On the holiday honoring her father's legacy, Bernice King reminded Twitter users that the fight for equality doesn't just happen once a year.
"Honoring you today and every day," she captioned a photo of her family, more than 50 years after the civil rights leader's death. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated four years after segregation was banned under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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His daughter is carrying on the legacy.
On Jan. 16, she also implored people to stop quoting her father while still supporting the systemic oppression he spent his life fighting. The reverend may be known for his historic "I Have A Dream" speech, but he still protested, broke laws, and was persecuted for his radical activism. Those aspects of his life have been whitewashed and diluted in favor of feel-good quotes about equality.
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Twitter users expressed similar thoughts — honoring MLK's life extends beyond reposting his gentler quotes, and requires remembering his radical action, too. And not just on the holiday named after him.
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And when it comes to revisionist history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation appears to want to hide its treatment of King when he was still alive. The FBI tweeted a tribute to the activist with a photo of a King quote memorialized at the FBI Academy's reflection garden, more than five decades after allegedly trying to blackmail him into suicide. The typewritten letter, part of a surveillance and harassment campaign against King, threatened to spread intimate details about his sex life.
Former FBI directer James Comey kept a copy of the request to wiretap King on his desk "as a reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong," the New York Times reported in 2014.
The FBI's tribute was thoroughly eviscerated by other Twitter users, like similar messages have been in years past.
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So how should you honor King's fight for racial equality? His daughter Bernice tweeted a clip of King's speech, "Where do we go from here?" in which he reminded Americans that dissent is necessary.
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"Let us be dissatisfied," King told an applauding audience. "Until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."
Topics Social Good
