Great Men Are Allowed To Be Wrong

“No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries…Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.”

Martin Luther King, Why We Can’t Wait, 1964


The Martin Luther King who millions of Americans remember on the third Monday of every January wasn’t supposed to have written the above statement. And he wasn’t supposed to have proposed that in a city with “a 30% Negro population,…Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas." The Martin Luther King that appears in American primary schools is a kind, gentle Reverend, dreaming of nothing more than a colour-blind society that could forget its past and start again. He is not a strong and angry leader whose dedication to non-violence did not detract from his belief in affirmative action, racial quotas and financial recompense, and certainly not the man who was accused of plagiarising parts of his most famous speeches and may have had a number of extra-marital affairs.

There are certain people who popular modern history has transformed, for a number of reasons, into mythological figures. These select few are raised up to a level beyond the criticism of us remaining mere mortals, to such an extent that to even consider questioning any of their words, writings or actions is tantamount to blasphemy. Martin Luther King is one of those people. So is Winston Churchill. So is Nelson Mandela.

The problem with this secular beatification is that it is necessarily discriminatory in the selection of the words and actions which become part of the ‘chosen one’’s mythology, discarding all but that which neatly fits in to the required stainless caricature. Therefore Winston Churchill becomes the epitome of an imaginary ‘Bulldog Spirit’, the wondrous leader who sacrificed everything for his nation, leaving the Winston Churchill who chopped and changed his political allegiance nearly every election (generally dependent on which party was winning) and who ordered the army to indiscriminately fire on miners’ pickets during the 1926 General Strike left untouched in the dusty archives.

Therefore Nelson Mandela is reduced to a smiling, benevolent grandfather-figure, forced to escape the gropes of molesting Spice Girls and the blank stares of millionaire imbecile footballers, a living symbol of a hideously simplified and meaningless ‘melting pot’ theory. It is just not on to mention his pre-prison dedication to African liberation through sabotage and guerrilla warfare as leader of the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe, without which the non-violent wing of the anti-apartheid movement would not have had the space to grow, because it does not fit in with what the Western political establishment want him to be. And when, today, Mandela makes a statement that is not concurrent with his ‘approved’ image (such as when he suggested that racism was behind Bush and Blair’s undermining of the UN in the run up to the invasion of Iraq), the reaction is merely a patronising ignorance, accompanied perhaps by a suggestion that the man himself is threatening his own legacy by daring to differ from the Nelson Mandela saluted in the history books.

The same is true with Dr King. The political (and it must be said, white) establishment know where they are with the Dr King who called for his children to be judged “by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin”. They have rather more difficulty in incorporating the Dr King who claimed that the USA "had committed more war crimes than any nation in the world" and should “move toward a [political system of] Democratic Socialism” (at a time when socialism actually meant something) into the toothless, sanitised version celebrated every year. They want a fictional apolitical, non-threatening black pastor to wheel out occasionally in order to pat themselves on the back for ‘how far we’ve come’, not the reality of a highly politicised man of action who would undoubtedly be as critical of today’s America as he was of that in the 1950s and 60s.

The awareness of the misrepresentative deification of Dr King was underlined to me last week, when, during my habitual trail around random blogs, I discovered a quote from a public letter attributed to him along the lines of “when people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism”. It was used, as similar arguments often are by apologists for Israel, as a counter against criticism of the Israeli occupation and cultural genocide of Palestine and the Palestinians. The gist of the blogger’s argument seemed to be that, if Martin Luther King believed that anti-zionists are always just anti-semites, it must be so.

It struck me that, regardless of the validity or not of the actual argument, this line of reasoning was simply ridiculous. Why should Martin Luther King’s opinion on Zionism hold so much weight that it, on its own, is enough to defeat any other? Leaving aside the fact that arguing that all anti-zionists are anti-semites is a heinous insult to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who actively protest against the Israeli occupation, and effectively brands them with the same ‘self-hating Jew’ brush liberally applied by real anti-semites, by making the assumption that a quote from Dr King is beyond criticism, that it is above the rational analysis that any other viewpoint must undergo, the author of the blog is, possibly deliberately, falling into the same trap as those who have constructed the cuddly, saintly image of the Dr King remembered every January, stripping him of all his views and actions they find disagreeable or uncomfortable.


The pretence that a man can be beyond criticism leads not only to an inaccurate and effectively meaningless history, but in actuality destroys the very things that made him a candidate for greatness in the first place. The reason why people who do amazing things should be remembered and lauded is not because they are without flaws, but precisely because they do. A person who leads a life of tremendous courage, commitment and belief acts the way they do despite their imperfections, not because they do not have any. Therefore, it should make no difference to his reputation as a great leader and activist whether Martin Luther King ‘borrowed’ parts of other orators’ speeches or was partial to a spot of adultery. These parts of his life should not be wiped from history because they do not fit in with a falsly sterilised image, just as parts of his political philosophy which do not sit easily with his ‘non-threatening’ portrayal, such as the demand for direct financial compensation for the descendents of the enslaved, should not be erased because they make the white leaders who try to capitalise on his memory uncomfortable.

As it turns out, the ‘letter’ quoted by the blogger was a hoax. There are reports of King making a remark similar to that quoted in a small private meeting, but no public declarations of support for Israel exist. No matter. The point is, even if he did believe that all anti-zionists are just dressing their anti-semitism in new clothes, and to a certain extent he probably did (the plight of the Palestinians was hardly well known at that time), that belief, on its own, does not mean that it is true. It is not. It is an argument used to defend the indefensible by those who have no other.
To take everything King (or Churchill, or Mandela) said or did at uncritical face value, or to construct a talking-puppet image of the man, with nothing behind the eyes except that which is handpicked by the current political leadership for their own convenience, simply deprives him of the rigorous intellectual appraisal his life and work deserve, and of the true stature his achievements, accomplished despite the possession of normal human imperfections, merit. He was not a children’s cartoon character, and does not deserve to be treated as such. There is nothing wrong in saying that great men were not always right. On the contrary, it merely makes their greatness all the more remarkable.