The Martin Luther King dreams that Obama forgot

Fredrick Harris is a professor of political science and the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of “The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics.”

When I was growing up in the 1970s in Atlanta — the birthplace of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the city where he is interred — we commemorated the civil rights leader quite differently from how we do today.
The remembrances took place on April 4, the anniversary of his assassination, not on his January birthday; after all, the King national holiday did not yet exist. And rather than focus on the March on Washington and King’s “I have a dream” speech, the city would emphasize his mission and message toward the end of his life. It was less a ritual of collective mourning than a reminder of the fight King was waging: a war against the triple evils of racism, poverty and militarism, reflected in a battle for the rights of low-wage garbage workers in Memphis, a movement against the Vietnam War and, nationally, the hope for a second march on Washington, one that would dramatize the plight of America’s poor.

On Monday, President Obama’s second inauguration and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday will converge, making for great history and symbolism. The president is embracing that symbolism — swearing in on the Bibles of King and President Abraham Lincoln, and having Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, deliver the invocation. Of course, the greatest symbol is Obama; for many Americans, his rise reflects how we’ve overcome the racism King fought. As Interior Secretary Ken Salazar put it during the dedication of the King memorial on the Mall in October 2011, Obama is “the personification of [King’s] American dream.”
Yet, it is no small irony that the anti-inequality movement that cleared the path for Obama’s presidency would find its supposed personification in a chief executive who has spoken less about poverty and race than any Democratic president in a generation. And that the Baptist preacher from Georgia who stood for nonviolence would never have condoned the militaristic actions of a president whose escalated use of drone warfare kills innocents around the world.
Unfortunately, these aspects of King’s legacy have been eclipsed by a national holiday that commemorates the civil rights leader by asking Americans to participate in an important, but generic, day of public service. In one of his most moving yet rarely remembered sermons, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” delivered at the National Cathedralthe Sunday before his death, King left the nation with a vision of what it would take for real change to come to America, and it was more than public service.
“We are coming to demand that the government addresses itself to the problem of poverty,” King told the congregation. “It is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.”
As inequality widens and more Americans fall into poverty, King’s call for direct action is no less true for Obama in 2013 than it was for President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Fresh from reelection to a second term, Obama has an opportunity to not only ceremoniously acknowledge the struggles of the past but to also directly address, through words and deeds, the unfinished agenda of erasing the vestiges of racial inequality.

resource :http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-martin-luther-king-dreams-that-obama-forgot