Why MLK Day Is Not Dr. King’s Real Birthday: Questioning What We Commemorate
Most people in the US are under the assumption that Martin Luther King Day signifies the exact day he was born, and, should you happen to be among them, I can understand. One would naturally assume that if there was a federal holiday named in a man’s honor there’d be some type of significance to that particular day, like how Christmas is supposed to signify the birth of Jesus — even though there’s no evidence to suggest he was born during that time, but you get the point.
However, rather than the date of January 20th most of us will observe in 2025, Dr. King’s birthday is actually on January 15th. Now you may be asking, what is the reasoning behind why the federal government chose to recognize him 5 days later, instead of paying his actual birth date the highly deserved tribute it is owed? Well, you can thank the Uniform Monday Holiday Act for that. It was passed in 1968, and this act aimed to create more three-day weekends for American workers by moving certain federal holidays to Mondays.
You know I always found it particularly egregious that the very same government who spied on him, harassed him and his family, threw him in jail, slandered him, and ultimately murdered him had the unmitigated gall to use a day meant to honor him as a way to “extend their weekends.”
It was the FBI under the racist Edgar Hoover who actively worked to systematically destroy this man by painting him as a communist, even though he was the ultimate embodiment of what American values are supposed to look like. And, it was because Edgar “the bigot” Hoover feared a quote, “black messiah” that they did one of the most heinous and cowardly things you could do against someone of Dr. King’s moral caliber; they accused him of infidelity against Coretta Scott King and that some of the girls he was supposedly creeping with were white women.
And like clockwork, about every 5 to 6 years, especially around MLK Day, the FBI hints at or so-called releases classified documents “proving” that King was having extramarital affairs. But, just for some darn reason, even though they’ve been sitting on these supposed incriminating documents for over 50 years, they just can’t seem to find the spare time to release them to the public.
Spoiler alert: Don’t hold your breath on them releasing them because they don’t exist.
Oh and by the way, so they mean to tell you and me that the man who was constantly in the public eye (with his wife, mind you), who was putting boots to the ground day-in-and-day-out across this country, who managed to raise money exclusively via the grassroots, who was in constant fear of his and his family’s lives, who was busy raising his children, and who was out here risking life and limb in hostile environments had the time to squeeze in a couple of romantic rendezvouses here and there?
All that to say, this is the very government evoking the name of one of America’s true founding fathers — one that never owned slaves nor condoned empire-building through useless wars, to give themselves an extra-long weekend. Just let that sink in for a moment. But I digress.
Now, what’s my purpose for pointing out the importance of recognizing Dr. King’s real birthday, you might ask? Why am I putting so much emphasis on doing so? To that, allow me to ask you all who are reading this a very fundamental question: Why do we commemorate anyone’s legacy in the first place?
Answer: Because there are certain characteristics and principles that any given individual has demonstrated that have had a profound impact on the world — ones that we wish to crystalize and propagate.
The other question I’ll ask is, what exactly are the elements of King’s legacy that we’re using MLK Day to galvanize around, and what specific messages are we utilizing it for to bolster it to the society at large? After all, how could a day — the very day the US government has given itself an excuse to take an extra day off — that wasn’t chosen by you possibly empower you and the group you’re a part of?
All throughout grade school via the standard curriculum and all throughout our adulthood courtesy of the white media, the image of Dr. King we’ve been beaten upside the head with was that he believed in non-violence, that he was anti-poverty, that he was anti-war, and that he had some kind of “dream” of some sorts — although rarely does anyone do any in-depth analysis as to what he was referring to as a dream. And, that’s precisely the point.
Seldom do you hear about the non-violence strategy being a and not the end-all-be-all strategy. To quote Dr. King, “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time.” Notice that Dr. King never said it was the only option. This right here demonstrates competence in knowing how to strategically utilize language and how to, wisely, focus on one’s strengths. Those are components of his legacy that most certainly should be observed and studied.
Dr. King, while he detested violence, understood that adequate self-defense against forces that fundamentally don’t believe in peace requires a level of violence, which did not go against his core beliefs. It’s just that he understood that’s not where his efforts would be best utilized.
He understood that his efforts would be the most effective in demonstrating to the world, that “we’re simply walking through neighborhoods completely defenseless and merely expressing our demand to be treated like human beings.” He understood that having German Shepherds sicked on our men, women, and children and that the local fire department using high-powered hoses to fling our bodies across the street like ragdolls would be a bad look on the local, state, and federal government.
His objective in doing so was to communicate to the white government power structure that black society was willing to make any sacrifice for the right to be treated like human beings and that America’s true get-down was now on Front Street for the whole world to see. The image that America tried to present itself as being some kind of moral leader of the free world took a major hit, internationally.
But, to dispel the notion that Dr. King was completely pacifistic, here is what was stated by Dr. King in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail:” “So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides-and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.”
Translation: Myself and those whom I affiliate with specialize in peace and wish to make our demands on peaceful terms, even when that peace has not been returned to us. We’re still willing to deal in good faith and to bring about justice through non-violence. That said, if you do not concede to our demands peacefully, that other side over there who reps the same quest for empowerment that we do will violently deal with you. And, oh yeah, they do specialize in and are trained for it.
The white media constantly harps on cherry-picked portions of the “I Have a Dream” speech, but do you notice they never mention that part about Dr. King’s philosophical stance? Notice how we’ve never heard about that part of Dr. King’s ideology throughout grade school nor media-wise, not even from your so-called publicly funded media outlets. And, that kind of information omission isn’t by chance or accident. It’s deliberate.
Furthermore, another piece of Dr. King’s philosophic totality that gets the most deliberately hidden and ignored was his understanding that it didn’t matter if black people were out of chattel slavery or if segregation no longer existed on paper. He understood that, particularly in his later years, anti-black racism would always exist, which I know would have been a devastating reality for him to have to accept.
There, unfortunately, is no amount of love, logic, convincing, or reason in existence that will convince all of white society to relinquish white privilege. As a matter of fact, the bloodiest war this country has ever fought was the Civil War, where you had 258,000 Confederates who wasted their lives all in the name of maintaining white privilege.
Dr. King began to realize, that while you can’t stop white society from adhering to white privilege, there is a way to protect black society from their tactics. And the only way to do that is with money.
The bus boycotts of the 1950s, when black people decided to withhold their dollars and that they were willing to make any sacrifice to not have to do business with those busing companies, crippled the white economy.
In the iconic interview Dr. King did with NBC back in 1967, Dr. King expressed how the European peasants were welcomed and given acres of cheap land via the Homestead Act close to the end of slavery but that black people were primarily denied those same benefits based on race. He also said that it is cruel to ask the bootless man to pull himself up by his bootstraps, when he was released from slavery, only to be left to contend with the elements.
In that interview, he also expressed that integration never really cost the country anything, that it actually boosted the white economy in many ways, and that bringing about substantive justice was going to cost this country billions of dollars (account for inflation). He understood the efforts toward integration had been misplaced. The movement that should have ran congruently with the Civil Rights Movement should have been an economic independence movement.
Dr. King understood very well in his later years, that while you can’t stop people from being racist, you can become economically powerful enough as a group to keep them from harming you. He understood that when your group economics are viable, you then have the resources to police, educate, employ, patronize yourselves, and bolster your means of protecting yourselves — aka power tools.
It was especially during that time when Dr. King began publicly expressing the strategy moving forward, and during his organizing of the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, the white power structure began seeing him as a legitimate threat to the white status quo as a whole.
Consequently, 11 months after his interview with NBC, he was assassinated. Now Isn’t that amazing? He gets murdered right around the time he begins making a strong push for the economic empowerment phase of black progress. That just goes to show you that the power of white supremacy lies in its economy, and it’s an economy that has no desire to compete on an equal playing field because it knows it would get dominated by a black one. That is why it is hyper-sensitive to any individual or group of black people that even give off the appearance they have some type of economic upward mobility.
My point in composing today’s piece is to convey that we should know exactly why we’re celebrating MLK Day or any other holiday for that matter. We shouldn’t just be rejoicing in certain things without knowing their origins, and we definitely shouldn’t let how we celebrate the icons who fought, bled, and died for us be dictated by non-black or non-on code influence. It’s both our privilege and our obligation to prop up our icons for the purpose of providing a just depiction of what their legacy demonstrates.
It’s not just enough to share some hashtags or to take a day off work to show your appreciation for our timeless elder, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Also, you only do yourself a disservice by engaging in that kind of superficial behavior. Yes, open chattel slavery was abolished. But, issues like forced prison labor, Eminent Domain, anti-black police murders, the anti-black wealth gap, anti-black gentrification, and anti-black job discrimination all, without exception, link back to economic deprivation aka never have been given what we’re owed.
Dr. King had a dream alright, and it wasn’t just about “little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls;” it was also about black hands moving green dollars in a manner where white hands could never think of harming us ever again.
One Love & One Justice,
The Stormy Poet
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