Why White Supremacists Support MLK’s Holiday
On MLK day, a lot of people were feeling angered or confused about why figures like Trump, Pence, and even Steve King — all deeply rooted in White supremacy — were praising Martin Luther King. Such praise was disturbing and insulting to millions of people. Others just wondered why in the world someone like Steve King, who recently wondered out loud about why believing in White supremacy would be a bad thing, would praise King. What does such praise mean about how King is perceived; and how King is used? What does it mean when Donald Trump visits King’s memorial for mere seconds, and then turns around and walks away after saying nothing? What was the purpose of such a visit? What message was intended to be sent?
The entire history of MLK Day is fraught, as historian Jeanne Theorharis describes in the opening pages to her important book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History (which I lean on heavily here.) Congressman John Conyers — who worked closely with Rosa Parks, who relocated to Detroit shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott — was the first to propose celebrating a day in King’s honor. That was in a proposed bill four days after King’s assassination. Three years later, King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, presented a petition with three million signatures in favor of a holiday. However, the proposal met significant opposition: for King was deeply unpopular at the time of his death, with 72 percent of White Americans holding an unfavorable view of him. The civil rights community, led by his wife Coretta, pushed forward for fifteen years, meeting opposition the entire way. When Reagan was elected in 1980, it was still common for White conservatives to suspect that King was secretly a Communist whose attacks on white supremacy were in fact a covert attack on America itself… a view that Reagan himself entertained.
King’s supporters, trying to break through this opposition to a holiday in his honor, started presenting King less as a fierce opponent of a deeply structural racism, poverty, and war, and more as a healing symbol of unity. He represented a vision of transcending race and coming together. Many Whites, feeling challenged and uncomfortable by pressures to think seriously about race and the profound inequalities that continued to grow after the civil rights movement, began interpreting this healing vision of King through a colorblind lens: if we could all just see one another for the content of our character… and not “see” race, not think about it and talk about it so much… if King represented an escape from having to think seriously about race, yes, White Americans could get behind a King holiday. It was only once King’s dream was reduced to an innocent, childlike vision of people of different colors smiling at each other and kids of different colors holding hands that an MLK holiday gained enough support to actually become a holiday. Cornel West calls this the “Santa Clausification” of King; historian Jeanne Theoharis comments that King, Rosa Parks, and other civil rights heroes were turned into “Thanksgiving Day parade balloons.” Meanwhile, race-based segregation and poverty had actually worsened in much of the country during the civil rights years, and King often referred to his dream as having descended into a nightmare… and the era of mass incarceration had not even yet begun.
As support for an MLK holiday grew, Reagan faced a re-election in which many White moderates worried that he was “racially insensitive.” What was “racially insensitive” to White moderates was explicitly racist for over 90 percent of Black Americans: Reagan had condemned the Civil Rights Act, and had said that the Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South.” While running for governor in California in 1966, he defended neighborhood segregation: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” Reagan opened his presidential bid with a speech in the South about how he supported “states rights,” which was a term White southerners themselves had abandoned during the civil rights movement because it was too explicitly associated with White supremacy: they had shifted to the language of “federal overreach” by the early 1960s when describing their opposition to federal government intervention in practices of racial segregation. Coretta Scott King said she was “scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Indeed, Reagan won White support using language similar to old Ku Klux Klan stereotypes; his famous words about “welfare queens” and young Black “bucks” sounded eerily close to a 1964 pamphlet from the murderous White Knights of Mississippi. The Klan pamphlet went: “We bet that you are driving a five to nine year old car that half the time you can’t afford to buy gas to go to church with your wife and children. We bet that if you check real close on that poor old southern negro driving that Cadillac, he has two or more negro women on Welfare that are drawing checks for half a dozen illegitimate negro kids of his.” Reagan regularly described Black “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs, who were “collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.” After abandoning his previous “Black buck” language, Reagan railed against that “young FELLOW ahead of you buying a T-bone steak” with foodstamps while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” As historian Ian Haney Lopez puts it, these messages from the Klan and from Reagan told Whites that “they were the workers, the tax payers, the persons playing by the rules and struggling to make ends meet while brazen minorities partied with their hard-earned tax dollars.” Conservative media outlets took all these messages up with great force during the 1980s.
Let’s all take a moment now to reflect on the fact that Reagan wouldn’t hire Jeff Sessions because Sessions was too “racially insensitive” for Reagan.
Anyway. Reagan wasn’t trying to get the Black vote. For Reagan, supporting the bill for an MLK holiday was a way to soothe White worries that maybe, maybe he was a racist. As Jeanne Theoharis explains in her critical book A More Beautiful and Terrible History, Reagan’s support of an MLK holiday was “a way to demonstrate racial sensitivity, pay tribute to the movements successful and now completed battle against racism . . . and thwart ongoing calls for racial justice.” Meanwhile, Reagan expressed privately that those who supported the bill did not know who Martin Luther King REALLY was, and he apologized privately to opponents of the bill. Reagan wrote to one opponent of the MLK holiday that he shouldn’t worry, for the holiday was based “on an image [of King], not reality.” Reagan went on to use his presidency to roll back the successes that the civil rights movement had gained just a decade earlier… and he used his support of a holiday for King to convince White moderates that he wasn’t “racially insensitive.”
When I look at Trump spending a few seconds at Martin Luther King’s monument before turning his back and walking away, having said nothing, what I see is a president who thinks that that will be enough respect for Martin Luther King to satisfy his base. “He went to King’s monument.” That will be enough. It’s a calculated decision. If Trump felt he needed to do more to soothe his base’s fears that he was a racist by doing more to honor King, he would have done more, just like Ronald Reagan did when he signed a holiday for King into law in the first place.
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