... if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there....
I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there.”
–Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 'I Have Been to the Mountaintop' speech, 3 April 1968.
Last week, while most of the US celebrated the birth of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as a federal holiday, I saw the usual alt-right vitriol against the man circulating around the Internet. By now, many researchers have either debunked, questioned or added meaningful context to these accusations. The general thrusts of those circulating this information is that the US should never have honored such a phony.
It’s curious to me how many seem to harp on the man’s actual name in showing him to be inauthentic down to the core. Says one such diatribe:
His name wasn’t Martin Luther. It was Michael. It was decided Martin Luther had a more prominent ring to it, so he went by that. He never legally changed his name. To this day, he lived and died as Michael King.
I don’t know if Rev. Dr. Michael King has less of a ring to it than the name we know today. Would not a rose by any other name just as easily get under the skins of FBI and CIA?
Of course, whenever invoking the name of the fallen civil rights leader, the memory of early-sixteenth-century monk Martin Luther looms in the background. As a professor of moral theology (University of Wittenberg), he had become increasingly dismayed at the selling of plenary indulgence.* Indulgences were, to put it crassly, a get out of Hell free cards. By paying the church directly, one could get the Roman Catholic Church to absolve any sin, whether it was committed by oneself, a friend or a family member. You could purchase them for evilly departed loved ones. You could even buy one for a mortal sin you planned to commit at a future date.
Naturally, the more money you had, the more indulgences you could buy. Johann Tetzel, a fellow monk who aggressively sold indulgences to the wealthy on the church’s behalf, became so enraged at Prof. Luther’s criticism that he sought to have the Church burn Martin at the stake for heresy.
That didn’t happen. And Luther spent the rest of his life doing something he didn’t really envision when tacking up the now famous Ninety-Five Theses. Luther’s intent was to reform the Church, not to abolish it, or for that matter make Christianity go away. Yet the absolute power once wielded over Europe by the Church had corrupted it absolutely, with true change coming after centuries of bloodshed, and pressure exerted by the competitive political and spiritual clout of the Protestant Reformation.
We can point to a ton of differences between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. One was white, the other black. One was German, the other American. One grew up Roman Catholic, the other Baptist. One lived in the Sixteenth Century, the other the Twentieth. Luther had a pronounced animosity towards Jews and other religious outliers who did not convert to his brand of Christianity, while King did not.
Yet, in many ways the two were similar. They both had academic backgrounds. They were both theologians. They were both reformers who reluctantly became revolutionary icons. They both endured threats on their lives from powerful enemies. Both spoke from a position of moral authority. And, let’s face it, they had similar names..
One can only guess that what gets in the craw of these alt-right posters is that the name associates the father of the Protestant movement, which they have firmly come to believe in, with the political activist they love to hate. Maybe they think that divorcing Dr. King from his given name somehow distances him from a more reverential figure.
Whatever the case, the hoopla seems rather amusing to me. While there is some decent reasoning behind it, the bulk of the story, and the inferences are patently false.
For starters, we know that Dr. King had used the names Martin Luther for the bulk of his life. As a college student during the 1940s, he routinely signed off as “M.L.”** And it’s quite possible that Martin Luther was the only name he knew during his lifetime.
The confusion comes from a a perfect storm of misunderstandings surrounding the name of the civil rights icon’s father, Rev. Martin Luther King, Senior. A 15 January 2019 Washington Post article by DeNeen Brown delved into this issue, in the process finding quite a few interesting tidbits.
The typical story, found in Wikipedia and elsewhere, is that Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. was born Michael King. Unsurprisingly, he named his first son after himself. But the elder King had embarked upon the life of a clergyman, and decided to change his name to one with more religious cache. In this scenario, it’s unclear if the King Sr. legally changed his name or not. Proponents of this story also dispute whether or not King Jr. did likewise.
Brown added context to this interpretation of fact, recounting in the Post article the religious 1934 pilgrimage made by King Sr. to the Middle East and Europe. In Germany, during a Baptist conference, he became acquainted with Prof. Luther, and was forever inspired by him:
King arrived in Berlin a year after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. During his trip, the senior King toured the country where, in 1517, the German monk and theologian Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle church, challenging the Catholic Church. The act would lead to the Protestant Reformation, the revolution that would split Western Christianity.
All around him in Berlin, King Sr. was seeing the rise of Nazi Germany. The Baptist alliance responded to that hatred with a resolution deploring ‘all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.’
After the trip, King Sr. immediately changed his named to Martin Luther, and did the same for Junior, then five years old. So, even by the most (forgive the expression) conservative account, this would still indicate that Martin Jr. had (1) never used a false name, or (2) was given the name by his parent – the way the rest of us receive what we call our ‘given name’.
Unfortunately, the issue is more clouded than that. King Sr. was born in 1899, according to most sources. Other sources say 1897.
If you’re wondering why the confusion, truth is that many African Americans of this period didn’t have official records of birth. Sometimes, parents recorded biographical information in family Bibles, assuming they could read and write. If they couldn’t, they might have to wait until a relative, friend, or some sympathetic person could write it down for them. And this could be years after the event. So sometimes, dates got a little screwed up. And if the family Bible were destroyed in a flood, or fire the information could be forever lost.
In the case of Martin Sr, we can see that the lack of official interest in recording the lives of African Americans comes into play when we look at his given name. In response to these hit pieces to Dr. King, Snopes.com cited a 1957 interview with King Sr. in which he explained that his name had always been Martin Luther King. Apparently, Sr. had been named for two uncles, one named Martin, the other named Luther. For some reason, his mother always addressed him as “Mike,” because, well, who knows. King Sr. Actually accepted that name for the first twenty-two years of his life until a relative informed him that his given name at birth was Martin Luther.
We know that from the early-1920s on, King Sr. had used the name Martin Luther exclusively, although the nickname Mike had stuck around. According to the elder King, he named his son Martin Luther at birth. It was not until 1934, after this trip to Germany, when the older Martin finally got around to getting a birth certificate for himself, discovering in the process that someone mis-recorded the name Michael Jr. on his son’s birth certificate.
One can see how such a mistake might happen. A dad wants to apply to the local clerk for his son’s birth certificate. He wants him to be named after him. Perhaps the clerk, who in a small rural town only knew pop by his nickname, or might have even contemptuously ignored his actual name as pretentious, might have possibly thought that “Mike” wanted a Michael Jr.***
Dr. King officially cleared up the confusion regarding his name in 1957 when updating his birth certificate.
Yeah, I know. It’s hardly Earth-shattering news that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s real name was Martin Luther King. But as you can see by the allusion to Prof. Martin Luther in the “I have Been to the Mountaintop” speech, Dr. King keenly felt the responsibility of living up to that name. His name.
These digs at King aren’t attacks on what he stood for, what he lived for, what he fought for, or what he died for. These types of character assassinations have always afforded rationales, or excuses, to those attacking equal rights. They've longed served as public relations designed to protect what they feel is their entitlement to racial dominion. They can often be true in part. Yet half-truths are still deceptive, especially when cited contrary to context. And even accurate data can be slanted so as to be grossly misleading. But most often, they’re simply untrue, made up from whole cloth.
In Dr. King’s case, this shows a rather sustained pattern of attack, where King’s personal integrity was always challenged, refuted, or undermined during his lifetime. I find it fascinating that fifty years after his passing those who maintain what seems to be a palpable hatred of Martin continue these attacks. That would indicate that even five-decades dead, Dr. King is still a powerful adversary to what we now call “conservatism”
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*As you can see from the above link, the name has changed in honor of its most prominent faculty member. It’s now the Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg.
**If you’re unfamiliar with early-twentieth-century southern African-American culture, it was common for many within that community to refer to males only by first and middle initial.
***On a personal note, I have a similar transcription error in my own birth records, one that has caused me minor grief since the age of sixteen. My birth certificate also records my mother’s age as eight years older than she actually is. So naturally, I’ll accept a birth certificate to prove one’s existence, although I’m rather an agnostic on their biographical accuracy.