The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is more than just a time for introspection. It’s a good time to be provocative. So, I usually say, that is the spirit in which I make my thoughts — as a provocation to think more thoroughly about the issues that confront us as a society, as well as what we do in response to them.

After years of campaigning by civil rights activists and Coretta Scott King, Ronald Reagan — the incumbent president but a political foe of King during his lifetime — consented to sign legislation making King’s birthday a national holiday in 1983. At the time of King’s assassination in 1968, Reagan made cruel and racist remarks about King’s killing, describing it as “a huge tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people began selecting which laws they’d disobey.” Right-wing reactionaries frequently ascribed the civil disobedience approach of the South to mere lawlessness, or the fights in the North to breaching their norms of law and order.

Reagan concluded his remarks about King in 1968 by dismissing the ideal of equality as beyond the scope of the American dream, saying, “The American dream that we have nursed for so long is not that every man be level with every other man, but that every man may be free to become whatever God intended.” So it was a triumphant moment as old segregationists and their facilitators, guys like Ronald Reagan who had fought King as a civil rights leader, were irritated by King’s national acceptance as a celebrated American. However, it was also a tragic moment, as King’s nuanced politics were defanged and defouled, twisted into meaningless calls for peace, justice, equality, and colour blindness. That was the cost-benefit analysis. King could only be a national hero if he was stranded at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, in search of a world in which his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, as he stated in his “I Have a Dream” speech — entombed in a casket of idolatry and political impotence.

Even while Republicans held political power in Washington, the King holiday’s elevation became conceivable because it could be used to deflect claims of racism against the relatively young Reagan government. When Reagan ran for president in 1980, he had some high-profile Black backing. Black leaders had grown frustrated with Democrat Jimmy Carter’s stalled agenda. For example, Ralph Abernathy, a former Martin Luther King Jr. lieutenant in the Southern Christian Leadership Council, shockingly supported Reagan, arguing that “the Democratic Party in Washington will not understand that Black people are a part of America until we let them know that we do have an alternative.”

But, with Reagan’s first budget, the animus that had animated his entire political career shone out. In 1981, his first budget removed over 400,000 people off the poverty lists while lowering payouts for 258,000 families. Almost one million families were thrown off food stamps, and another million had their payments decreased. By 1983, two years into Reagan’s first term, black unemployment had increased to 21%, and it would not fall below 10% for the rest of the decade. The poverty rate of 14 percent in 1982 was the highest since 1965, when it reached 17 percent at the outset of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. The bottom was falling out for African-Americans, with poverty consuming an amazing 30 percent of the Black population. And, of course, this was before Reagan’s War on Drugs, which ushered the United States into an age of mass incarceration.

The right utilised King’s bland legacy and the deadening repetition of “I Have a Dream” as a weapon to depict their political programme as colorblind, dismissing Black misery as lapsed personal responsibility, cultural inadequacy, or the distorted values of Black families. The issue with how we remember King is not simply the inaccuracy or misrepresentation of his politics, but also how those distortions are utilised to advocate or excuse regressive policies that King would never support and would almost likely lead rallies against.

King, who once called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” while also calling for a radical distribution of wealth in the name of equality, would support teaching Critical Race Theory, acknowledging slavery as central to the political, social, and economic development of the United States, and would be out in the streets protesting continued attacks on the right to vote as well as rampant police abuse and attacks on Black communities.

However, the distortion of King’s legacy is not just due to the right’s antics. When compared to the militancy, wrath, and destruction that engulfed the Black movement in the late 1960s, liberals have been just as invested in presenting a distorted version of King as a more palatable form of Black politics. In August 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, then-President Barack Obama stated, “And then, if we’re really honest with ourselves, we’ll say that over the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us, claiming to strive for change, lost our way.” The agony caused by assassinations sparked self-defeating riots. Legitimate complaints about police violence morphed into justifications for criminal behaviour. Racial politics can cut both ways, as the transforming message of unity and fraternity is drowned out by recriminatory discourse.”

“That’s how development halted,” Obama continued. That’s how hope got skewed. It’s the reason our country is still split.” This perception of riots as senseless and criminal, in contrast to the nonviolent movement that is seen as heroic, has cemented the notion of King as their essential opposite, with almost no recognition of his own political transformation from the March on Washington in 1963 to his emphasis on mass direct action, civil disobedience, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism at the end of his life.

The twisted legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. is also used to rewrite the history of the civil rights struggle, transforming it into a storey of patriotism meant to confirm the inherent progressive arc of American history. As a result, the civil rights movement is remembered as a triumph over tragedy, of good triumphing over evil, rather than as a movement that exposed the entire United States as a thoroughly racist and anti-Black country. When looking at how liberals allowed for rampant housing and job discrimination, second-class education, and stood by passively in the face of repeated police assault on Black communities, the movement revealed that racism was not just a peculiar Southern malady, but also raised questions about the quality of Black equality in the North.

The rise of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the power of the civil rights movement do not demonstrate progress as the essential engine moving American history forward. Instead, King’s political trajectory and the inherently radical nature of the civil rights movement demonstrate that progress is not assured in the United States, and justice is not part of its natural life cycle. Both are the result of long-lasting social movements, labour movements, and struggle. Change is represented by a Black president and the biggest number of Black elected lawmakers ever to serve in the United States Congress. But when, in the previous two weeks, two home fires in Philadelphia and the Bronx part of New York — fuelled by poverty and neglect, spurred by landlord greed – killed 39 Black people, predominantly women and children, it points to horrifying continuity with the past.

Indeed, the current Black Lives Matter movement, the ongoing fight for unrestricted voting rights, the fight for affordable and safe housing, the fight for living wages, the fight for healthcare, and so on reveal an alarming continuity of the past, rather than an arc of history bending towards progress. In an essay released nearly a year after his death, King argued that the Black movement had exposed these concerns as profoundly ingrained in American institutions. “In these hard circumstances, the Black revolution is more than a struggle for negroes’ rights; it is forcing America to face all of its interconnected defects – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism,” he wrote in 1968. It is exposing the evils that are firmly ingrained in our society’s entire framework. It reveals systemic weaknesses rather than cosmetic defects and argues that the underlying issue to be addressed is radical societal reformation.”

The remainder of Professor Taylor’s remarks can be viewed here.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a Princeton University professor of African American studies. She recently received the MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes known as the “Genius Grant.”