With Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday observance approaching, protesters mobilized by the shooting deaths of young blacks and upset about racial inequality have been evoking his work and using the hashtag #ReclaimMLK hoping to kindle a new movement for social change.
The website Ferguson Action, for instance, which has been a focal point for information on protests and activism in the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., said King's "radical, principled and uncompromising" vision should be a model for protest and disruption for our time.
The images of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. come from an era when he was confronting legalized discrimination, and communication tools included mimeographed fliers and the holy grail of a network television report. Today's protesters cite myriad ills embedded in the economy and culture and spread their messages instantly through websites, Twitter hashtags and text messages.
At a time of widespread social unrest over race and inequality, the King holiday Monday is highlighting both the power of King's vision, brought to the public again in the film Selma, and the enormous difficulties of forging a new movement along similar lines.
Nonetheless, today's protesters are embracing King's spirit and the tactics of his era with a sense of commitment that has not existed, perhaps, for decades.
"We're in the business of disrupting white supremacy," said Wazi Davis, 23, a student at San Francisco State University who has helped organize protests in the Bay Area. "We look toward historical tactics. The Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins -- those tactics were all about disruption."
What is far less clear is whether today's protesters have the ability to build an organized movement capable of creating social change.
David Garrow, a historian and the author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said the impromptu protests of recent months were not comparable to the strategies used by civil-rights groups of the 1960s, which had clear goals such as winning the right to vote or the right to eat at a segregated lunch counter.
"You could call it rebellious, or you could call it irrational," Garrow said of the new waves of protests. "There has not been a rational analysis in how does A and B advance your policy change X and Y?"
Garrow compared the protesters to those of Occupy Wall Street.
"Occupy had a staying power of, what, six months?" Garrow said. "Three years later, is there any remaining footprint from Occupy? Not that I'm aware of."
After the deaths of Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and others, protests have included angry marches and mass "die-ins" in streets and public buildings. They have grown to include actions such as Black Brunch, in which protesters have confronted white diners in upscale restaurants. On Thursday, several dozen people shut down a major highway carrying suburbanites into Boston by attaching themselves to 1,200-pound drums filled with concrete and standing in the middle of Interstate 93.
Mayor Martin Walsh of Boston and other officials called the protests dangerous and counterproductive and asked protesters to reconsider their tactics. And many, even those who are sympathetic, say today's protesters run the risk of alienating people rather than convincing them through their tactics.
But the protesters say civil disobedience and disruption were also at the heart of King's vision.
"We really feel that King's legacy has been clouded by efforts to soften and sanitize that legacy," said Mervyn Marcano, a spokesman for Ferguson Action.
A Section on 01/18/2015