had also recorded a similarly more nuanced take on MLK’s assassination, one wherein these white Irishmen confront how much uncomfortably more they have in common with James Earl Ray or Earl Clark (depending on which side of the debate you fall on as to who the true killer was), than with Dr. King.
In general however, U2 has gotten off the hook for helping legitimize this overly-romantic martyrdom reading of Dr. King’s murder: partly that is because the band supported Public Enemy’s protest against Arizona’s banning of MLK Day in 1991 (but more on them in a moment); partly because Bono has actually walked the talk in helping eradicate AIDS in Africa; partly because the album closer “MLK” does indeed say “May your dreams be realized,” future tense, acknowledging that the Dream remains unfulfilled; partly because the song itself, over-played though it may be, really is a banger; and partly because the Irish themselves were often discriminated against as “white negroes” when they first immigrated to the US in the mid-1800s–and were still being so treated by the UK in 1980s Northern Ireland. If any group of white people are allowed to sing unironically about the American Civil Rights movement, it is arguably the Irish.
(I say “arguably” because there were also plenty of Irish slave-holders in the Americas, too—of which the O’Haras from Gone With The Wind are merely the most famous example—not to mention just last year there were violent riots in Dublin by Irish white supremacists against letting more foreign refugees in. There were Irish counter-protestors too, but the point here is no one group has been a complete angel about racism.)
3) Moodswings and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, however, get less of a pass, because their wholesale sampling of the “I Have a Dream” speech in the final third of their 1992 electronica opus “Spiritual High (State of Independence)” comes off as kinda cringe and clueless, as performed by some self-satisfied white liberals only too willing to treat MLK’s dream as somehow completed and fulfilled–as a victory lap to be celebrated–as though racism itself and not Dr. King had been killed that April day. (Moreover, it was certainly an odd choice to have Hynde wear white gloves–and feature crowds of mostly white people–in a video supposedly honoring Dr. King. But then, it was also a strange choice for someone to carve the 2011 MLK memorial in Washington, D.C. out of white marble, of all things.)
Not that either Moodswings or Chrissie Hynde have ever been raked over the coals for the track; rather, the song has mostly just been forgotten, as most cringy moments tend to be. The Moodswings album it appears on has long gone out of print; and when the song appears on various Pretenders Greatest Hits compilations, it tends to only be the shorter single version without the MLK excerpts. That is largely for the best: “Spiritual High (State of Independence),” beautiful though it admittedly may still be, frankly adds nothing to anyone’s understanding of Dr. King’s mission–just as the “I Have a Dream” excerpts adds nothing to anyone’s enjoyment of the original song.
4) Not that this sanitized narrative of MLK’s legacy wasn’t getting regularly challenged at the time: only a year earlier in 1991, Public Enemy famously released the fiery “By The Time I Get To Arizona,” taking direct aim at Arizona Governor Evan Mecham for cancelling Martin Luther King, Jr. Day when he took office in 1986, as well as for telling black activists “You folks don’t need another holiday. What you folks need are jobs,” and for the state entire voting down reinstating the holiday in a 1990 referendum. Hence why Chuck D had no qualms with declaring “the whole state’s racist.” As Sista Soulja states in the intro, “the powers that be” had “found psychological discomfort in paying tribute to a black man who tried to teach white people about the meaning of civilization.”
The accompanying video was even more controversial, and was condemned by no less than MLK’s own widow Coretta Scott King, due to its fantasy-depiction of black militia members assassinating Governor Mecham in revenge for King’s murder, which seemed a violation of all the radical nonviolence that Dr. King spent his life preaching. The video was quickly removed from MTV rotation (though one suspects that may have had more to do with its graphic depiction of ‘50s-era white-on-black violence–not to mention its reenactment King’s actual assassination); nevertheless, the track itself remained a live staple of the Hip-Hop crew for years, during which they would often burn a Klansman in effigy. When Public Enemy opened for U2 in 1992 at Mecham’s alma mater of Arizona State University, they performed only this one song, then walked off the stage, with U2’s full support. It is a track that very much calls attention to the fact that MLK’s dream remains unfulfilled, with far more work left to do.
Mecham, incidentally, was also a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; that is, he was a man born and raised defending the Black Priesthood ban as unchangeable divine doctrine, who had likely read Ezra Taft Benson’s 1969 book An Enemy Hath Done This (released only a year after King’s assassination no less), wherein Benson accused the entire Civil Rights movement of being a communist plot to overthrow American democracy, without the slightest shred of irony or self-awareness. That is to say, we have our own complicities here, of which we still are in need of sore repentance. (This is partly why President Nelson has partnered with the NAACP in recent years to condemn racism.)
Mecham, by the way, was impeached on corruption charges only two years after the MLK Day fiasco, in 1988. He was later cleared of the charges in court, but one gets the impression the impeachment had less to do with corruption than with how personally unlikable he’d become even within his own party (seriously, who cancels a holiday?).
5) This overly-romanticized view of Dr. King’s death was also challenged at the time by Rage Against the Machine, on the track “Wake Up” from their 1992 self-titled debut. The song is perhaps better known nowadays for featuring in the rousing ending scene of The Matrix, so it is important to remember that the track is first and foremost about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.–specifically, how he was killed not by a lone gunman, but by a purported conspiracy within the U.S. Government (which incidentally was confirmed unanimously by a mixed-race jury during a civil suit brought by the King family in 1999). “You know they went after King when he spoke out on Vietnam,” snarls Zach de la Rocha at the end of the first verse, “He turned the power to the have-nots/And then came the shot.”
Like Gil Scott-Heron, Rage treats the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X not as holy martyrdoms but gross miscarriages of justice: “Ya know they murdered X and tried to blame it on Islam,” he adds conspiratorially. But it wasn’t conspiracy theory at all when Zach de la Rocha at the bridge recites verbatim from the FBI’s own 1968 internal memo concerning MLK: “But should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to the ‘White liberal doctrine’ of non-violence and embrace black nationalism, through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them…” He repeats that ominous phrase “and neutralize them” six times in a row.
That is, when he screams at the listener to “wake up” in the song’s finale, it isn’t in the vague sense of “waking up” to some abstract concept of injustice in general, but rather to the very specific fact that Dr. King was murdered by government actors to “neutralize” the Civil Rights movement–and that these same actors are still trying to “neutralize” us today. It is a song that works very hard to ensure that Dr. King’s murder does not get consigned to some mythologized past, but remains urgently relevant to the present.
Zach de la Rocha finishes the song by quoting Dr. King (who was in turn quoting Galatians 6:7), by declaring, “What you reap, is what you’ll sow.”
6) Long after Rage’s 2000 break-up, Zach de la Rocha began guesting on tracks for the politically-charged Hip-Hop duo Run the Jewels (most thrillingly on “A Report to the Shareholders: Kill Your Masters“). This group has likewise engaged in combating MLK revisionism, specifically on their 2016 track “Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost),” wherein they insist on keeping Dr. King horribly relevant to our present moment. The majority of the track in fact makes no reference to MLK whatsoever, but instead describes a race riot unfolding in the present tense; the song was recorded only one or two years after the Ferguson and Baltimore riots, and less than four years before the George Floyd ones. “Some get to count sheep, some gotta count kids that they bury,” rhymes El-P, succinctly summarizing the root causes of riots, “Fear’s been law for so long that rage feels like therapy/Nobody gets no more sleep till we teach them a memory.”
“No more moms and dads crying,” adds Killer Mike, “No more arms in the air/We put firearms in the air/Molotov cocktails thrown in the air.” At every rhetorical turn, Run The Jewels work to make race riots feel not like an artifact of some bygone historical era, but as immediate as the evening news. Moreover, it is not the rioters themselves but the oppressor they explicitly hold responsible for this violence: “What have you done,” guest singer Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio asks rhetorically, “What are you making us do?”
Then, to head-off any potential complaints from those comfortable hypocrites who decry violent protest for any reason–and love to quote MLK to do it–they finish off by sampling Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s other most famous speech, 1967’s “The Other America,” wherein he portentously warned: “I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.” (That line, “a riot is the language of the unheard,” is also quoted by Rage Against the Machine on their 1999 track “Calm Like a Bomb”). It is, needless to say, a far more effective sample of Dr. King than the Moodswings song.
In this manner, Run The Jewels continue to rescue Dr. King from being consigned to the archaic past, by having him speak to contemporary conditions directly. In Run The Jewels’ hands, MLK’s Dream remains unfulfilled, the Civil Rights movement incomplete, and his murder did not end or finish anything, one way or the other. They pick up right where Gil Scott-Heron began. They remind us that the way to help fulfill MLK’s vision isn’t by weaponizing his quotes to tut-tut those still having to rage against their own oppression, but to heed his warnings to address underlying causes of riots, and to act as though the Civil Rights movement still hasn’t ended yet—because it hasn’t.
Then-President Uchtdorf once said in April 2014 General Conference, “Don’t sleep through the restoration” (which was even cited in this year’s Come, Follow Me manual, incidentally). His title was directly citing Dr. King’s own, “Don’t sleep through the revolution,” because we are not through with either yet.