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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.

In recent weeks, shootings involving federal agents connected to immigration enforcement and homeland security operations in Minneapolis and Portland have raised urgent questions about the expanding reach of federal policing, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dangers of unchecked surveillance powers. These incidents are not isolated. They exist within a long arc of state authority asserting itself most aggressively where dissent, migration, and racialized resistance converge.

To understand this moment, we must tell the truth about King’s.

Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI conducted an extensive campaign of surveillance against Martin Luther King Jr.: King’s phones were tapped. His movements were tracked. His private life was scrutinized and weaponized. Hoover famously described King as “the most dangerous Negro in America,” not because King was violent, but because he was effective. Hoover feared what he called the rise of a “Black Messiah” — a leader capable of unifying Black people across class lines and mobilizing moral resistance to state violence, economic exploitation, and militarism.

King was not targeted because he preached hate. He was targeted because he preached liberation.

This repression intensified as King moved beyond civil rights rhetoric into structural critique. When he opposed the Vietnam War, organized the Poor People’s Campaign, and challenged economic inequality, King crossed an invisible line. He became not just a moral voice, but a political threat. Surveillance was the state’s response.

That logic did not end with Hoover. It evolved.

I know this not as distant history, but as lived reality. In Memphis, beginning around 2016 and intensifying through 2017 and 2018, people organizing for racial justice found ourselves under police surveillance because of our participation in collective efforts demanding accountability, transparency, and criminal justice reform. Faith leaders, grassroots organizers, and activists connected to the Movement for Black Lives-aligned efforts were engaged in lawful, nonviolent organizing when the Memphis Police Department tracked protests, monitored social media pages, and documented organizing strategies. What should have been protected civic engagement was treated as a threat.

I was later called to testify in federal court against Memphis Police Department’s unlawful surveillance practices, and it was revealed that even our church — Abyssinian Baptist Church — had been illegally surveilled. Spaces meant for worship, organizing, and sanctuary became zones of scrutiny. These experiences were later acknowledged by the Department of Justice’s pattern-and-practice investigation, which documented systemic constitutional violations, including improper surveillance and the targeting of Black activists and communities. The lesson was unmistakable: surveillance is not abstract. It is personal, local, and routinely deployed to suppress Black political dissent rather than protect public safety.

Today, we witness new forms of state surveillance justified under the language of “public safety,” “border security,” and “anti-terrorism.” Federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate with extraordinary discretion, often in communities already intensely policed and under-protected. When federal agents are deployed to cities without transparency or accountability, and when violence follows, the public is told to trust the process rather than interrogate the power.

But history teaches us otherwise.

Nowhere is this more painful or more revealing than in Memphis.

Memphis is the city where King was assassinated. It is also a city where police were found to have violated a federal consent decree by spying on protesters and activists. It is a city currently living under the weight of an expanded, militarized policing apparatus that many residents would describe as occupation. The Memphis (un)Safe Task Force, with its broad authority and opaque metrics, reflects the same logic that once framed King himself as a threat to be monitored rather than a prophet to be heard.

This is not coincidence. It is continuity.

Let’s remember that King did not inherit a tradition of quiet faith; rather, he stood firmly within the Black Prophetic Tradition. This tradition insists that faith is inseparable from justice, that love without truth is hollow, and that peace without accountability is false. It is a tradition that confronts power, exposes hypocrisy, and names systems (not just individuals) as sites of sin.

The Black Prophetic Tradition refuses the lie that order is more sacred than justice. It rejects the idea that safety can be built on surveillance alone. It insists that democracy is not secured by force but by trust, participation, and dignity. And it understands that when the state treats Black resistance as criminal, it is often because that resistance is effective.

This is why King unsettled those in power. And it is why his legacy remains threatening when taken seriously.

Yet today, King’s name is often used to legitimize policies he would have opposed. MLK Day becomes a “day of service” rather than a day of confrontation. Leaders praise King’s dream while avoiding his demands. They quote his words while rejecting his method. They honor his memory while reproducing the conditions that made him vulnerable to state violence in the first place.

The recent shootings perpetrated by federal agents in Minneapolis and Portland should force us to ask difficult questions about the expanding role of federal policing and surveillance in U.S. life. But in Memphis, those questions carry added weight. What does it mean to invoke King while tolerating unchecked policing? What does it mean to honor a man assassinated under state surveillance while refusing to protect civil liberties today?

The answers are uncomfortable, but necessary.

If Memphis leaders truly wish to honor King, they must do more than quote him. They must develop the political consciousness and courage to protect the rights of those most vulnerable to state overreach. That means prioritizing transparency over theater, accountability over aggression, and justice over optics.

Given that neither federal nor state administrations can be relied upon, organizers in Memphis are calling for aggressive court challenges, civil rights litigation, injunctions, and independent investigations to force transparency, halt unlawful surveillance, and regulate joint task force operations. Justice, in concrete terms, looks like disaggregated public data, unmasked federal agents, an end to racial profiling and broken-windows policing, and sustained legal pressure that makes unconstitutional practices costly, visible, and ultimately untenable — demands that apply nationally because the mechanisms of aggressive policing are national.

King warned us that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” He also warned that militarism and racism were twin threats to democracy. Those warnings were not abstract. They were rooted in lived experience, prophetic insight, and political clarity.

King was not assassinated because he was misunderstood. He was assassinated because he was clear.

If we are serious about honoring his legacy, clarity — not comfort — must guide us now.

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