I agree that you should preserve it.
KC's points were brilliant. I would only add this to it -- that there are reasons why "current events" are divisive. History will decree which side "wins", and the victors will re-write history as they please (for example, that MLK was uniformly a great man, yet he cheated on his wife repeatedly, a fact carefully hidden for nearly 40 years after his death). But there are reasons people on the "losing" side of history felt the way they did, and it's just as vital to understand their perspective.
Take just one clear "loser" in history -- Adolf Hitler. Do we really believe that Germans were whispering behind their hands about what a fascist dictator Hitler was? -- no, he rose to power because for many people, he made sense, he strengthened a weakened Germany, he brought prosperity, and he actually had that nation on the brink of taking over all of Europe. And yes, there were anti-Semitics who felt extermination of the Jews was a good thing, but there were also people for whom hatred of the Jews was not the primary or even secondary reason why they followed, admired, and supported him. But do we hear those stories? -- of course not! It's not politically correct to admire Hitler -- and yet, he took a broke, bankrupt, and demoralized nation, still repaying debts and penalties from its role in WWI, to a world power within 20 years. That IS something to admire -- and yet merely saying that will brand the admirer as a "neo-Nazi".
Similarly, it's politically incorrect to express anything other than fawning admiration for MLK (and add Ghandi and the Dalai Lama to that list). And yet, all human beings have failings. And in that era, opinions differed across the country. Even today, the way race issues are approached vary. I've lived in many parts of this nation and I live in the South now -- and the most racist places I ever lived were in the north, with their paltry 6, 8, 12% black populations. Come live in an area that is 78% black (the last county I lived in in Georgia), or 90% black (the county my husband is from) and then let's talk about racism and race relations then!
Don't dismiss her as ignorant, just because she called MLK an agitator. Many felt similarly. Bear in mind, too, that MLK was the most peaceful of the civil rights leaders, and that many Americans had experience of civil rights violence (it wasn't just black people being sprayed with fire hoses -- it was Malcolm X encouraging violence against whites, and white women being afraid to walk alone or at night, and a lot of other things). MLK was just one in the crowd, and the bulk of the crowd was in favor of some level of violence against whites. It would take time to accept that MLK was different, and for some, he probably didn't seem all that different. And yes, the lived experience of the civil rights movement would have been vastly different in the south than it was in the north, different in the country than it was in the city. And thus, any individual understanding of the civil rights movement would have been understood largely in light of local events and local attitudes.
(For example, my husband was raised by a black woman, "the help" as the movie/book calls them, in a rural community where whites and blacks knew each other from birth, loved each other as family, etc (people have a hard time understanding that -- but yes, he loved her, cried bitterly when she died, and is in regular contact with her daughter, a woman who is like an aunt to us). For whites in this kind of community, the civil rights movement felt like a betrayal, like a member of the family suddenly standing up at the Thanksgiving dinner table to scream that you are the worst human being on the planet, followed by a litany of woes. In some areas of the north, with minuscule populations of blacks, the civil rights movement was an abstract thing, a philosophical discussion and experiment playing out in real time. How these two groups see the movement, lived the movement, and remember the movement will be different. Their opinions of it, and of the people in it, will differ.)
In short, to decide arbitrarily that only one opinion should be preserved is a disservice to the real human beings -- good people, trying to live their best possible lives -- who felt differently than the "winners" did. One day, historians will want to know things like this -- after all, even an uneducated housewife can have an opinion on world events, and it's interesting to see that at least she was paying attention.
