President Obama has spoken often about the debt he and the entire nation owe to MLK.
“In a world full of poverty, he called for empathy; in the face of brutality, he placed his faith in non-violence,” he said in 2015.
“His teachings remind us we have a duty to fight against poverty, even if we are wealthy; to care about the child in the decrepit school long after our own children have found success; and to show compassion toward the immigrant family, knowing that we were strangers once, too.”
It no doubt informed the President’s evolution on LGBT rights, from a tentative supporter to a staunch ally.
“I have always sensed that he intuitively understands gays and our predicament—because it so mirrors his own,” wrote Sullivan.
“And he knows how the love and sacrifice of marriage can heal, integrate, and rebuild a soul.
What will the next Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations look like? FBI surveillance of King began with the goal of uncovering the relationship of King and his closest advisers, like Stanley Levison, with communists. Not only did King come out in support of Rustin when questioned by the media, all of the leaders within the movement did.
The memos also detail the closeness of his relationship with Dorothy Cotton, a longtime associate of King’s in Atlanta and director of his organization’s Citizen Education Program.
During FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year tenure, the agency greatly expanded the scope of its surveillance activities – often at the behest of sitting presidents.
What are the lessons of the civil-rights movement that LGBT people can share with the world?
Below, we examine five ways the legacy of Martin Luther King as it applies to the LGBT community.
“By The Content Of Their Character”
The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom espoused the idea that all Americans were equal, and were to be judged on their actions, not on immutable factors like race.
The LGBT community has expanded that belief to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
Bayard Rustin
The architect of the March on Washington, Rustin also pioneered the earliest Freedom Rides, refused to give up his seat on a segregated bus more than a decade before Rosa Parks, and was the first supporter of a young Martin Luther King Jr.
But as an out gay man, Rustin was often sidelined by the very movement he helped found: After a 1953 arrest for solicitation, Bayard wrote “sex must be sublimated if I am to live in this world longer.”
In 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond read his entire arrest report into the congressional record, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the March on Washington.
In his later years, Rustin directed his energy into the nascent gay-rights movement, declaring, “the new n***ers are gays.”
A year before he died, Rustin gave a speech at the University of Pennsylvania where he declared “we cannot fight for the rights of gays unless we are ready to fight for a new mood in the United States.
Starting in late 1963 and continuing until his death, the FBI had been tracking King’s every move. In an era of lenient surveillance laws, J. Edgar Hoover was able to gain unmitigated access into King’s personal life. Unless we are ready to fight for a radicalization of this society.”
In 2013, President Obama awarded Bayard Rustin a posthumous Medal Of Freedom.
In 2015, Logo honored his legacy by announcing the Bayard Rustin Trailblazer Award, honoring unsung heroes of LGBT equality.
Coretta Scott King
While MLK was assassinated before Stonewall, his widow, Coretta Scott King, was a staunch ally to the LGBT community—nd believed her husband would have been, too.
Before her death, Mrs.
King spoke eloquently about the links between racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of hate, insisting they all “seek to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood.”
Speaking of her husband’s legacy at a gathering in 1998, Mrs. King said, “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice.
If these memos are true, such a stance feels hypocritical.
The narrative has just changed. Will more women come forward? But after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Rustin agreed to fly from Memphis to help lead the campaign in King’s absence.
As Garrow explains in his article:
“Without question [the agents] had both the microphone-transmitted tape-recording and a subsequent full transcript at hand while they were annotating their existing typescript; in 1977 Justice Department investigators would publicly attest to how their own review of both the tapes and the transcripts showed them to be genuine and accurate.
Throughout the 1960s, when no precedent for the public release of FBI documents existed or was even anticipated, [the agents] could not have imagined [their] jottings would ever see the light of day.”
It’s natural to want to defend King – to say, “let’s wait and see.”
Others might try to argue that abuse precedes abuse, and that the long legacy of slavery still informed the actions of these revered black clergy who subconsciously became like their oppressors.
The Guardian initially agreed to take the story, edited the piece, paid Garrow for his work and then decided the story was too risky to run. Instead of stopping it, handwritten notes in the file say he encouraged the attacker to continue.
King was once thought of as a saint beyond reproach. The assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham fire hoses and dogs.
Virginia
A nation divided by the definition of marriage: It’s an issue the LGBT community still grapples with six months after Obergefell v.