We Can Use Dr. King’s Legacy

By Erena Daniel

The legacy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left at the height of the Civil Rights Movement had lasting and profound impacts on the consolidation efforts of African American people, both then and today. Despite the magnitude of controversy King received, his activism and work are constantly referred to and reflected upon as a beacon of light in the struggle for justice and peace for African American people. And though his movement was at its height over half a century ago, his impacts can be felt reverberating across the fabric of American society today, both in pride of its progress and in admissible regret in the places where it has fallen short in its ability to permeate American reality.

In advocacy for a more equitable and free world, King fought for desires that many African Americans have continued to strive for with great fervor: access to education, opportunity, and social and financial mobility—possibilities that may seem intangible, yet are filled with nuance in their ability to garner freedom and true individual choice. In order to have achieved these necessary protests—the fight for basic freedom and civil liberty—the aspects of life that make existence not only possible but hopeful were of vital importance to King’s peaceful advocacy protests. Without those steps, the black legacy in the U.S. would be far removed from its current state today.

A key untouched stone, however, also crucial to the identity of African Americans and their humanization process in this country, has resided in the cultivation and scaling of the incarceration system. Rather than the harrowing policy enforcing segregation of the former half of the twentieth century, the modern age of the U.S. boasts of underlying and overlooked methods barely acknowledged in the U.S. Constitution, but remains as reinforcements to the perpetual oppression, destruction, and exploitation of African American individuals, families, and whole communities with its maniacal efforts. Mass incarceration in America did not merely start out as a gigantic conglomerate of institutions working together to keep the racial power dynamic in line with a systemically racist agenda. But decade by decade, as the civil rights movement began to take shape as one of the foundational pillars of American liberty, the reimagining and repurposing of penal systems within the U.S. took hold of American politics and mass media platforms. Mass incarceration replaced America’s plan to keep Black Americans weak and impoverished through segregation and Jim Crow with the fight against crime. But truly, who were the criminals?

Through issued propaganda on a national scale, African Americans were rounded up on petty crimes, with the judicial system failing them in its greed. People were not given fair rights to trial and were forced to sit in pending sentences that would get continuously pushed back in priority, all while being subjected to the criminal enforcement of minimally paid hard labor in which lobbyists and bureaucracies would profit off of thousands of times over. The lack of personal autonomy, laced within the entirety of the system, reinforced the numerous stereotypes and economic instabilities that African Americans have been forced to succumb to for generations. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy of upliftment for the future was being erased and cancelled out by those who benefitted from the unfair distribution of power.

The solution to undoing these implemented and enforced social and institutional systems may not be simple, but the first steps can be educational awareness and discourse. Americans from all backgrounds, whether with little or no experience or understanding of one of America’s largest and most profitable businesses, need to start talking about the current implications of what the incarceration system is doing to marginalized people in this country. Without the dialogue, no outcry for change can be heard or enforced.

Author and prison reform activist Ivan Kilgore put it best at a class seminar at Santa Clara University, sharing a rare and unique look into the African American experience within the prison system. Kilgore states that as individuals “us[ing] our personal experience and observations to craft narratives that confront apathy, expose injustices, and motivate readers to advocate for change” was fundamental in King’s work even from behind bars and should be utilized in the push for change now. Kilgore’s words echo out that the injustice of centuries past can be rectified through the same storytelling that has pushed mankind this far into its history. Nationwide dialogues will spearhead the prison revolution for the benefit of those who have borne the burden of such an institution the hardest and the longest throughout its existence.

Martin Luther King’s legacy was ambitious in the eyes of America, and though it has not been fulfilled to the greatest extent of its possibilities, a bright future in its progress can be paved so long as Americans both in and out of the bounds of privilege remain hungry and resistant to allowing the dust of the past to settle into the framework of the future. There is no need for a watered-down version of King’s legacy.