Memorials to King obscured ongoing black suffering.

Evidence

By 1979, the decade-long congressional push for a national holiday to celebrate Dr. King had gained enough steam to reach a vote in the House, though it did not yet succeed. But Baldwin worried that tributes to King served to obscure a deeper truth. People could ignore what was happening in black communities across the country and instead celebrate the so-called legacy of Dr. King. They could pin King’s wings to the page. In this sense and for that purpose, Baldwin lamented, the memorials and the named streets perfumed the carnage. They hid in plain sight what actually happened to many of the movement’s survivors and their children. All one had to do was look down from the street signs for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and see the poor neighborhoods along it to get the point. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 468

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core of ‘the lie’ — the memorializing impulse that domesticates King’s witness and hides the unfulfilled condition behind his legacy.
• SEED: Essay angle: how street names and monuments function as a technology of forgetting — looking down from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as a method for measuring a nation’s unfulfilled promises.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thesis about ‘the after times’ — the period when a country tells itself it has changed and has not. Ties to the broader argument for recanonizing late Baldwin.