Pressing Forward: Are Days of Service Really the Best Way to Honor MLK’s Legacy? Really?
Rann Miller poses for a photograph in his office at Camden Promise Charter School in Camden, New Jersey, October 27, 2021. Miller is the head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for his Camden charter school district, and is reshaping curriculum to include important perspectives from the BIPOC community once left out.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a new monthly column for Front Runner New Jersey called “Pressing Forward,” authored by educator, thought leader and renowned cultural commentator Rann Miller. The subjects discussed by Miller will be his views.
BY RANN MILLER | For AC JosepH Media
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a champion for justice; justice for Black people, the poor, and all marginalized and oppressed people worldwide. His work centered on fighting against the power structure to bring justice to society.
Therefore, the Day of Service in “honor” of this work is utter bull.
King worked to eradicate injustice caused by racism, capitalism, and militarism. He didn’t die so that we could volunteer one day out of the year. He did not die so that we could feel good about a one-day “activism.” That was not his legacy.
The Day of Service is a con in the highest form… it is deception and a deflection from King’s true work. The day is how the power structure manipulates what King served for. It is a day for white people unwilling to change America to “honor” his service to others without having to acknowledge why he served or challenge themselves to adhere to King’s principles. It is a way for Black people, unwilling to be the “radical” that King was, to attach themselves to his radical politics—addressing the fruit of America’s sins and not the root.
Simply put, it is a way for all of us to cosplay activism without having to flip tables.
Don’t get me wrong. Numerous individuals and nonprofit organizations take this day to do a lot of good for people. But the good work they do should happen daily and little if any of the “good” work on this day calls for the United States to end capitalism.
It doesn’t call for an end to wars or funding them, nor does it call to end racism; specifically, anti-Black racism which is at the root of economic inequality, insecurity, and injustice. It doesn’t call for a redistribution of wealth. It doesn’t call for reparations for African Americans due to the exploitation of their labor and their lives as part and parcel of the growth of the U.S. as a world economic power.
It doesn’t call for an end to U.S. imperialism that exploits the lives and labor of racialized people all over the globe so that the capitalist racist elite can increase their profits and the white working class can, as DuBois says, get a share, however pitiful, of “wealth, power, and luxury… on a scale the world never saw before.
Naming these out loud for the evil that they are with the mission to eradicate them from our world is the work of Dr. King that a day of honoring his legacy should be about.
Additionally, the Day of Service in “honor” of Dr. King departs (by design) from a major theme associated with non-religious federal holidays—freedom struggle. Granted, Dr. King never fought in a war nor participated in any conquest, but he was engaged in freedom struggle. His life was dedicated to the Black Freedom Struggle. Yet his “holiday” doesn’t memorialize the Black Freedom Struggle.
The power of holidays is that they are memorials. Holidays memorialize what a society believes to be important. Columbus Day, for example, remains a memorial because Christopher Columbus is white settler colonialism personified and the United States is a white settler colonial project; it is the essence of Americana. Thus, the Day of Service matters in a special way to the United States.
It is important for a white settler colony to manipulate the narrative of a man descended from enslaved captives from West Africa who challenged the very core of what this colony stands for. That’s what can happen, and has happened, when the government sets the terms for its honoring of a man who demanded a nation no longer be hypocritical; and no longer dehumanize any of God’s creation, whether it be BIPOC domestically or abroad, particularly the poor among them, because that nation believes that it’s always been a city shining on a hill.
In the fall of 1983, Ronald Reagan signed the King holiday into law. He changed his position—against the holiday for King—claiming that his previous point of view was based “on an image [of King], not reality.” He used King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech to turn King into a symbol of color blindness. Petrella and Gomer, explain Reagan’s calculus as a man who built his political career as an opponent of civil rights:
“Reagan, who thought little of King, ultimately used the creation of a national holiday honoring King as a way to co-opt his legacy, enabling Reagan ironically to oppose key civil rights laws in the name of aligning himself with King’s supposedly colorblind dream. In so doing, Reagan became one of the most successful proselytes of what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva terms “colorblind racism,” and Reagan’s frequent citation of King marked the beatification of King not as a champion of racial justice but of colorblind ideology.”
This hijacking and manipulation of King’s legacy provided a blueprint for conservatives and liberals alike; colorblindness offered an effective ideology to not simply roll back the victories of the civil rights movement, but effectively change the victory itself: to one of participation and cultural inclusion in statist structures, divorced from the Black Radical Tradition. Thus, the Day of Service is a smoke screen: volunteerism is the cloud that conceals the agenda divorcing King from his radicalism.
To be clear, only the enemies of justice and humanity consider King a radical in his thinking. King identified himself as a Christian; a Baptist minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But I digress.
I don’t have any animosity towards those who serve on this day. The truth is that those who serve are likely of the community of servants who serve marginalized and historically oppressed communities regularly; particularly those Black persons and organizations rooted in Black communities. For them, their work today is nothing different from the work they do any other day. May they continue to serve the people today and every day.
My animus is towards the government and the persons who fails to honor the work of King at the policy table and the ballot box. It’s easy to volunteer for a one-off event. It’s much harder to live out Christ-like principles preached by a man who challenges your comfort, privilege, entitlement, and power as a result of the belief that the Black man has no rights any white man is bound to respect.
If any backlash comes from what I say here, let it come. I’ll be in good company… the gainsayers didn’t like what King had to say either.
BIO: Rann Miller is a writer, author, and educator. A graduate of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Rann teaches AP United States History, is the author of Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids, and is an opinion columnist, featured in various news outlets exploring the intersections of race, education, politics, culture and history. You can follow on “X” @RealRannMiller, on IG, and TikTok @realrannmiller.
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