An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

not overlook another form of racism that was relentlessly pursued on
American shores: the physical extermination of the American Indian.” 26
Once more, Dr. King reminded his audience that it was not simply the
actual killing of Native peoples; it was also how that genocide circulated in
popular culture. He wrote, “The poisoning of the American mind was
accomplished not only by acts of discrimination and exploitation but by the
exaltation of murder as an expression of the courage and initiative of the
pioneer.” Through the massacre of Native people, white settlers were able
to affirm their status as the rightful owners of the land. They fought for it,
and won. King carefully entangled Black and Indigenous histories: “Just as
southern culture was made to appear noble by ignoring the cruelty of
slavery, the conquest of the Indian was depicted as an example of bravery
and progress.”
It is crucial that we expand our view of Dr. King’s activist and
intellectual agenda so we recognize the lens through which he saw the
world did not only include anti-Black racism, economic exploitation, and
US military aggression; his lens was wider than that. He also understood
that the way the United States treated the Indigenous people and Black
Americans within its own borders was easily replicated around the world. 27
This reevaluation of Dr. King helps us rethink how racism developed the
United States and what we know about the Black freedom struggles of the
1960s. It should also remind us that racism is not rooted only in anti-Black
racism; it is also rooted in Native colonization.
Finally, we may question the need to lump together the struggles of
Black and Indigenous peoples, and we can quibble with the fact of Dr. King
perhaps naively believing in the ideals of US democracy, liberty, and justice
—maybe. But we cannot question his belief that US society needed to
change, both in its values and its economic order. He made that focus clear
in his final book, “As we work to get rid of the economic strangulation that
we face as a result of poverty, we must not overlook the fact that millions of
Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites are
also poverty stricken. Any serious war against poverty must of necessity
include them.” 28 For Native people, King might have challenged anti-
Native racism more. Whatever his shortcomings, it is now up to our
generation (and the one after) to continue to dismantle not only anti-Black
racism but also anti-Native racism and colonialism as well as the racist
treatment of the Latinx communities. It is our duty, and will require all of us