Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren boge obam here. Martin Luther King Junior's birthday is a national holiday here in the United States. His leadership in the struggle for civil rights and his promotion of non violent tactics have made him an international icon of social justice. But that wasn't always the case.
King was assassinated on April fourth, ninety eight, but historians tell us that it wasn't King's work while he was alive, nor even his murder that changed his reputation in the minds of most Americans. In writing the article that this episode is based on, back in ten, we spoke with Jean Theo Harris, who teaches political science at Brooklyn College and is the author, most recently of A More Beautiful and Terrible History, The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.
Her book is an attempt to get beyond the myths that have arisen about the civil rights movement and look at how it was really seen then and what it
means for us now. Many Northerners, for example, believe if the King was always a beloved figure, and that his crusade against the Jim Crow South was widely celebrated in the North, but the o'harris points to a New York Times pole from nineteen sixty four, the same year that the Civil Rights Act was passed, that shows a majority of white New Yorkers thought the civil rights movement had gone too far, and a national pole in nineteen sixty six,
just two years before King's death, found that only twenty eight percent of white Americans had a favorable opinion of King. A separate nineteen sixty six poll found that seventy eight percent of black Americans approved of King's work in the fight for civil rights. The o' harris said, the general public does not support the civil rights movement when it's happening. The same criticisms made against Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement today in were trotted out against Martin
Luther King, and Rosa Parks sixty years ago. They were disruptive, they were called extremists. They were accused of moving too fast, going too far. All these things we see today have parallels in the civil rights movement. Even King's famous I Have a Dream speech at the nineteenth three March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, d C. View today is the high water mark of the movement, and King's short, yet impactful career was delivered under a cloud of fear
and tention. THEO. Harris said, we think of the March on Washington as the most American event ever at the time, it wasn't seen like that local and federal law enforcement prepared for it, like it was an invasion. Many Americans also believed that King's work ended with the passage of the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act and the nineteen
sixty five Voting Rights Act. We also spoke back in tween the Claiborne Carson, history professor at Stanford University and founding director of the Martin Luther King Junior Research and Education Institute. He pointed out that King didn't retire after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Carson said, he was in Chicago the next year dealing with problems more national in scope that are still with us today. He was dealing with the question of war, and now we're
living in an era of perpetual war. He was dealing with the issue of poverty on the day that he died. If Martin Luther King were alive today, he would say that the landmark legislation was a tremendous victory, but it's made us very complacent about his goal of global human
rights and social justice. That was his big picture. So if King was distrusted and maligned by mainstream America during his life, was it his martyrdom at age thirty nine that changed public opinion and transformed him into an almost saintly American hero. Not immediately, says THEA. Harris, explaining that it took fifteen years of lobbying by civil rights leaders and sympathetic legislators to finally convince Congress to commemorate Martin
Luther King Day. President Ronald Reagan, who was against the holiday during his first term in office because he agreed with former FBI Director J Edgar Hoover the King was a Communist, changed his tune when he was running for re election and needed to close a sensitivity gap with minorities and women. By signing the bill in three that made King's birthday in national holiday. Reagan's skillfully laid out the elements that would become the national fable, Reagan said
in a statement at the time. Now our nation has decid to honor Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. By setting aside a day each year to remember him and the just cause he stood for. We've made historic strides since Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. As a democratic people, we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice and took action to correct it. And we should remember that in far too many countries, people like doctor King never have
the opportunity to speak out at all. THEO. Harris says that Reagan's genius was to frame King's story as another example of American exceptionalism. Quote, we had an injustice and we corrected it. It's all about the power of individuals and the power of American democracy. These will be key elements in terms of how the civil rights movement comes
to be memorialized in our national culture. By nineteen eighty seven, four years after the creation of m L. K Day and nearly twenty years after King's murder on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, a full seventy six percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of King, and those numbers only continued to grow. By nine nine, King came in second on a gallop survey of twentieth century individuals that
Americans admired most, behind Mother Teresa. Political scientist Sheldon Appleton wrote in that younger, college educated white Americans tended to support King, and both of these demographics were larger in nineteen eighty seven than in nineteen sixty six. He also noted that the widespread lack of knowledge about King and the civil rights movement in general might have also influenced
earlier perceptions. Appleton wrote, perhaps recent media treatment of King has helped to induce selective memory by some middle aged and older Americans. Of course, Americans have every reason to venerate Martin Luther King and to celebrate his accomplishments. He didn't do it alone, and he had his flaws like any other human. But as Carton explains, he also had an undeniable gift for challenging Americans then and now to
make good on the promise of our founding principles. Carson said he had that ability to link the goals of the civil rights struggle to ideals that most Americans believe that they have. That that's what he was doing in the I Have a Dream speech in Washington. We as a nation justified our independence with a human rights statement called the Declaration of Independence. The question is can we live up to that? Today's episode was written by Dave
Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit has Stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is a production of by heart Radio. More podcasts of my heart Radio visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.