海角大神

On Monday, the nation honors a figure whose legacy has for years been the safest of touchstones for political figures, regardless of ideological stripe.聽

This year, those reflecting on the meaning of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.鈥檚 work should have much to ponder, given the departure of the nation鈥檚 first African-American president and the elevation of explicit appeals to white racial identity into mainstream politics.聽

And what has grown into a perennial exercise for young racial-justice activists on the left 鈥撀爐he 鈥渞eclaiming" of the civil-rights movement鈥檚 more urgent and disruptive tactics, as well as the strains in Dr. King's teachings that linked racial justice to economic and foreign-policy questions 鈥� could seem more poignant than ever, as Democrats鈥� loss in the presidential election has sparked calls for the left to shift its focus away from racial issues and seek to recapture more of middle America.

鈥淭here is a Martin Luther King that is important to the resistance movement that we don鈥檛 hear about,鈥� Abdul Aliy-Muhammad, co-founder of the Black and Brown Workers Collective in Philadelphia,聽told the Associated Press. 鈥淲e always hear about love and forgiveness.... There was also a King who was radical.鈥�

It鈥檚 certainly true that King wasn鈥檛 always beloved: in one 1966 Gallup poll, 63 percent of聽American public said they viewed him negatively. And much of the press saw his civil disobedience 鈥撀爏it-ins at federal buildings, boycotts of schools, and marches in cities that had stridently racist leaders聽鈥撀燼s unnecessarily divisive. The FBI, meanwhile, called him "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country."

That might have been at least in part because, as The Washington Post noted in 2015, many of the nonviolent protests that King helped organize were far from passive affairs. Tactics like one 1963 mobilization of black children to march through Birmingham, Ala., where the police force had garnered a reputation for brutality, might seem questionable even today.

鈥淭hey couldn鈥檛 have been ignorant of the terrible response鈥� they would incite, New York University historian David Levering Lewis, who has written biographies of King, told the Post then.聽鈥淜ing and his inner circle appreciated the probable certainty of violence on the part of the establishment to trigger responses that they wanted, in terms of legislation and policies.鈥澛�

In the decades following King鈥檚 1968 assassination, memories of such hard-nosed political strategy gradually gave way to his calls for voting rights and the end of segregation, which appealed to moderate swaths of the American public. The fierce opposition to US foreign policy that King added to his agenda toward the end of his life 鈥� for him, the US was 鈥渢he greatest purveyor of violence in the world today鈥� 鈥� or the heavy presence of labor activists within the ranks of the civil-rights movement鈥檚 organizers, conversely, has faded.

That inter-issue emphasis has inspired activists with Black Lives Matter and other similar-minded groups.

"We do King a disservice when we try to tell a flat story of turning the other cheek," Charlene Carruthers, national director of Chicago鈥檚 Black Youth Project 100, told the AP. "It was never simply that."

The "agitation" of King's generation of activists "shows up differently than how our agitation shows up today," Ms. Carruthers added. "However, I think King鈥檚 work and the work we do are part of the larger tradition of black radical resistance."