An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

highlighted the importance of freedom. Collectively, though, they often
reinforced Indigenous erasure, which I will emphasize below.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. AND THE NATIVE QUESTION
It seems as if everyone has a version of Dr. King. Old civil rights activists
criticize younger generations by pointing to Dr. King’s nonviolent approach
and arguing that is how protest is done. Black and white conservatives pull
one quote from Dr. King’s speech and say that poor Black folks need to
focus on the “content of our character” or some other nonsense. If they did
that, they would be free to live in this “free,” capitalist society. Others point
to the Dr. King who argued that three evils shaped US society: militarism,
capitalism, and racism; this is my favorite Dr. King.
However, what most people don’t know is that, in Dr. King’s
understanding, the foundations of racism, as a theory and practice, began
with the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples and its aftermath. In
Why We Can’t Wait (1964), King observed that in order to understand the
complexities of racism, one had to also understand the root causes of social,
political, and economic racism. He reasoned, “For too long the depth of
racism in American life has been underestimated,” and the “surgery to
extract is necessarily complex and detailed.” 20 Understanding racism’s root
causes is important for going forward. King further reasoned, “The strands
of prejudice toward Negroes are tightly wound around the American
character.” And yet, he also realized that you cannot have a good clue about
the foundational understanding of racist ideas without focusing on
Indigenous people: “Yet to focus upon the Negro alone as the ‘inferior race’
of American myth is to miss the broader dimensions of evil.” 21 The broader
evil, of course, was racism. But it was also about colonialism. Dr. King
understood the importance of employing a dual analysis of anti-Black
racism and settler colonialism that affected both Black and Indigenous
peoples:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that
the original American, the Indians, was an inferior race. Even before
there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial
hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth
century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. 22