Forty years on, some lessons from the life--and death--of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Nearly a century ago, V.I. Lenin wrote in State and Revolution: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

King was a reformer, pacifist and Baptist minister, not a revolutionary socialist. Nonetheless, he was the leader of a mass popular movement that for more than a decade challenged the barbaric racial oppression in the American South. Lenin’s observation aptly characterizes the process by which the civil rights leader has been transformed into a public icon, the recipient of insipid tributes from contemporary big business politicians—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain (who voted against the King national holiday), and even the wretched George W. Bush.