MLK was not meek and inoffensive MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan delivered a monologue Sunday night on the “the Santa Claus-ification” of Martin Luther King (Princeton University Professor Cornel West’s words). Over a dozen years ago, West warned his audience at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta that King’s image was at risk of being sanitized by history until the truth of the man is distilled away. “We have to resist the ‘Santa Claus-ification’ of Martin Luther King. I don’t want to sanitize Martin Luther King. I don’t want to deodorize Dr. Martin Luther King. I don’t want to disinfect Dr. Martin Luther King, and we’re not gonna domesticate Dr. King,” West said. “The FBI said he was the most dangerous man in America, and the FBI said he was the most notorious liar in America,” West continued. Cuddly and grandfatherly King was not. Quotes that appear on his monument in downtown Washington, D.C. may be among his most famous because they were the least offensive, the least radical, the least threatening to white Americans. They minimize his legacy while celebrating it. “For most Republicans,” Hasan began, “Dr King is just a guy who said to forget about skin color. They basically know just one quote of his, out of context, and they repeat it ad nauseam.” “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…