As the Martin Luther King holiday and South Carolina primaries approach, Democratic presidential candidates will continue to make claims on the legacy of King and the Civil Rights movement, but it's not the front-runners whose messages most mirror King's, says a Duke University historian.
"While Senator Obama and Senator Clinton grapple over the memory of Dr. King, neither candidate has taken positions that fit easily under King's mantle," said Timothy Tyson, visiting professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke's Divinity School. "Ironically, John Edwards' campaign draws much more closely on Dr. King's legacy than either Clinton or Obama."
Tyson is author of "Blood Done Sign My Name," a memoir about a 1970 lynching in Tyson's hometown of Oxford, N.C., and "Radio Free Dixie," which won two major awards from the Organization of American Historians. He is also a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and teaches "The South in Black and White," a course jointly offered by Duke, North Carolina Central University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
"Poverty has become Edwards' signature issue, just as it became King's, if you look at the Memphis sanitation workers strike and the Poor People's Campaign," Tyson said. King depended heavily on the support of organized labor, as does Edwards. Edwards is also the most anti-war of the viable candidates -- by a hair -- which is a position King embraced during the Vietnam War, Tyson noted.
Even the contradictions coincide. "Edwards is chided for championing the poor, but living like the rich," Tyson said. "King fought for the disinherited, but he was a prince of the black aristocracy. If there had been a $400 haircut in 1960, King might well have gotten one. He cared nothing for money, but he liked nice suits and expensive cuff links."
Tyson said the contemporary political proposal that King would have likely endorsed is Dennis Kucinich's call for a "Department of Peace."
"The truth is few of us are ready to sign up with Dr. King, who insisted that ‘unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final say in reality,'" Tyson said. "Any honest assessment of American political culture in 2008 has to concede that Dr. King remains unelectable."