In our modern celebrations of Dr. King, it can become easy to conflate Dr. King with the civil rights movement writ large. But it’s important to remember how messy & sometimes fraught movement politics were - w/ often sharp disagreements based on policy, tactics & personalities.
And it wasn’t just MLK vs. Malcolm X or later the Black Panthers. Even things like the the sit-ins and the Selma march were very controversial in some quarters at the time.
And some people who did key work didn’t get credit at the time (women in particular). Some still haven’t been fully recognized.
All of which offer important lessons for the sometimes intense progressive politics of our age - which have a lot in common with the messy *actual* politics of the civil rights movement era (in contrast to the cleaner, more linear version of the story we like to tell ourselves).
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