Woman Shocked to Learn Martin Luther King Jr. “Also” Wrote Books

“I thought he just marched.”

Allison Johnson, 37, came upon a shocking revelation this weekend.

While researching “Black writers”, she was shocked to find, among many others, Martin Luther King Jr. as a search result.

Apparently, Johnson believed that famed activist and orator Martin Luther King Jr., “just marched, and, like, was cool.”

“He wrote and published four books while he was alive! Why did no one tell me about this?”

Allison was not just shocked to see King come up, but practically every other result, as well.

“Malcolm X? James Baldwin? Maya Angelou? Frederick Douglass? TONI MORRISON??”

When asked about why she was so shocked, she revealed that she “never really looked into these celebs beyond social media.”

“I kind of just equated them to, like, the Jay-Z’s and Beyoncé’s of their time. Or, like, Tyler Perry.”

“I honestly thought James Baldwin was a rapper.”

White is not alone, though. In a recent Lil’ Mama survey, 76% of our readers could not identify a single Martin Luther King Jr. quote past “I have a dream.” 26% could, but out of that 26, 16% voted “Yes, Storm Reid is Maya Angelou’s granddaughter.”

When probed about her social media comment, White revealed a shocking implication.

“Yeah, after school, I never really heard or looked much into these guys. Once Instagram came into my life, though, I started seeing them getting posted again and again, and I was like, hey! I remember them from elementary school and that one class I took in college. Though, I couldn’t quite remember for what…”

After that last ellipses, White trailed off into eventual silence and then picked up her phone, as if we weren’t even there. And after reminding her of our presence, she acted as if nothing had even happened.

Media theorist and UCLA professor Maya Watkins has written extensively about this phenomenon.

“If you’ve ever seen the movie Yesterday, where no one can remember the Beatles, it’s kind of like that. Where this differs, though, is that instead of a full forgetting, like depicted in the film, Black people only suffer a half-forgetting. Their remembrance of these figures can instantly be retriggered, if they come into contact with a book either about or by them. Everyone else, though, just forgets, like in the movie. In a way, you can deem all Black people in America ‘Jack Maliks’, the name of the film’s protagonist.”

According to Watkins, the country is slowly being infected by a “forgetting or misremembrance of all historical Black figures.”

“The implications of this are deadly. Without remembering these figures and what made them so important, we risk repeating, or making even worse, mistakes that they worked towards eliminating.”

We were dumbfounded by this. We decided to put it to the test by asking random White people on the street if they could identify various Black historical figures. The only response we got that wasn’t utter confusion was someone asking us if Fannie Lou Hammer was a nursery rhyme.

But, again, according to Watkins, all Black people have to do to not be inflicted by this memory loss, or what she calls “brain damage”, is read a book.

And, so, according to Watkins, White isn’t quite safe yet.

“Allison White is in the early stages of remembrance. She made a vital step by making the neurological connection between Dr. King and literature, but if she doesn’t actually read one of his books soon, it will all have been for nothing.”