Republicans' performative championing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called out by MSNBC host

Monday marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the day the civil rights leader is celebrated with acts of community service and conversation about the strive for equal rights.

One thing MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan predicted is Republican Party members posting sentiments that twist Dr. King's quotes to fit their agendas.

Hasan began his Sunday night segment by saying that it took more than 20 years before Congress would pass a law making the slain civil rights leader's birthday a national holiday.

"Prominent Republicans at the time, like the late Sen. John McCain and the current GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IL), voted against it," the host recalled.

One thing Republicans tend to do is take a key message from his "I Have a Dream" speech out of context and quote it, Hasan argued.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," the quote says. Republicans use the quote to justify a "color-blind" society that neglects the experiences faced by people of color, according to Hasan.

"I don't think we can ignore race," said Martin Luther King III. "What my father is asking is to create the climate where every American can realize his or her dreams. Now what does that mean when you have 50 million people living in poverty?"

"And when white Americans tell the negro to lift himself up by his own bootstraps, they don't look over and see the legacy of slavery and segregation," said MLK. "I believe we do all we can and seek to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps. Many negroes by the thousands of millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression and it was a result of a society that deliberately made color a stigma and something worthless and degrading."

Hasan claimed that many of the things King believed would be things that led leaders in both parties to flee, such as his support for democratic socialism. For example, as a 23-year-old, King said that he was more of a socialist than a capitalist because "capitalism has outlived its usefulness."

King echoed the same sentiment about a month before he died.

Hasan further argued that these will be the things forgotten by politicians on MLK Day as part of what Cornel West called it 'the sanitization of Dr. King.'

See Hasan's comments in the video below or at this link.

How Republicans will screw up MLK's memory on MLK Dayyoutu.be