The Illusion of a Hero

Former State Representative Maureen Murphy once said the reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces. In the United States, politicians have the reputation as being lying, two-faced worms who are only in it for the money, the power, and the fame. That being said, certain names in history arise as belonging to those who possess true integrity, honor, and courage. Among those is Martin Luther King, Jr. Not only is King credited as being a peaceful freedom fighter and Baptist minister, King also won the Nobel Peace Prize, earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and has a national day in his honor (Wikimedia Foundation). Working with his right hand man and the secretary-treasurer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph David Abernathy, King and his fellow civil rights fighters traveled across the United States to establish equality for African-Americans. However, unlike most names that have become symbols for heroes and role models for those of proceeding generations, the name Martin Luther King, Jr. has come to represent an incomplete man, a man that is nearly unknown to the public. Though King was known for his compassion and courage in fighting for African-American rights, there is sufficient evidence provided by those close to him to question his morality in other realms. Some even go as far to argue that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not only a racist, but a sexist as well. The point of this paper is not to argue that King was either of those; it merely means to argue that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not the man he led the public to believe he was, either for better or worse. If America knew the

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full and real Martin Luther King, Jr., it can be brought into question as to whether this name would hold the reverence it does today.

Some time after the death of his friend Martin Luther King, Jr., Southern Christian Leadership Conference officer Ralph David Abernathy wrote an autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. Though ridiculed for writing a book that included private parts of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life that betrayed the image that King himself wanted portrayed, Abernathy felt inclined to describe these events anyway. One can determine after reading this autobiography that Abernathy felt no malice toward King and had no motive for maliciously slandering his name. It is in this book that different faces of Martin Luther King, Jr. emerge. Though some of these faces reveal a man who had an “unflagging capacity to have fun and to make everybody else join in,” they also reveal an often ill and pessimistic man with took ideas and credit from other sources and who did not necessarily have the morality of the minister that is currently connected to Martin Luther King, Jr. (Abernathy, 467).