It is very odd to see a number of recent essays that attempt to redefine the healer Dr. King as a radical, as part of a defense of the divider Rev. Wright. Instead of condemning the Wright rhetoric, the trope seems to be that he is within the mainstream of political discourse since we don’t realize how fiery and radical MLK really was.

The methodology is odd: the body of Rev. Wright’s work supposedly proves than he is not as radical as we suppose from the “snippets”—while the snippets of MLK’s speeches prove that he is more radical than we otherwise think from the aggregate body of his work. But to paraphrase Lloyd Bensten, “America knew Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rev. Wright is no Martin Luther King, Jr.”