“MLK, I Choose You!”

Abstract

Chapter 3 examines roles of memory and history in the network, exploring how participants in the network resist dominant historical narratives and reassert accounts of the past that highlight ongoing racial oppression and resistance. It looks at how the This Week in Blackness podcast Historical Blackness uses history as a resource for reinterpreting the present in ways that undermine dominant racial discourses, as well as at complex ways the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. is deployed for neoliberal political ends. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how King has been invoked to condemn the tactics of the Movement for Black Lives and how the movement has reclaimed and re-remembered King in ways that position its participants as the inheritors of his legacy