I could be wrong, but it seems that the conventional reaction to MLK Day is sentimentality and wistfulness over the memory of a man of peace. And it seems that in exclusively remembering him that way, the majority of folk are happy to soften his image to the point where it conflicts with the reality of who the man was. I have gotten this impression through reading and other media, as I was in my mother's womb when Dr. King was killed, so I am interested in the thoughts of posters who were following his deeds as they happened, young as you may have been then. Here are a couple of articles that feed the impression I mentioned:
http://fair.org/media-beat-column/the-martin-luther-king-you-dont-see-on-tv/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/29/1011562/-Most-of-you-have-no-idea-what-Martin-Luther-King-actually-did
So, is it true that Dr. King was harder-edged and more radical than he is remembered today? If so, do the ten songs above adequately memorialize him? Shouldn't there be more songs explicitly about rebellion and black pride, like "Get Up, Stand Up," "Fight the Power," or "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" (or any number of songs I've rarely or never heard that are on the same level)? Now KFOG is hardly a transformational institution, but I think it would be doing its listeners a service by balancing its soundscape portrait of Dr. King with songs that reflect everything for which he stood.
I see what you mean. Some songs just don't seem to fit the epic scope of the movement, esp that JT song. 
I see MLK as non-violent overall, so songs that are peace-filled seem appropriate. (Fight The Power and Say It Loud ...would be more fitting in a set devoted to Malcolm X.) He certainly was "radical" in the FBI's eyes, but anything that wasn't WASP-centered was a threat to them.
Then again, I wasn't around then, so I'll leave it to our "senior" posters to fill in the details about what they saw or heard when Dinosaurs roamed the earth.
I was a young dinosaur in the mid-60s, and although I already had a well-developed interest in
popular music -- I have the 45 of Dion's
Abraham, Martin And John -- outside of a couple
narrow areas of interest I didn't pay any attention to the news or current events. (My collection
of newspaper clippings about the Gemini space program unfortunately didn't survive past junior
high.) So most of what I know about MLK has been learned in retrospect. That being said, the
articles above don't contain any significant surprises for me, so I guess I've had a more thorough
and balanced exposure to his life and work.
I'm not sure if I agree that there's that much distance between the memorialized image of King
and his actual person, although I don't consume much of what is regard as "mainstream" media,
particularly television news. It doesn't surprise me in the least that he is most remembered for,
and associated with, the peaceful and non-violent aspects of the civil rights movement. There
seem to be a lot of obvious reasons for this, starting with the simplification of any story by
general news coverage.
King studied Ghandi and correctly realized that the techniques of non-violent confrontration
would be directly applicable to the civil rights movement. People are generally remembered
for their greatest successes, and for King that would be the passage of the CRA and the VRA.
While his prescient anti-poverty speeches may have been unpopular and largely ignored by the
press of the day, they also are not particularly radical. Dwight Eisenhower had made similar
statements about military spending years earlier. His anti-war stance was also very out-of-step
with the majority opinion of the day, even as the anti-war movement was growing, and put him
in the company of those perceived as "bomb-throwing" anarchists who wanted to "tear the
whole system down."
I think the ever-expanding sense of, and desire for, freedom in the 1960s eventually overtook
and overshadowed MLK's anti-war, anti-poverty stance. In the early years, it was about freedom
of speech, freedom for minorities, etc. By the end of the decade, among those who would soon
be known as the Woodstock Nation, there was the very strong belief that all of mankind's ills --
racism, the war, poverty -- were the result of "the establishment," and that protesting et. al.
was just more of the same, fighting within and thus perpetuating the system. There was the
notion that young people were just going to turn away from all that and "get back to the garden,"
that a new society based on peace, love, and freedom was going to erupt, and the old structures
would wither and blow away. There was a time when this feeling seemed very tangible -- that
it was inevitable. Naive, yes -- but that was the '60s.
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully
equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement.
"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single
destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
-- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953
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"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate
or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic
universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
"And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.
Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There
was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding
the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and
with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave
finally broke and rolled back."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
