Rep. Hillary Scholten can’t claim to honor Dr. King’s legacy, while she supports policies that directly contradict that same legacy

On Saturday, the Grand Rapids Chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity organized a silent march in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Grand Rapids, according to MLive.

The silent march was a rescheduled event from January, but organizers said that it was an opportunity to show unity. One of the speakers for the event was 3rd Congressional Representative Hillary Scholten. Scholten posted on her Facebook page the following comments:

As we honor Dr. King’s legacy, we reflect on how far we’ve come & how far we still need to go to create the society he dreamed of. It was an honor to participate in the MLK Silent March alongside so many powerful leaders & advocates.

Like virtually all politicians, Scholten uses words like legacy and Dr. King’s “dream.” These are warm and fuzzy words, but they are meaningless unless they are attached to actions and context, which Rep. Scholten fails to address. Rep Scholten mentions Dr. King’s legacy, but never names what honoring his legacy would look like. 

This is a perfect example of what I mean by the bastardization of Dr. King’s message. Scholten makes it seem as if after everything the civil rights leader endured – the persecution, the beatings, the arrests, the constant death threats, government surveillance, jailing and his eventual assassination, that Dr. King was committed to some vague notion of what he dreamed about. Therefore, what I would like to do is a simple comparison to what Dr. King was all about in words and in actions, then compare that to what Rep. Scholten is all about in words and actions, by looking at major themes that both addressed.

Militarism 

Dr. King was fundamentally opposed to militarism and violence. In his famous 1967 speech at Riverside Church, he came out against the US war in Vietnam, stating: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… But they asked, and rightly so, ‘what about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew 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.” 

Rep. Scholten is deeply committed to militarism. Since she was elected to office in 2022, she has voted for Department of Defense Budget, with the last budget being the largest in US history at $886 Billion. Rep. Scholten has unconditionally supported the US sending billions to Ukraine since the Russia invasion, and has unconditionally supported the US role in perpetuating the Israeli occupation of Palestine, along with the current genocidal campaign against Gaza and the West Bank. On the issue of Rep. Scholten’s unconditional support for Israel, which GRIID has documented throughly with over a dozen article since last July, she has repeatedly noted that “as a Christian” she is obligated to support Israel, which mean supporting Israel diplomatically, with $3.8 Billion in US Military Aid annually and her support for the additional $14.1 Billion the Biden Administration wants to send now! 

Capitalism

Dr. King’s view of Capitalism evolved during his lifetime, especially after he shifted his emphasis from the South to the North, moving to Chicago. While working on a housing campaign in Chicago, Dr. King stated: 

“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”

In addition, it is important to note that Dr. King always discussed economic priorities and structural poverty. In his Beyond Vietnam Speech, Dr. King stated the following two points: 

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”  

“On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Rep. Hillary Scholten is fundamentally committed to defending the system of Capitalism, by supporting the massive tax breaks for the billionaire class, by supporting corporate welfare/subsidies, and by not fighting to pass a livable wage law in the US. Sure, Rep. Scholten has provided moderate support to some of the more mainstream unions, but that support has been primarily rhetorical and she has no problem accepting campaign contributions from rich people and private corporations that exploit the working class. 

Policing in the US

Dr. King was often the subject of arrests, based on the number of marches, sit-ins and other protests he engaged in over the years, from the Montgomery Bus boycotts of the late the 1950s through his support of the Memphis Sanitation workers strike. Dr. King was arrested dozens of time for deliberately violating laws that protected and propped up systems of oppression. During his 1963 March on Washington Speech, King said,  “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” While sitting in a jail in Alabama, Dr. King also made an astute observation about the function of policing, stating, “ It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation.”

Rep. Scholten, while only being in Congress for a little more than a year, has been a defender of policing in the US, even after the massive national uprising against policing in the summer of 2020. Rep. Scholten, as a candidate and as a member of Congress has not supported any defunding of policing in the US and has consistently supported the need for policing.

According to the site Mapping Police Violence, in 2023, the police in the US killed 1,352 people, with a disproportionately high number of African Americans. Rep. Scholten has been silent on the matter of cops killing US civilians, with a disproportionately high number of African Americans who have been killed by police. 

How to work for change?

From the Montgomery bus boycotts right up to his assassination, Dr. King put most of his emphasis on how to make change by active participation in social movements. Dr. King historically centered his work within what is often called the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Freedom Struggle, but he also was part of the economic justice and the anti-war movements as well. Dr. King engaged in marches, sit-ins, boycotts, worker strikes, civil disobedience and numerous ways of disrupting business as usual, even shutting down highways.

For Rep. Scholten, as a politician, she has primarily focused on encouraging people to vote and to make campaign contributions. (See data from Rep. Scholten’s 2022 campaign contributions.)

As you can see, just from the examples I have provided here, there are virtually no similarities between Rep. Hillary Scholten and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We should put all politicians to the test and make comparisons to what they say and do, with what Dr. King did and said, especially since politicians like Rep. Scholten like to talk about honoring the legacy of Dr. King, but their actions are actually an insult to that legacy.