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Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, elected officials quote King while standing safely at a distance from the risks he embraced. His name is invoked, his image sanitized, and his politics stripped of urgency. The U.S. celebrates a softened King who spoke about love but not power, unity but not confrontation, peace but not disruption. What we rarely confront is this truth: Martin Luther King Jr. was not merely misunderstood in his time. He was actively surveilled, criminalized, and treated as a threat to the hegemonic order in the U.S.
That history is not behind us. It is unfolding again.