In a Religion News Service interview with Adelle Banks, Lewis V. Baldwin, a scholar of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s works, makes the following point:
“[Dr. King’s] legacy is being hijacked, misinterpreted. For an example, on the extreme right of the political spectrum, there are those who argue that Dr. King was opposed to affirmative action, and they make that argument without any proof at all. There are also those on the right who make the argument that Dr. King, if he were alive, would be opposed to critical race theory. Some have argued that he would be a Republican if he were alive. So all of these claims are made without any foundation whatsoever. Because the people who make the claims obviously have not read Dr. King. They don’t understand his message.”
Banks then asks if political liberals a distorting King’s legacy. Baldwin replies:
“The only problem I have with the left is that there has not been enough of a pushback on what is happening on the right, in terms of their [the right’s] distortion of Dr. King’s message, his ideals.”