Martin Luther King, Jr., is, perhaps, the greatest influence on my life outside of the mentorship of my beloved pastor, the late, great rhetorical genius, theological giant, and political mystic, the Rev. Dr. Frederick George Sampson II. I was nine years old when King was murdered in Memphis, and though I had never heard of him, his death affected me profoundly. I scrounged around for every personal recollection about him I could find, sent off for recordings of his most famous speeches, and read every article and book about him that the library contained. This chapter from Reflecting Black is among my first published attempts to wrestle with the intellectual and moral legacy, as well as the clear but complex social heroism, of a man I consider the greatest American in our nation’s history.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NATIONAL HOLIDAY to honor the life and achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a reason for critical celebration. Only the second American and the first African-American to be feted with this singular honor, the celebration of King’s birthday is an occasion of national, religious, and racial significance. It acknowledges that King was the supreme embodiment of American citizenship and political engagement, the highest manifestation of the American religious genius, and the richest expression of the multifaceted character of the black experience in America.
On the other hand, the King birthday celebration also presents the danger of losing the challenging and uncomfortable dimensions of King’s thought and life by romanticizing his career. The nature and scope of King’s accomplishments, which center in nothing short of a specific revolution in how black people live and are perceived in American culture, inevitably invite historic embellishment and social myth. But neither a puerile romanticization of King as Safe Negro nor a caricatured mythologization of King as Great American Hero will do. King’s life was too complex, his achievements too profound, and his thinking too provocative to warrant such naive responses. We must transcend such unrealistic assessments of King and concentrate on the substantive contributions of his life and thought.
An especially helpful and illuminating way to view King’s life and justly assess his accomplishments is through a reflection upon the ethics and politics of hero celebration. This context permits us to examine the beneficial and harmful uses to which the King holiday may be put in creating or preserving images of King that avoid disturbing history or dodge painful truth. This context also provides a healthy framework in addressing recent revelations about King’s character, including charges of plagiarism and womanizing. In this chapter, I will examine some characteristics of heroism, exploring the ways it makes sense to call King a hero, treat two central tensions that arise in asserting that King’s heroism is ambiguous, and briefly suggest that King’s birthday is indeed worth celebrating.
In my brief examination of some characteristics of heroism, I do not intend to provide a theory of heroism or trace its varied genealogy. Rather, I will discuss heroism within the limits of existing understandings of the concept and then seek to apply them to King in analyzing the effects of hero worship on the ideals for which he gave his life.
In his work on George Washington, cultural critic and historian Gary Wills reminds us that hero worship “is a hard assignment for many people today—one they think they cannot fulfill, or should not. Hero worship is elitist. It reduces the science of history to mere biography, if not to anecdote. It suggests that individual talent is a more important force than large economic processes. . . . The attitude of many in our time is captured by Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, who says: ‘Unhappy the land that needs a hero.’”1 While Wills’s larger point about the suspicion of many Americans toward hero worship may be valid, explaining the diminished field of activity over which heroism is spread, it is equally true that American hero worship is presently focused in two social spheres: competitive sports and the military.
Contemporary forms of American heroism are often displayed within the context of sports competition, where individual or team exploits are lauded for embodying particular virtues, skills, and mastery. For example, basketball heroes are often said to embody the virtues of rigorous habits of practice, expert skills of physical dexterity, and mastery of the overall complexity of their craft necessary to perform excellently and unselfishly in a team sport.
Military heroes, as well, figure prominently in the comparatively constricted sphere of heroism celebrated today. America’s recent war in the Gulf shows how eager Americans are for clear embodiments of American values of national patriotism, personal valor, and sacrifice for the common good. That Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell are instant heroes testifies to the peculiar hunger of many Americans for reassurance about the integrity and rightness of this country’s values and ways of life.
Perhaps this last point clearly demonstrates a telling feature of heroism: it is intimately related to ideals felt to be worthy of support because they say something important about national self-identity. Part of the difficulty in deciding upon a genuine and truly national hero is connected to the increasing diversity of American culture. Because of the bewildering pluralization of perspectives about what it means to be an American, growing dispute about what goods are worthy of pursuit, strong disagreement about how to measure various forms of moral and social excellence, and the unraveling of a unified concept of the public good, the virtuous as well as the heroic is subject to radical revision and heated debate. Occasionally, however, a person or movement so decisively captures the nation’s imagination that a variety of Americans come to believe that their truest selves and deepest beliefs are embodied in the vision and life of that figure or movement. Such was the case for many Americans in relation to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement.
The civil rights movement provided a social context, cultural framework, and racial worldview for blacks and other similarly excluded Americans to argue for inclusion within the larger circle of privilege, rights, and status from which they had been socially and legally barred. Civil rights leaders and activists built upon the symbol systems of black religion, the resonant traditions of radical protest within black culture, and a progressive understanding of liberal democracy in articulating demands for equality, justice, and freedom. Because of this potent mix of elements, the civil rights movement had the advantage of appealing to specific values nourished within a black cultural cosmos, while linking them to the iconic structures, symbolic worldviews, and heroic values that undergirded much of American society. As symbolic representative of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., embodied the virtues of black religious culture and black traditions of protest, as well as the best impulses of Western liberal democracy.
On the other hand, King wove into his rhetorical and strategic tapestry threads of prophetic religious utterance and radical social criticism that sorely tested the limits of liberal tolerance of forces of fundamental social challenge and transformation. The fact that some state and national politicians who represent the forces of stasis and regression that King opposed are now in part responsible for presiding over the public rituals to commemorate his memory only attests to the ambiguous character of the heroism King embodies.
King figures prominently in a distinct line of social prophets whose ideals can sometimes only be truly honored by their remaining, in significant measure, outside of the totemic processes of official acceptance, which cloak their status as prophetic characters whose memory judges American moral practice. The ambiguity that surrounds King’s memory is healthy because it creates suggestive tensions within the developing edifice of King worship and draws attention to those troubling aspects of King’s thought that have the potential to shatter the rigid constructions of official truth.
In reflecting on the ambiguity of King’s heroism, it will be helpful to discuss some characteristics of heroism and explore how King can be usefully understood as an American hero. A heroic figure undeniably possesses the ability to substantially alter and influence the course of events because of her mix of personal traits, skills, talents, and visions. This definition, of course, rests on the distinction that Sidney Hook made between two types of persons who qualify as potential heroes. After defining the hero in history as “the individual to whom we can justifiably attribute preponderant influence in determining an issue or even whose consequences would have been profoundly different if he had not acted as he did,” Hook describes the difference in “eventful” persons and “event-making” persons.2
The eventful man in history is any man whose actions influenced subsequent developments along a quite different course than would have been followed if these actions had not been taken. The event-making man is an eventful man whose actions are the consequences of outstanding capacities of intelligence, will, and character rather than of accidents of position. This distinction tries to do justice to the general belief that a hero is great not merely in virtue of what he does but in virtue of what he is.3
By Hook’s measure, King certainly qualifies as a genuine hero, as someone whose combination of talents, intelligence, and vision considerably altered the course of events. This does not mean that King was the only person in the civil rights movement who possessed high degrees of intelligence, discipline, and skill. Numerous participants in the civil rights movement exhibited extraordinary leadership ability and qualities, ranging from the ingenious strategic skills of Bayard Rustin, the penetrating philosophic skills of Bob Moses, the uncanny organizational skills and folk wisdom of Fannie Lou Hamer, and the creative nonviolent theory of James Lawson.4 While others possessed sharper skills than King in particular areas, King possessed a unique ability to inspire masses and maintain the loyalty of an impressive host of talented men and women. Perhaps this was best expressed by Benjamin Mays when he wrote:
It may be that only one man in ten million could have led the Montgomery boycott without that city exploding into one of the worst race riots in history. . . . If the Montgomery Improvement Association had chosen a person other than King to communicate the Negroes’ grievances to the city fathers, Dr. King might have gone through life as a successful Baptist preacher and no more. His rare ability to lead and inspire the classes as well as the masses, in a crusade for social justice, might never have been called forth.5
Furthermore, it may be argued that the force of King’s personality, intelligence, and gifts helped create the conditions for social change in regard to race relations. King thus exhibited what Hook meant in a further clarification of the eventful versus the event-making person.
The event-making man, on the other hand, finds a fork in the historical road, but he also helps, so to speak, to create it. He increases the odds of success for the alternative he chooses by virtue of the extraordinary qualities he brings to bear to realize it. At the very least, he must . . . display exceptional qualities of leadership. It is the hero as event-making man who leaves the positive imprint of his personality upon history—an imprint that is still observable after he has disappeared from the scene.6
As Lerone Bennett observed, King’s ability to create the conditions that led to social transformation was clearly demonstrated in Birmingham, Alabama, where it is widely believed that the civil rights movement gained its greatest symbolic victory because of a highly publicized clash with Sheriff Bull Connors’s violent tactics to repel the civil rights demonstrators.
No leader, of course, can create an event the time is not prepared for. But the genius of the great leader lies precisely in his apprehension of what the times require and in carrying through in the teeth of great opposition an act that changes the times. In Birmingham, King approached that kind of greatness, creating the occasion of the “Negro Revolution” by an act almost everyone said was ill-timed and ill-chosen. Birmingham . . . was cbosen, not stumbled upon. It was created by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and how much he would probably have to pay to get it.7
King was certainly a figure who often precipitated change through conscious, decisive action.
The hero, particularly the one who advances an agenda of trenchant social criticism and sweeping ethical reform, also possesses the ability to create a situation in which it is untenable to remain unchanged or unchallenged by the hero’s vision of how things should be. The hero, in short compass, forces us to make moral choices. As James Hanigan says:
One thing that makes the hero’s course a precarious one is that the very nature of the hero’s role in history requires the more ordinary among us to make choices. It is not simply a matter for us of liking or disliking, of admiring or ignoring the hero. Rather, we are forced to choose for or against the hero, for or against the vision, or dream, or message, or course of action the hero proposes to us. One hallmark of the hero’s authenticity as a hero is precisely that he or she forces us to choose; we cannot remain indifferent to this presence among us, even if we would. For not to be with the hero is automatically to be against him or her.8
This aspect of heroism was quite evident in King’s life. He constantly envisioned America as a work in progress, a nation constructed by the redemptive or destructive choices it would make about its moral and social future. In this regard, King was quintessentially American, placing the notion of experiment and pragmatic moral revisionism at the heart of his creed of American social life.
The primary impact of King’s life and career may consist in the clarity he brought to the choices that Americans must make in “living out” the principal ideals of the American creed, particularly as embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. King’s genius and heroic stature derived from his adroit skill at pointing out the disintegration of the American Dream and dramatically portraying the distance between American ideals of justice and equality and its contradictory antidemocratic practices. But it was his willingness to die for American ideals that made King so dangerous, because he forced America to examine itself with the instruments of equality, justice, and social morality America claimed as its own. Because of this quality in King’s leadership, we may concede that “the possibility for heroism in our time will be tempered by the ideals we propose to ourselves—a thing proved in the heroic age of civil rights, when Dr. King and many others suffered and died for the concept of equality we profess but have not lived up to.”9
Moreover, King’s martyrdom also linked him to other American heroic figures, like Abraham Lincoln and John and Robert Kennedy, whose deaths made them the subjects of national memory through eulogies and memorials, and gained them even greater status as the vehicles of American moral and social redemption. As Conrad Cherry perceptively notes in writing about Robert Kennedy’s funeral, and by extension other funerals of national significance:
In this funeral Americans joined in a sacred ceremony, the scope of which crossed denominational religious boundaries. Many citizens had participated in another such ceremony only a few weeks earlier at the funeral for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and in still another only a few short years earlier at the funeral for President John F. Kennedy. American history is, in fact, replete with leaders who have been canonized in the national consciousness as exemplars of American ideals and as particular bearers of Americans’ destiny under God. When those leaders have met their deaths they have become, in the national memory as well as in the ceremonies and speeches that surround their deaths, martyrs for the American cause, even in some cases redeemers.10
Equally important, heroism often enables ordinary people to make a critical difference in their social and personal existence by linking their lives to larger social goals and movements that embody the virtues to which they aspire. The ideals of equality, justice, and freedom had for so long been uttered in public discourse and written in the creeds of American society and had in varying degrees been realized for particular segments of American culture. But freedom, equality, and justice often remained unrealized for many others, and King both envisioned how these ideals could be enfleshed and boldly envisioned how enormous obstacles to their realization could be overcome. In this scenario, the individual hero functions as an enabler for a group of people to rise above their limiting circumstances and participate in a drama of redemption, reconstruction, or transformation in which their roles, however small, are perceived as necessary and vital. Thus I will speak of this further when I discuss King’s means of nonviolent transformation.
But the hero also looks to the group for insight and inspiration. Indeed, the group often serves a heroic function itself, engaging in what Max Weber called social heroism:
Max Weber claimed that the Reformation and the attendant rise of capitalism were the last examples of middle class heroism. He is not alluding by this to the highly individualized gallantry of a John Wayne. Heroism for Weber is a social act. It occurs when a group of people no longer simply stand up for the system, but stand out against it. They critique the present and act to reclaim control over the future. The bourgeoisie of the Reformation era changed the circumstances of their existence and freed themselves from the dominance of aristocratic, social, political, and economic structures.11
In this scenario, the hero often functions to recall great past deeds as the basis for present and future action by masses of people. King understood this, and acted on it.
But the prospect of King’s heroism becomes more problematic as we reflect on why he is presently being officially canonized, while near the end of his life he was roundly dismissed as a hopeless romantic and an irrelevant idealist. What was the real nature of King’s achievements? In this section, I want to explore the nature of King’s genius, and then proceed to address two tensions that further reinforce the ambiguity of King’s heroism. Although King possessed many gifts, I think his genius lay in his moral vision and the choice of nonviolent means in attempting to achieve equality and real democracy for black Americans.
The idea that Martin Luther King was a man of moral vision raises questions about the nature of moral arguments, the particular content of moral statements, and the proper adjudication of competing moral claims. In our day, simply put, morality has fallen on hard times. This difficulty, though, does not absolve us of the responsibility to engage our every energy and resource in clarifying what we mean by morality and advancing a moral vision. King was willing, and able, to perform such a task. In fact, the historical conditions under which he and his comrades labored elicited from King and the civil rights movement a moral vision to guide and regulate its tasks and purposes.
Although King’s moral vision may be variously conceived, I think, for my present purposes, it may be helpfully viewed in the following two ways. First, King’s moral vision was not the work of one man; it expressed the hopes and aspirations of a long tradition of confrontation with and critical reflection upon the existential and social circumstances of black people in America. King did not invent or discover, but rather inherited, the imperative to rectify the evils of racism and impoverishment embedded in the legal, social, political, economic, and religious structures of American society.
King was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Baptist preachers, so the very texture of his life from birth was religious and spiritual. He was reared under the powerful preaching of his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia. Martin Luther King, Jr., attended Morehouse College and came under the influence of, among others, the late Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, president of Morehouse, and Dr. George Kelsey, who is now professor emeritus at Drew University. These men, both scholarpreachers, provided for King the paradigm of ministry as an intellectually respectable, socially engaged, and emotionally satisfying vocation. At nineteen Martin was ordained to the ministry and became associate pastor of Ebenezer, and later its co-pastor, after serving six years as the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
Given this background, King was firmly rooted in the institution that lies at the heart of Afro-American life, the black church. Throughout their history religion has been and remains the central ordering influence upon the vast majority of Americans of African descent. Albert Raboteau, in his groundbreaking work on the religion of Afro-American slaves, titled Slave Religion, writes,
Black religious institutions have been the foundation of Afro-American culture. An agency of social control, a source of economic cooperation, an arena for political activity, a sponsor of education, and a refuge in a hostile white world, the black church has been historically the social center of Afro-American life.12
From its inception the black church identified racism (whether embedded in vicious slavery or embodied in white Christianity’s segregationist ethos) as a heinous sin, and resolved to make its extirpation a primary goal of the black church’s existence. The black church’s message that all people are children of God and that everyone deserves to be treated with decency and respect found ample application in King’s moral vision. The notion in the black church that God sides with the oppressed, as God sided with Israel against Egyptian bondage, inspired King’s actions and was a central part of his moral vision, as reflected in his belief that Afro-Americans had “cosmic companionship” in the struggle for liberation.
The Afro-American religious notion of loving and praying for one’s enemies, despite their decadence, hate, or brutality, had a strong affinity with the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence as a teaching technique and lifestyle that King ardently preached and assiduously practiced. The black church understanding that all people, regardless of social standing, educational attainment, political sophistication, or cultural refinement, are equal heirs to God’s promises found expression in King’s concept of the beloved community where black and white, rich and poor, and powerful and powerless would be united in peace and harmony.
In these and many more significant ways King was organically linked to the living tradition of Afro-American religion. One aspect of King’s genius was his ability to project this profoundly Afro-American religious sensibility into the American sociopolitical ethos and employ it as a base from which to argue for and, to a degree, effect social, political, and economic transformation.
This ability reflects the second characteristic of King’s moral vision: it countered the narrow exclusivism of a vulgar patriotism and put forward a creative reinterpretation of America’s central political concepts and documents. King’s moral hermeneutic understood these concepts generally in relation to American moral improvement and specifically in relation to Afro-American freedom and liberation. In short, King appealed to the very documents that are central to American civil life—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence—and pointed out their basis for a moral understanding and interpretation of concepts like equality, justice, and freedom. Furthermore, he employed these documents as a yardstick to judge the actual attainment by American society of the goals, norms, and ideals they articulated.
Not only does King’s moral vision have a religious moment, but it extends itself into the national and civic realm, constituting its political moment. King’s moral vision was predicated upon, in part, what he understood to be the best in American religious, civil, legal, social, and political history. He deemed his moral vision to be commensurate with American historic and national goals set forth in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which help regulate American ideas about issues like freedom, justice, and equality.
In fact, in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, King clearly stated that his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream.”13 When King confronted the massive and abusive legal, social, and political structures that thwarted the materialization of Afro-American freedom, justice, and equality in any concrete sense, he appealed to these documents in calling for the realization of the norms and ideals they espoused. King said in Washington, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’”14
King believed, despite the fact that black people were slaves when this creed was written, that any fair-minded interpreter would be bound to enlarge its vision of liberty and equality to include all people. The principles articulated in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence struck an authentic chord of truth for King that could not be nullified even by the shortsightedness of their original authors in regard to people of color. These documents provided a substantial foundation for American society to accord all people the status of persons with rights. King stated: “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”15
King refused to permit the interpretation of democracy, liberty, justice, and freedom to be monopolized by those who would truncate and distort the understanding of American history and ideals. King refused to allow either the overt barbarity of bigoted segregationists like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council or the covert but no less pernicious racism of prejudiced politicians to define democracy. On the rhetorical battleground of American public ideology, King wrested from them the prerogative of describing and defining what is authentically American, and in the process transformed the terms of American political and civil discourse. Martin Luther King’s moral vision, then, which was rooted in Afro-American religion and which advanced a creative American moral hermeneutic, was a powerful and often persuasive means for structuring a protest movement to secure basic rights for black Americans.
Another way of accounting for King’s heroic character and genius is his insistence on militant nonviolence as the means of obtaining freedom, justice, and equality for black people. King’s advocacy of militant nonviolence was important for two interrelated reasons. First, it appealed to the African-American religious heritage of black culture, while linking that heritage to other powerful models of resistance and social transformation. Second, it presumed the heroic character of everyday black folk to resist evil and located transformative agency within their grasp.
King’s advocacy of nonviolence was deeply anchored in an African-American religious ethic of love that promoted the fundamental dignity of all creatures because of their relationship to a loving, all-powerful God. As I have already indicated, norms and values developed in the black church influenced King’s theological ideals, but they also shaped his strategies of social reform and his beliefs about human potential for progress and change. What is crucial for the AfricanAmerican religious ethic of love in relation to nonviolent means to attain social, economic, and political freedom is that in King’s worldview, nonviolence was a way of life and not simply a strategy of social transformation.
This distinction is key to understanding how King maintained a consistent moral stance toward various forms of violence, including war and domestic policies that reinforced poverty and classism. King saw nonviolent resistance to oppressive social structures, policies, and persons as a means of acquiring basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter, as well as being the only viable and ethically legitimate way to obtain freedom, justice, and equality. Although the destruction of racism was a major goal of African-American nonviolent resistance, it was only one goal of the nonviolent lifestyle. As King matured politically, he began to expand his field of moral vision to include classism, poverty, and militarism as legitimate objects of social protest. He believed that conceiving of nonviolence as both a lifestyle and a means of resisting a variety of social and moral problems was consonant with the affirmation of life, liberty, and equality in the black religious experience.
But King’s advocacy of nonviolence was also the result of disciplined study of its applications in a variety of national, social, and moral contexts. He examined the principled resistance to taxpaying advocated by Henry David Thoreau, as well as his seminal essay on civil disobedience. It is widely known that King also diligently studied the principles, methods, and lifestyle of Mohandas Gandhi, whose “experiments with truth” had a powerful impact on King’s thinking. Gandhi’s leadership of millions of Indians to resist the systemic social oppression of British colonialism inspired King to adapt Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance to American society.
Second, King’s advocacy of nonviolence presumed the heroic character of everyday black people. Although this presumption contained romantic notions of black self-identity, it also located forms of transformative agency within the grasp of often powerless ordinary black folk. It is important to remember that at the beginning of the civil rights movement the lot of everyday black people remained even more circumscribed by the forces of segregation, race hatred, and class inequality from which the black middle class had only occasionally, and precariously, escaped. The civil rights movement provided an enormous boost to the self-identity of black people who had long believed that they were relatively powerless to change their condition.
However, Cornel West points out that King’s presumption that black people could wield nonviolence as a means to social liberation contained a romantic notion of superiority over other racial groups, particularly white Americans. West also contends that King’s doctrine of nonviolence
tends to assume tacitly that Afro-Americans have acquired, as a result of their historical experience, a peculiar capacity to love their enemies, to endure patiently suffering, pain, and hardship and thereby “teach the white man how to love” or “cure the white man of his sickness.” King seemed to believe that AfroAmericans possess a unique proclivity for nonviolence, more so than do other racial groups, that they have a certain bent toward humility, meekness, and forbearance, hence are quite naturally disposed toward nonviolent action. In King’s broad overview, God is utilizing Afro-Americans—this community of caritas (other-directed love)—to bring about “the blessed community.” . . . The self-image fostered . . . is defensive in character and romantic in content.16
While I think West’s assessment is just, there is another dimension to King’s assumption that must not be overlooked: his belief in the moral heroism of black people also assumed that the power to affect their destiny and to exercise transformative moral agency was achievable by ordinary black folk. Like that of Marcus Garvey before him and Malcolm X during his own day, the genius of King resided in the ability to appeal to his followers’ heroic potentials by placing strict demands on their shoulders, challenging them to live up to a standard of moral excellence that neither they nor their opponents realized they possessed. King believed that black people could muster the resources they already had at their disposal, such as moral authority and a limited but significant economic base, to foster legitimate claims to social goods like education, housing, and enfranchisement.
Moreover, the standards of moral excellence that King expected through disciplined participation in nonviolent demonstrations, which included rites of selfexamination and purification, were of inestimable worth not only in fighting for denied social privileges and rights, but in the healthy enlargement of crucial narratives of racial self-esteem. King understood the virtues of “everyday forms of resistance,” and appealed to the “weapons of the weak” in opposing unjust social forces.17
While the above discussion specifies how it makes sense to call King a hero, now I want to explore two tensions that flow from the assertion of King’s ambiguous heroism, which may be summed up in the following way: while King’s contributions were heroic and significant, many African-Americans, particularly the working poor and the underclass, still suffer in important ways; and while King deserves great honor and praise of a particular sort, he is indebted to traditions of African-American religious protest, social criticism, and progressive democracy.
It must be conceded that despite the significant basic changes that King helped bring about, the present status of poor black Americans in particular presents little cause for celebration. Their situation does not mean that King’s achievements were not substantial. Rather it reflects the deep structures of persistent racism and classism that have not yet yielded to sustained levels of protest and resistance.
In order to judge King’s career, we must imagine what American society would be for blacks without his historic achievements. Without basic rights to vote, desegregated public transportation and accommodations, equal housing legislation, and the like, American society would more radically reflect what Gunnar Myrdal termed the “American Dilemma.” King and other participants in the civil rights movement wrought heroic change, but that change was a partial movement toward real liberation.
If it was once believed that King’s vision was only a beginning, a mere foot in the door of civil rights, political empowerment, and economic equality, the tragic reality now is that the door has been shut fast in the face of many AfroAmericans. This is displayed particularly in two areas: the persistence of racism and the disintegration of postindustrial urban life.
It is fair to say that a climate of hostility has been generated toward those who assert that this country has not achieved the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality in any significant structural manner, as envisioned by the mature Martin Luther King Jr. The early Martin Luther King was preoccupied with securing inclusion in American society as it is, without questioning the means by which wealth is distributed; without probing the mechanisms that determine privilege, prestige, and status; and without challenging the growing classism that shattered the notion of a monolithic black community.
The mature Martin Luther King Jr., however, understood that economic injustice was just as great an impediment to black liberation as racial injustice. As I will show later, King’s mature career was spent in attempting to draw out the implications of a coalition politics that transcended race to speak of economic injustice and class oppression. His Poor People’s March was the first real attempt to enact a coalition politics that bound together the interests of various marginalized groups, including Latinos, poor blacks and whites, and peace activists.
Part of King’s great frustration resulted from the fact that racism was much more complex and multifaceted than he realized at the beginning of his career, and he sought to educate himself and his colleagues about the structural, socially embedded nature of institutional racism and the structural nature of class oppression. This accounts in part for how we can claim that King’s contributions were heroic while acknowledging that they were neither perfect nor permanent. Some of the gains King helped secure were structurally permanent, such as legally desegregated public housing and transportation. Other gains must be continually ratified by law, such as the civil rights bill, which must be renegotiated through legislation. Moreover, the logic of racial progress is subject to perennial reexamination and justification.
The project to make King a particular sort of hero has often presented a picture of completion and satisfaction with regard to the structural obstacles to AfricanAmerican racial progress. However, a suggestive and subversive side of King’s heroism views him as an iconic figure who inspires continued battle to implement the goals and dreams for which he gave his life. It is consistent to suggest that although the general perception of blacks has changed, the actual legal barriers to social mobility have been removed, and particular categories of blacks have made substantial gains economically, King’s life equally symbolizes the continued battle for the truly disadvantaged, the ghetto poor. It is heroic in a distinctly Kingian sense to resist official efforts at King canonization that both whitewash actual racial history and deny the work that remains, and to support the belief that much more progress must be made before real liberation can be achieved.
To suggest this, however, is to counter the self-image of the reigning political view of things that is the framework of contemporary conservative and liberal American sociopolitical ideology. Conservative political thought as construed here maintains that the struggle for black self-determination is largely over and that sufficient energy has been devoted to the eradication of racism in American life. Liberal political thought, even when it acknowledges the continuing expression of certain forms of racial and economic inequality, rarely effectively examines the reasons for their malignant persistence.
The predominant political ideology shrinks space for radical dissent and marginalizes, absorbs, or excludes voices asserting that the American condition is in terrible disarray. In short, the ideological horizon and sociopolitical landscape have been dominated by conservative and liberal visions that constitute political realism, effectively preventing radical alternatives to their often mundane and pedestrian achievements.
Conservative ideology and politics have the effect of both offering limited and narrowly conceived options to Afro-American suffering and ensuring the continued hegemony of white, upper-middle-class politics. Liberal alternatives, while certainly an improvement, are nevertheless plagued by an inability to move beyond a provincial vision of what economic and political measures are necessary to better Afro-American life. Liberalism attends to symptoms rather than to root causes.
The tragic reality of the Afro-American condition is that, while in many respects blacks are certainly better off, in other respects many blacks continue to suffer. For instance, the disintegration of the moral, economic, and civic fabric of poor black communities is stunning and entails lethal social consequences. The arising of a subculture of crime, which thrives on the political economy of crack, is threatening to destroy the inner city. Also the gentrification of black urban living space means that inner-city residents are being squeezed out of marginal neighborhoods by an escalating tax rate that forces the working poor into even poorer neighborhoods.
Poverty, for example, affects black people in an especially pernicious manner. Since the 1970s, there has been an enormous increase in poverty in America. In 1970, 14.9 percent of all children were poor. Today the figure is almost 21 percent. For minorities, it is even worse. Two out of every five Hispanic children are poor, and almost one out of every two black children is poor. For black children under six, the poverty rate is a record high 51.1 percent. There is a continually widening gap between the wealthy and the poor in America, and this year it is the highest ever since the Census Bureau began collecting statistics in 1947. Last year, twofifths of the population received 67 percent of all national income, the highest ever recorded. The poorest two-fifths, on the other hand, received only 15.7 percent of all income, the lowest ever recorded. Even worse, one-third of all black America remains below the poverty line.18
Another factor that has contributed to the current condition of black America for the better part of the eighties is the legacy of the Reagan era. The Reagan administration symbolized, and ominously expressed, a new breed of racism, generating policies pervaded by subtle forms of discrimination and prejudice that have had a devastating impact on black America. The Reagan administration’s laissez-faire attitude toward the enforcement of laws and governmental policies that protect minorities and its outright attack on the hard-won rights of America’s poor and dispossessed helped set the tone for an almost unmitigated viciousness toward these groups.19 The Reagan years have fueled a subversive shift in the modus operandi of American racism. Often no longer able to openly express racial hatred through barbaric deeds, racists have found subtle and insidious forms of expression.
This racism not only is evident in upper-middle-class America, with its staunchly conservative values and sensibilities that problematize Afro-American progress, and in the white working and underclass, with its tightly turfed communities that cling to racial and ethnic identification as a means of exclusion and survival (e.g., Howard Beach and Bensonhurst);20 but it also has, in a cruelly ironic twist, engendered a new reactionary group of black neoconservative political and intellectual figures. This group rejects civil rights as a means to black progress and naively contends that such measures as affirmative action cripple rather than aid black freedom by creating negative stereotypes about inferior black performance in education and employment. All of this suggests the deep dimensions of our current crisis.
The second tension in regard to King’s heroism rests on the fact that, although his achievements merit praise and honor, those accomplishments are related to a larger tradition of African-American protest, as well as traditions of liberal democracy. For instance, the King Holiday reminds us that by celebrating King’s life, and career in particular, America celebrates the profound accomplishments of black America in general. This recognition offers to American intellectual life the vital resources of a living Afro-American intellectual tradition that can continue to inform, challenge, and even transform American discourse about race, class, justice, freedom, and equality. More specifically, since, as I have stated above, King’s life was developed and shaped in the ethos of a black church worldview and since the locus classicus of his moral vision was the Afro-American religious experience, our attention is redirected back to that experience as a crucial resource for the maintenance and extension of King’s moral vision, in alliance with other progressive sociopolitical, historical, and economic thought.
Indeed, the notion that King himself was the producer, not the product, and the cause, not the effect, of Afro-American liberation potentials that had been long latent, and at times vitally visible, in the fabric of our national experience is entirely alien to King’s thought. Although he believed historical forces, under the direction of a demanding but loving providence, had arranged his ascension to a leadership position, he always believed that he articulated what many black people thought, knew, and held to be true. King obviously understood that he was the voice for a protest movement that had been growing for a long while and that had finally gathered the strength to resist the cumulative evils visited upon black people by the apartheid-like conditions in the American South. In fact, in speaking about the experience that initially catapulted him into international fame, King wrote:
When I went to Montgomery, Alabama, as a pastor in 1954, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent resistance would be applicable. After I had lived in the community about a year, the bus boycott began. The Negro people of Montgomery, exhausted by the humiliating experiences that they had constantly faced on the buses, expressed in a massive act of noncooperation their determination to be free. They came to see that it was ultimately more honorable to walk the streets in dignity than ride the buses in humiliation. At the beginning of the protest the people called on me to serve as their spokesman.21
The recognition that King was part of a larger tradition disallows America to escape its obligation to those King represented by relegating his thought to the fixed and static past. Instead, it forces America to critically engage and constantly examine the dynamic contemporary expressions of the thought and practices emerging from the tradition that birthed and buttressed King.
Furthermore, the need for a reinvigorated moral vision can only be immediately strengthened by portraying the explicit relationship among King, the civil rights movement, and the most recent and powerful popular expression of the AfroAmerican intellectual and religious tradition: the Jackson campaigns for president. No honest and complete assessment of the movements and forces made possible by King’s and his comrades’ achievements can be performed without mention of the Jackson candidacy. The Jackson campaigns, which have already in a fundamental way transformed the shape and contours of modern American politics, were made possible by a host of historical ingredients, not the least of which was the tradition of sociopolitical insurgency stimulated by the Afro-American religious tradition and the civil rights movement.
The Jackson campaigns in part enact a profound transformation in the ideas we inherit from the mature Martin Luther King. They underscore the need for a transition from an initial emphasis on civil rights to an appreciation of issues of class and economic inequality.22 Thus the relationship between King and Jackson, as participants in the same tradition and in active pursuit of the goals of economic empowerment, racial harmony, and universal justice, regulated by a vision developed in an Afro-American religious perspective, must not be lost as we celebrate King’s birthday.
Indeed, as we celebrate his birthday we must exercise extreme caution in retrieving images of King, especially those that avoid the painful truth of recent revelations about King’s character. The latter includes charges that King plagiarized portions of his dissertation, that he was a womanizer, and that he possibly physically abused a woman the night before his death. In the face of these revelations, how can we proceed celebrating King’s life?
First, it is important to remember that the celebration of King’s achievements is not predicated upon a notion of human perfection. Before these revelations, it was well known that King was a great but flawed human being. He admitted on several occasions his own guilt over sexual indiscretions and pledged to remedy his infidelity with all the strength to resist temptation that lay in him. King’s obvious recognition of his finitude and limitation serve as a worthy model of emulation for us as we seek to celebrate his moral legacy of protest for civil and social rights. But his legacy of self-examination, admission of fault, and the attempt to concretely rectify the wrong, even if it is not always successfully done, is a model we can usefully incorporate as responsible and mature moral agents.
Second, the charges of King’s alleged plagiarism are disturbing and inexcusable. To use someone else’s written work without proper recitation is a form of verbal thievery. This painful truth, however, forces us to raise even more questions about why it occurred. Since we cannot question King, we can only surmise, infer, and speculate. King’s dissertation was completed while he was pastoring his first church in Montgomery and during the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott. Undoubtedly, the pressures of the burgeoning movement tempted King to plagiarize Jack Boozer’s dissertation in order to complete his own doctoral studies.
Moreover, although many black scholars had passed through Boston University’s doctoral program in religion, one peculiar and tragic legacy of racism involved the pernicious self-doubts that could have plagued any developing black scholar. Qualities of self-worth, competence, talent, and skill are not developed in a vacuum, but are in part socially constructed and reproduced. In the mid-fifties it is certainly conceivable that a young talented black doctoral student who was uncertain of his real worth, despite the encouragement of professors and colleagues, and who was faced with an unpredictable and unfolding social crisis, could be tempted to rely on work that had already been accepted and viewed as competent.
The best approach to these charges, as well as charges about King’s possible physical abuse, can be made by developing a healthy and realistic framework of assessment of King’s life and career that will remain consistent even in the event of other revelations about his person and character. The power of King’s achievements, the real force of his genius, consisted in his passion for justice to be done for the most lowly and oppressed inhabitants of American society. His moral authority as a spokesperson for truth, equality, and the embodiment of a particular slant on the American Dream cannot be compromised by revelations about his personal and student life.
What these revelations do achieve, however, is a sad reminder of the forces of wrong and dishonor by which we are all subject to be tempted and corrupted. King serves as a reminder that no figure establishes an Archimedean point of moral perfection from which to argue for social change, that all argument for transformation is immanent criticism rooted in the faults and limitations of being human, but those limitations do not ultimately destroy the truth for which limited and faulty humans stand. Although the vehicle for that truth is tarnished, enough of the truth’s power and persuasion can emerge to convince others of its necessity and worth. We must view King in such a realistic fashion. These revelations show that King was an enormously complex human being, confirming what we know of him as we study his ideological evolutions and his political maturation.
As has been much remarked on, toward the end of his life King began to discern inadequacies in his former analyses of racial antipathy, social injustice, and economic inequality. He discovered that these problems were much more deeply rooted and structurally expressed than he had initially surmised.
As a result he focused his considerable critical skills on the larger national and international economic, political, and social contexts of Afro-Americans’, and other oppressed people’s, plight. King began to speak about the redistribution of resources, guaranteed incomes for the poor, and forming a multiracial coalition of the unemployed and the poor. This signified his changing perspective. In an article written just before his assassination and published after it, King wrote:
We call our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income because we feel that the economic question is the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, are confronting . . . . We need an economic bill of rights. This would guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work. It would also guarantee an income for all who are not able to work . . . . I hope that a specific number of jobs is set forth, that a program will emerge to abolish unemployment, and that there will be another program to supplement the income of those whose earnings are below the poverty level.23
King had already begun to speak out against the war in Vietnam, decrying the lamentable manner in which resources for the poor were being pilfered by an ever increasing war chest. He was criticized within the civil rights movement for squandering its social influence and political capital with the Johnson administration. He was attacked outside the movement for delving, even “meddling,” into larger domestic and foreign affairs that were not the legitimate concern of a civil rights leader.
King’s moral vision, however, could not abide the spurious schizophrenia that compartmentalized moral concern into distinct and separable spheres. Morality was of a piece to King, and his moral vision was integrated and unified. The whole of life fell under its searching purview and rigorous scrutiny. King’s later efforts to unite poor blacks, whites, and other minorities, as well as labor and other progressive concerns, marked him as a highly dangerous man who was greatly feared in many governmental, political, and social quarters.
These facts must be recalled as we engage in the rituals of remembrance and rites of recovery of the meaning of King’s moral vision. We must refuse those who would commodify King’s career into acceptable packages of comfortable, and not dangerous, memory, to be consumed by the American public in the name of a mythologization project intent on subverting King’s radical and disturbing memory. In short, we must engage in hermeneutical combat and interpretive warfare over the future of King’s memory, making certain that the custodians of the King canon include and remember his provocative words and oppositional ideas, as well as his comforting thoughts and hopeful beliefs. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man who possessed a profound moral vision that was rooted in the AfroAmerican religious experience and that advanced a creative American moral hermeneutic. Remembering his life and thought challenges us to examine the present condition of American moral life and discover it wanting in regard to its treatment of those King represented: the black, the poor, and the oppressed.
Construed in the above manner, King’s birthday serves as an outpost in progressive terrain, creating space in which to collect the energies of protest and struggle as they are related to the visionary revival and recovery of the moral tradition within which King lived and labored. King Day can facilitate a broadly conceived coalition of the oppressed and suffering who have a desperate interest in recovering the symbol and substance of King’s moral vision.
Celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday as an official holiday promises a poignant and profound change in the rhythm of public rituals commemorating events of ultimate national and historical significance. King Day structures in the recurring cycle of American holidays a period of time that concentrates attention upon the meaning of King’s life and thought. It also extends beyond King, transcending his personal and individual meaning, and celebrates the ingenuity of black survival in an American political, social, and cultural ethos often inimical to Afro-American existence.
King Day also points us back to that Afro-American religious tradition that produced King and that continues to thrive in the midst of American religious, social, and political life. It also provides a means of reconstituting King’s moral vision by challenging us each year to more closely approximate in our national and individual life and thought the goals and purposes for which he gave his life. In this sense, the name Martin Luther King, Jr., no longer merely represents the time and place of his life and body on earth, but symbolizes the hope of oppressed people everywhere that the dignity and worth of human life will be universally respected and uplifted.