I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
It’s not so much the content that I’ve been thinking about lately.
It’s the title.
The title reveals King’s location,
and that tells us a little something about his reputation.
It tells us how his ideas were received during those turbulent years.
It tells us that, back in the 1960s, King was not universally loved;
he was seen as a radical;
he was persecuted and maligned;
and this, to many Americans, is a revelation.

You see, I remember elementary school history class.
I remember hearing about how peaceful Martin Luther King was
and how he didn’t want to cause anyone any trouble,
but he knew that, through peace and good will,
equality would be achieved.
There was no radical rhetoric.
There were no protests that halted city services.
The sit-ins and marches must have been fabulous fun for the whole family,
so much so that white America eventually just agreed with him.
And while all that is a beautiful fairy tale,
hearing it seems to create a dissonance:
if King was regarded as so peaceful,
if King was as mild and gentle as we portray him,
if King was as universally beloved,
then why did the white authorities respond so viciously?
Why did they assault him?
Why did they jail him?
Why did they kill him?
What was it about a strong, influential, well organized black man that scared them so much?
And why don’t we hear about that Martin Luther King in school?

If there’s one thing we’ve grown dangerously good at as a culture,
it’s manipulating history into neat moral fables—
tales that espouse to impressionable kids the values we want them to have
at the expense of their knowing the more complex, more human history.
Was King nonviolent? Yes.
Was he the passive teddy bear of a man that my 5th grade history teacher made him out to be? Absolutely not.
Just listen to his speeches.
A sacred fire burned in Martin Luther King.
He spoke painful truth that revealed the dissonance lurking under what white Americans thought was a pristine and perfect society,
and he was hated for that.
He was arrested for that.
He was assassinated for that.

This wasn’t feel-good, smile-for-the-camera fluff;
King was a strong and vigorous leader
who sought to pull the wool back from the sheep’s eyes
so that we could see the consequences of our actions,
even if it meant shutting down city services to get our attention.
He was aware of the personal cost of his mission,
but he pursued it anyway for the benefit of people everywhere.
I’d like to see that taught in a 5th grade history class:

Sometimes, children, being on the side of truth means
your convictions get you convicted.

Sometimes, justice and the judicial system
have a complicated relationship
if they’re not divorced from one another entirely.

And sometimes, to commit to a cause
is to be cornered in an assassin’s crosshairs
or castigated on Pontius Pilate’s cross,
and oh,
while we’re on that topic,
the way that we’ve subdued King’s public image,
the way we’ve removed the revolution from his rhetoric,
is nothing compared to how we’ve diluted Jesus.