Barbara Ran sby
BRANDON TERRY’S ESSAY reminds me of the words of the late Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dose friend: “Dead men make such convenient heroes.” It is a warning to those who would praise King not to fall prey to selective amnesia and sanitize him in ways that distort his legacy.
In response to Terry’s thoughtful essay, I would like, first, to further contextualize King, socially and historically; second, to foreground the dass politics embedded in who we remember and how; and third, to revisit the politics of respectability in light of today’s Movement for Black Lives.