Fox News’ pre-eminent demagogue Glenn Beck has been taking flack for leading today what he billed as a “Restoring Honor” march on Washington because it coincides with the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Beck has recently claimed that this was a coincidence and that he has no real intent to make a link between his rally and the Civil Rights Movement. This is certainly possible and, since the event was billed as a non-political rally in support of the American military, there is no real reason to doubt him.Well, except, that Beck has repeatedly invoked King and the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in support of his own political points and, indeed, previously suggested that today’s rally was “a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the Civil Rights Movement. It’s been so distorted and so turned upside down… it’s an abomination.”

In a July article and video, Beck rhetorically asked “Who’s distorting the Civil Rights Movement?” and proceeded to demonstrate what we already knew: it was him all along! To Beck, the liberal distortion of the movement was twofold. First, liberals portray King as a critic of capitalism and, in our current political climate, that would make him a socialist radical (and Muslim? He did after all profess to be a Christian! Suspicious). As an example, Beck cites NAACP chairman Julian Bond, who notes that “we don’t remember the King who was the critic of capitalism… who talked ceaselessly about taking care of the masses and not just dealing with the people at the top of the ladder.” Beck’s second point of disgust is with the notion that King’s success, and that of moderate organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), was actually dependent on the ability of more radical elements of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to apply intense pressure when needed.

So let’s discuss. By the end of his life, King had begun to turn his attention toward issues of economic inequality in the North and American imperialism abroad. We like to focus on the beautiful imagery and vision of the “I Have a Dream” speech, but perhaps it would be useful to dwell for a moment on a later speech that may actually be his best. Before an audience of clergy in New York City on April 4, 1967, King delivered a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” that strongly criticized the war in Vietnam, American imperialism, and (gasp) capitalism itself:

Thus, King helped organize the “Poor People’s Campaign” in late 1967, arguing that “We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.” The campaign requested $30 billion (in 1967 mind you) be put toward eradicating poverty and (gasp again) guaranteeing an annual income to citizens. Indeed, in one speech, King elaborated that “we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.” It is a truly twisted irony that Beck would hold a rally that tries to “reclaim” American honor by celebrating military aggression and decrying taxes in the name of King. There seems little doubt that if King were alive today, Beck and his ilk would be decrying him as an un-American socialist who “we need to take our country back" from.

As for Beck’s second concern, that the successes of the movement was due in part to the violence and radicalism of other groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers, this is also generally accepted by historians for an obvious reason: King’s demands seemed much more reasonable when your city was on fire. King was an ardent supporter of nonviolence, of course, but he also came to recognize that “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall famously argued that the narrow vision of the Civil Rights Movement that “color-blind conservatives” like Beck advocate is an attempt to portray colorblindness as “the movement’s singular objective, the principle for which King and the Brown decision… stood.” This allows them to overlook continued racism and persistent structural inequalities, arguing instead that the Civil Rights Movement was a complete success and “in the absence of overtly discriminatory laws… African Americans thereafter bore the onus of their own failure or success. If stark group inequalities persisted, black attitudes, behavior, and family structures were to blame.” And so for such conservatives it was now civil rights activists who made racism an issue and it is, thus, whites who were the victims of government policies.

Hall argues that “the Civil Rights Movement” of the 1950s and 1960s did not occur in a vacuum. If one moves beyond this time period in either direction, it becomes clear that it was a period of relatively moderate goals and successes. The earliest organized resistance to white racism came, in fact, from black nationalists and American communists—a fact largely forgotten because of the Cold War. Thus, we forget that it was communists who came to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. We forget that Bayard Rustin, King’s most trusted advisor who was nearly as central to the successes of the movement as King himself, was both gay and a socialist. Long before King, it was communists who were advocating and marching for the economic and social equality of African Americans and human rights. And so too did King toward the end of his career and the civil rights demonstrators that followed him.

So while the successes of “the Civil Rights Movement” were unquestionably tremendous, and the sacrifices heroic, historians increasingly understand that they were also limited. They destroyed the most overt, legalized forms of racism—gaining equal access to public services or private accommodations (much to Rand Paul’s chagrin). But the struggle to gain economic or social equality that predated King, that he espoused, and that followed him continues.