Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist.

He never called himself that in public. Cold War red-baiting was still powerful and haunted him even before his rhetoric turned to class. But his organizing was increasingly in that vein and privately he spoke of his support for democratic socialism. He was organizing a Poor People's Campaign and talking about the necessity to build an interracial movement for economic justice.

In this and in many other ways, King was a radical.  But, from watching most of the news coverage of the 40th anniversary of King's assassination today, you wouldn't know it.  The absence in our collective memory of of King's leftism is just one of the aspects of what Cornell West calls the Santa Clausification of MLK:

He just becomes a nice little old man with a smile with toys in his bag, not a threat to anybody, as if his fundamental commitment to unconditional love and unarmed truth does not bring to bear certain kinds of pressure to a status quo. So the status quo feels so comfortable as though it's a convenient thing to do rather than acknowledge him as to what he was, what the FBI said, "The most dangerous man in America." Why? Because of his fundamental commitment to love and to justice and trying to keep track of the humanity of each and every one of us. [...]

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This week, in light of Barack Obama's much-lauded and discussed speech on race in American, we asked a handful of academics, journalists and activists (and those somewhere in between) to offer us their thoughts on race in America. Specifically, we asked three questions:

1. Setting aside the politics of the moment (if that's possible), do you think Obama's speech advanced the national conversation of race in America?

2. Moving forward, what questions do you think we should be asking about race in America?

3. What roadblocks do you think have preventing us from having a productive conversation about race previously? How can they be avoided going forward?