A Ram truck commercial shown during Sunday night’s Super Bowl ignited backlash for using one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches despite his social justice message that criticized the excesses of capitalism, according to scholars.
The 60-second ad featured a voiceover of King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon – delivered exactly 50 years ago to the date – over images of firefighters, football players, military members and others in acts of service, with a final scene revealing a Ram logo and the words “Built To Serve.”
Many condemned the commercial, including Bernice King, King’s youngest child and chief executive of The King Center, as well as scholars who argued that the monetization of King’s legacy to sell commodities directly opposes his beliefs.
“When I see something like this on television, it’s almost as if this is perpetuating the sanitizing of King’s legacy and his true meaning, not just then in his own time, but his persistent meaning today in our own time,” said Dr. Andrew Rosa, assistant professor in the Department of Diversity and Community Studies at Western Kentucky University. “The real irony is that King himself, toward the end of his life, really believed in a vision of social justice that was people-centered rather than profit-centered or property-centered, and this is really what this ad is about.”
Rosa added that near the end of his life, King spoke heavily about racism in the North and South, eloquently critiqued the Vietnam War and mobilized people for the Poor People’s Campaign, confronting issues he considered the “three evils of society:” racism, militarism and capitalism. In his 1968 “Drum Major Instinct” sermon two months before his assassination, he warned against “celebrity culture,” overspending and the influences of advertisers, whom he referred to as “those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion.”
King’s voice, words and image have been used in ads on various occasions over the years, noted Dr. Clayborne Carson, a historian at Stanford University. However, he said commercial use should “honor his legacy rather than sell a product. In advertising, the product itself is not the good cause. And part of King’s sermon made that point. The whole point is to do [service] without calling attention to yourself.”
Dr. Greg Carr, associate professor of Africana Studies and chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University offered another critique. “When we listen to Dr. King’s ‘Drum Major Instinct’ speech …When we read his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, what we saw yesterday was a beautiful, compelling example of exactly what Dr. King said was the problem in this society.”
