By: Rev. CJ Rhodes
Recently, I read a post arguing that Malcolm X should be honored with a national holiday. That claim sparked predictable debate, but what caught my attention was a familiar and deeply misleading refrain: the only reason we have a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. is because he was “safe for white people.”
I want to be clear at the outset. I have deep admiration for Malcolm X. His moral clarity, his global analysis of white supremacy, his insistence on Black dignity, and his refusal to beg for humanity remain indispensable to the Black freedom tradition. Malcolm named truths that America did not want to hear and that many still resist hearing today. Honoring Malcolm does not require diminishing King. In fact, the attempt to pit them against one another reflects a shallow reading of both men and a misunderstanding of how freedom movements actually work.
The claim that King was “safe” is not only wrong; it is historically indefensible.
The Long Struggle for a King Holiday
The Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday did not emerge organically from national goodwill. It was the result of years of organizing, resistance, and sacrifice, much of it led by Coretta Scott King. Long after her husband’s assassination, Coretta King labored to ensure that his life, witness, and unfinished work would not be buried beneath national amnesia. She built coalitions, endured political hostility, and faced open opposition from lawmakers who argued that King was too controversial, too divisive, and too radical to be honored.
When the holiday was finally signed into law by Ronald Reagan, it followed years of sustained pressure. Even then, several states resisted recognizing it. This was not the triumph of a “safe” figure. It was the begrudging concession of a nation forced to confront the moral weight of a man it had once vilified.
King Was Never Safe
If Martin Luther King Jr. were safe for white America, his home would not have been bombed in Montgomery. He would not have been subjected to constant surveillance, harassment, and psychological warfare by the FBI under COINTELPRO. Federal agents did not treat King as a benign reformer. They treated him as a threat to national stability.
King’s public opposition to the Vietnam War further shattered the myth of his supposed safety. When he named the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” he lost major donors, liberal allies, and mainstream media support. Many white moderates who had applauded his calls for desegregation recoiled when he linked racism, militarism, and economic exploitation into a single moral indictment of the American project.
King did not simply want integration into existing systems. He wanted those systems transformed. His Poor People’s Campaign challenged the moral legitimacy of an economy that produced obscene wealth alongside entrenched poverty. His critique of capitalism pushed beyond polite reform into the realm of structural change. That is not safety. That is prophetic danger.
If King were truly safe, he would not have been assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel while standing in solidarity with sanitation workers demanding dignity and fair wages.
Sanitization as a Form of Control
What has made King appear “safe” to some is not his actual life or thought, but the selective memory imposed upon him. His radical theology, his democratic socialist leanings, his fierce critique of white supremacy in churches, and his insistence that peace without justice is violence by another name have been softened, truncated, or ignored.
This sanitization has been politically useful. It allows institutions to celebrate King while resisting the changes he demanded. It enables appeals to “law and order” to masquerade as King’s legacy. It permits the use of his words against contemporary movements for racial justice, even when those movements echo his deepest convictions.
Ironically, some of the most aggressive distortions of King now come from evangelical spaces and, tragically, from Black voices who function as surrogates for reactionary politics. King is recast as naïve, unbiblical, or dangerous in the wrong ways, while his actual radicalism is dismissed or denied.
Malcolm and Martin Together
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were not interchangeable, but neither were they enemies. They represented different strategies, different audiences, and different moments within the same long struggle for Black freedom. Malcolm named the global dimensions of racial oppression and affirmed Black self-respect in the face of terror. King articulated a moral vision that exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of American democracy as it then existed.
Both men evolved. Both became more radical over time. Both were moving toward a deeper international and economic critique by the end of their lives. And both were deemed dangerous enough to be neutralized.
The Responsibility of Memory
What concerns me most is not disagreement, but how easily misinformation circulates, even among us. That reflects a broader failure to teach Black history with honesty, complexity, and depth. At a moment when truthful accounts of race, power, and resistance are being stripped from classrooms, the responsibility to tell our stories faithfully grows more urgent.
The Black freedom struggle was never simple. It was complex, contested, and costly. It included prophets, organizers, preachers, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. It included Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Neither was safe. Both were necessary. Each, in different but complementary ways, called this nation to reckon with itself and to imagine a more just future.
We honor them best not by flattening their legacies, but by telling the truth.
