Rethinking the Iconography of the Civil Rights Movement:
In issues around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, The Nubian Message attempted to educate its audience about the importance of reconsidering King’s legacy along with the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement more broadly. For example, Myshalae Jamerson’s “What the Media Doesn’t Tell You About MLK,” makes the case that King’s legacy has been reduced by the media to the Montgomery Movement and the “I Have a Dream Speech.” Jamerson also asserts, as Pettigrew’s “Our Forgotten King” would also discuss in the context of the black freedom struggle, media and historical remembrances of King focused too much on the grand biographical arc of his life.
Instead, Jamerson argues that contemporary media narratives deliberately ignore important aspects of King’s life after the federal legislation of 1964 and 1965. For example, this article cites the Poor People’s Campaign as evidence that the U.S. Government also needed to work to alleviate poverty across racial lines and “close the gap between the rich and the poor.” Moreover, Jamerson cites King’s vehement denunciation of the U.S. Government’s conduct in escalating the War in Vietnam. Lastly, these issues proved inter-related for King, as Jamerson points to King’s view that the federal government “use some of the money that was spent on the military to help the poor.”
Meanwhile, Harold Pettigrew’s article on “Our Forgotten Kings” takes a different view in attempting to undermine narratives that held King up as “the great messiah of our civil rights.” Instead, Pettigrew claims that “Afrikan American’s [sic.] must realize the importance of our collective history,” including important figures such as Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP, A.Phillip Randolph, and Ida B. Wells whose struggles against Jim Crow preceded and arguably laid the foundation for the “classical” Civil Rights Movement between 1954 and 1965.