I was Raised to Despise Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Up from White Supremacy, Part I

Trying to explain the entire story of how I was raised in but then left behind one of the more notorious white supremacist sub-cultures at the turn of the 21st century is going to require a series of posts. I suppose that’s fitting because leaving that white supremacist ________

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already I struggle to find the right object to put behind the adjective “white supremacist.” White supremacy was both an idea and a community. For me, it occupied a particular geographical space but was also a set of invisible ties binding together a people from across the world. It was a function of belief but also affection. It shaped the religion, politics, and aesthetics of my youth.

To call it inescapable would be incorrect in the direct sense — one can either lean in or turn away from white supremacy — but it’s exactly correct in the sense that white supremacy so permeated my lived experience as a child and teenager that it was rendered all but invisible to me at the time. It was affirmed even in the negation: in that particular, knowing New South sneer at the embarrassing Old South hooligan. It was everywhere even when I felt it nowhere.

So I will unpack my experience leaving white supremacy for you in exactly as piecemeal and halting-stutter-step-a-stumble a fashion as it occurred for me. And we might as well start on and with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the only day each year that many white Americans during the 1980s and 1990s could be bothered to think in an overt way about racism.

MLK Day was observed precisely once when I was in middle school, when my seventh grade social studies teacher stopped the regularly scheduled lesson — possibly about the demerits of purchasing Chinese-made products and thereby funding the People’s Liberation Army — to remind us that Martin Luther King was a womanizing plagiarist.

I hasten to add that my teacher was not incapable of showing a festive spirit. He once brought in brownies for the whole class to enjoy in celebration of another notorious womanizer on that most auspicious day marking the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton! An additional pizza party was promised upon conviction of the errant president, which made Kenneth Starr’s ultimate failure the cause of great lament for the 13 year olds of classroom 7a.

That gives you some sense of what I mean when I say that I grew up in a very politically conservative place. And by place, I don’t just mean the Christian school / segregation academy I attended all the way from nursery school through college. Disdain for MLK Day united the white, conservative residents of Greenville County, South Carolina until a startlingly late date.

The first state to secede from the Union was also the last state to recognize MLK Day as a full, paid holiday in 2000. And Greenville was the last major community in the Upstate to follow suit on the local level in 2005, which happened to be when I was a college sophomore. I note this to emphasize that my particular experience of white supremacy was not as far from the typical experience of a white, conservative southerner at the time as it might seem today.

When the Greenville City Council finally voted in favor of commemorating MLK Day, they did so with an 8-5 split. Again, that might seem odd to younger readers, who have gotten used to a profoundly bipartisan and profoundly bland celebration of Martin Luther King. Even the most conservative Republicans in Congress today are quick to release a press statement every January eulogizing a man who “never gave up and never preached hate” (Kevin McCarthy), a “true fighter for social justice” (Lindsey Graham), and who was possessed of a spirit that “should be living on in all of us” (Lauren Boebert, who may or may not have then chanted “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice”).

But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, proposals to mark MLK Day as an official holiday remained a lightning rod for conservatives — like Senator Jesse Helms’ (R-NC) 16-day filibuster of the national holiday in 1983 — although their objections were often framed as being about something other than racism (ie, official holidays are just so very expensive, it’s only right to counterbalance the celebration by simultaneously honoring a fellow southern hero like Robert E. Lee, and so on).

But there was obvious utility in opposition to MLK Day, although I would not have admitted it then, not even to myself. You see, celebrating MLK Day made *them* feel good but made *us* look bad. (Past me would’ve protested at present me suggesting that “them” and “us” had a racial valence and not simply a partisan meaning, although obviously it did.) Surely, they couldn’t simply be interested in celebrating a martyr in the movement to secure basic civil rights that had been denied to them right up until just a few years prior to my birth?? We simply assumed that supporters of the King holiday were as insincere as we were, that their motivations were just as crassly political as ours.

I look back at this mood now as the first inchoate stirrings in my community of a mentality that we would now label “owning the libs.” We assumed the worst of our opponents, not realizing that we were looking in a mirror rather than through a window. In any case, since enacting MLK Day would be a win for liberal Democrats, it would be a loss for conservative Republicans and thus should be opposed at all costs.

Now at this point, if you come from a similar background to mine (and you are as yet unreconstructed), you might be thinking, “But Paul, it’s true, right?? Martin Luther King was both a womanizer and plagiarist! So what’s wrong with questioning a holiday named in honor of him?”

It’s true. King was both a serial womanizer and a serial plagiarist.

The question isn’t whether those facts were true. The more important question is why did I care about those particular facts so much that I fixated on them to the exclusion of other equally true facts. Why did it matter so much more to me that King had feet of clay than that he had a crown of gold?

His infidelity to his wife didn’t erase his perseverance through beatings and jailings. His plagiarism didn’t invalidate the truth in his calls for justice. He was a deeply flawed person standing in the gap on behalf of a deeply righteous cause.

It’s not as if condemning the bad while honoring the good was an alien mental exercise for me. Such figures were a trope in my Sunday School classes where we poured over the stories of King David, Sampson, Rahab, and a whole host of heroes with feet covered in clay just as red as the soil of the Carolinas.

Looking back, I now see why King’s flaws mattered so much more and virtues mattered so much less to young me. It’s because on some subconscious level I knew that MLK Day was not actually about — or at least was not only about — Martin Luther King. He was the focal point for a commemoration of all that had been accomplished in the Black freedom struggle up until April 4, 1968 and a reminder of all that remained to do afterwards.

And THAT was deeply discombobulating to a white, conservative boy growing up in South Carolina in the 1980s-2000s. MLK Day implied that the work of anti-racism didn’t oh-so-conveniently-for-little-ol’-me end in the deep, dark, distant, past of the 1960s. MLK Day implied that King’s death was a beginning, not just an end. MLK Day implied that my entire way of viewing society, politics, faith, and so much more might have to change in some way.

I wasn’t wrong.