By Faisal Kutty / Los Angeles TimesEvery February, Black History Month invites Americans to honor the giants of the civil rights movement. Many institutions that now proudly invoke King’s legacy insist that protest today be carefully managed and, above all, non-disruptive. From university campuses to city halls to cultural institutions, leaders regularly invoke the legacy of civil rights while struggling with how to accommodate protest, disagreement and moral urgency in practice. The irony is that the very qualities once condemned in civil rights leaders — their urgency and their willingness to unsettle and to insist that justice delayed is justice denied — are now celebrated in retrospect. It should force a harder question: Whether we recognize the logic of the civil rights movement when it reappears — in contested spaces and inconvenient demands.
