Charles P. Pierce: The Radical Dr. King

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15165611/martin-luther-king-radical-legacy/

The Radical Dr. King
His legacy should not be passive and sanitized.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jan 15, 2018


In Spokane, six years ago this Wednesday, a 30-year-old Army veteran named Kevin Harpham walked up to a park bench tucked into the corner of a parking lot and surrounded by two low brick walls at right angles behind it. Harpham left behind a black backpack containing a couple of T-shirts. It also contained explosives, the guts of a cellphone, and a number of fishing weights that were meant to become shrapnel when the backpack detonated. Later it was discovered that Harpham had coated the fishing weights with a form of anti-coagulant rat poison, and with human feces, to increase the shrapnel’s lethality.

In fact, it was Harpham’s purchase of an unusual number of fishing weights that first drew the attention of authorities in the small, unincorporated area of Washington where Harpham lived. The bomb was rigged to kill and wound as many people as possible during Spokane’s annual parade celebrating the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday. Harpham meant to kill and wound as many people as possible, and he meant to do it in dark tribute to the power of Dr. King’s true message.

In his evil way, Kevin Harpham acted out of a more truthful vision of Dr. King’s mission than are any of the banal proclamations coming from politicians snuggled deeply into their political safe spaces, and certainly a more truthful vision of Dr. King’s mission than those proclamations coming from conservative politicians whose entire careers have been spent rolling back the achievements of Dr. King and the movement he helped lead, and whose entire careers have been built on the remnants of the system of American apartheid that Dr. King gave his life to destroy. Kevin Harpham knew. Dr. King was a radical. He worked not only to create a “beloved community,” but to upend and to pound into the dust the comfortable racist community in which white Americans lived, the one that Kevin Harpham was willing to kill to preserve. Kevin Harpham was correct. Dr. King did indeed mean to take Kevin Harpham’s America away from him in order to build one truer to its founding creed.

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Dr. King hung floodlights on the gap between America’s promises and America’s reality. He lit every shadow of America’s dark history and he showed those shadows to Kevin Harpham’s America, which did not like the view at the time, and appears to like it even less today. Even Dr. King’s memory was a threat to Kevin Harpham’s America, so Kevin Harpham thought to bloody that memory as best he could, to sink poisoned shrapnel into the memory of every marcher as surely as he meant to sink that poisoned shrapnel into their bodies.
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He failed, though. He failed because a couple of city employees, both Hispanic, the kind of people for whom Dr. King went to Memphis to fight on the week he was killed, spotted some wires dangling from the black backpack and called the police, who re-routed the march and then disarmed the bomb. Harpham’s in prison now, serving a 32-year sentence. Dr. King will be dead 50 years ago this April. At 10 o’clock Monday morning, the Unity March in downtown Spokane went off as scheduled. Unity is a fine thing, but it cannot be a narcotic that swaddles the country in a haze that softens the reality of what the day actually represents, here in a dishonest era in which the President* of the United States speaks the unvarnished language of racism. Unity is a fine thing, but it is not an answer to the real questions of this day.

If Dr. King was a figure of anodyne unity, why did Kevin Harpham plant his bomb?

If Dr. King was a figure of saintly consensus, why did Kevin Harpham soak his fishing weights in rat poison?

If Dr. King wasn’t divisive, why in the hell did someone shoot him to death, fifty years ago this April?