Missing Martin

Missing Martin

by Paul M. Gaston

Forty years ago a quarter of a million Americans came
to Washington in a march for jobs and freedom. Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s, "I Have a Dream" speech, the
riveting highlight of the occasion, began with a
prediction that the day would "go down in history as
the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history
of our nation." And so it did.

Now at its fortieth anniversary, the March
on Washington is being commemorated all over the world,
putting me in mind once more of the warning flag the
southern writer James Agee hoisted many years ago.
"The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can
strike is to do fury honor," he wrote. "Official
acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that
salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign
of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas."
Strong language. Vintage Agee. And, like most
sweeping generalizations, it obscures some truths as it
illuminates the big ones. Furious struggles for
liberty are not universally robbed of their power to
inspire; but they are routinely appropriated to serve
other agendas and ambitions.

King’s dream speech has become especially vulnerable.
For one thing, it has been used to turn the civil
rights movement into yet another example of the heroic
and dramatic story of American democracy. His dream,
he said, was "deeply rooted in the American dream."
And so the civil rights movement, as it swept away
segregation and disfranchisement, came to be understood
as a heroic and dramatic example of the self-corrective
nature of America’s unique democracy. One can hear
Agee warning us to see that this is "the one surest
sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of
Judas."

For many white Americans, probably most of them, the
civil rights movement’s success in dismantling Jim Crow
was proof that their nation could reform itself to get
on with the business of making the American dream
possible for all. It affirmed their need to believe in
the essential beneficence of the American republic. It
echoed their belief that racism could be excised from
the body politic without altering the structure of
their society. It vindicated their faith in the unique
superiority of their country.

This was not Martin King speaking. Those who thought
it was missed his meaning. After the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 he said it
was necessary to move beyond the reformist tactics of
the previous decade. The abolition of segregation and
the acquisition of the right to vote were important but
they were not the goals of the civil rights movement,
not ends in themselves. The meaning of freedom, he was
to say often, reached far beyond those building blocks.
"We must recognize," he said, "that we can’t solve our
problems now until there is a radical redistribution of
economic and political power." Among other things,
this would require facing the truth that "the dominant
ideology" of America was not "freedom and equality"
with racism "just an occasional departure from the
norm." Racism was woven into the fabric of the
country, intimately linked to capitalism and
militarism.

They were all "tied together," he said,
"and you really can’t get rid of one without getting
rid of the others." What was required was "a radical
restructuring of the architecture of American society."
That phrase-"a radical restructuring of the
architecture of American society"-was not uttered in
the dream speech of 1963. The time was not right for
it. The Jim Crow shackles had to be smashed first.
But the phrase carries the essential message and
embodies the enduring legacy of Martin Luther King,
Jr.-and it is a message virtually air brushed from
history. His radical critique was drowned out from
the beginning by angry White House rejections, white
fear of the Black Power movement, escalating riots in
Northern cities, and liberal integrationists’
continuing loyalty to their reformist principles of
contained social change. Even before the reaction of
the Nixon Administration set in, the King who would
remake the "architecture of American society" was
absent from school books, anniversary celebrations,
and political oratory.

Julian Bond had it right when
he wrote that "we do not honor the critic of
capitalism, or the pacifist who declared all wars
evil, or the man of God who argued that a nation that
chose guns over butter would starve its people and
kill itself. . . . We honor an antiseptic hero."
This antiseptic hero was the product of the whole
culture, a culture innocently unable to imagine itself
as fundamentally flawed. The right-wing assault on
civil rights over the last generation, however, has
been anything but innocent. It has appropriated King
himself as its ally in rolling back the things for
which he and his comrades stood, fixing on the dream
speech as its primary text. King’s "My dream is deeply
rooted in the American dream" statement is interpreted
to discredit his radicalism; and his hope for the day
when people would be judged "by the content of their
character rather than the color of their skin" is
enlisted in the battle against all legislation and
programs that might help to undo the effects of three
and a half centuries of racial exclusion and
exploitation.

Pundits and politicians of the right, lavishly
supported by an ever increasing number of think tanks,
have fixed on, and shamelessly distorted, these two
fragments. George Will, conceding the existence of
continuing poverty and disadvantage, explains them as
the "terrible price" blacks have been made to pay "for
the apostasy of today’s civil rights leaders from the
original premise of the civil rights movement." That
premise, he declares, was that "race must not be a
source of advantage or disadvantage."

Will’s fellow journalist Rush Limbaugh wonders how "the
vision that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had for a
color-blind society has been perverted by modern
liberalism." Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly, blasting
what they call "the failure of racial preferences,"
conjure up King’s "heartfelt voice" wishing for an end
to judging people by skin color. Linda Chavez,
prominent crusader against affirmative action, came to
my university a few years ago to admonish us to cease
judging applicants "based on the color of their skin."
Dr. King, she told us, would be opposed because our
policy "smacks of the kind of racism that has long
plagued this nation." She and a legion of others have
given life to what George Orwell, in his novel 1984,
called Newspeak, the use of words in ambiguous and
contradictory ways, telling lies by appearing to tell
the truth.

Were he to come back to make a fortieth anniversary
speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, reflecting
on the manipulation of his legacy to discredit his
mature prescription for his country, we should not be
surprised to hear an oration entitled "I Have a
Nightmare." One can imagine the long catalogue of
abandoned commitments to racial justice. Then,
recalling his wish for "a radical redistribution of
economic and political power" he might note the cruel
irony of deepening poverty, a widening gap between rich
and poor, and a tax policy designed to make it wider.
Remembering his hostility to militarism he might summon
his powerful rhetoric to condemn his nation not only
for the massive destruction it wrought on another
country but for apparently justifying its actions with
untruths.

Then he might recall words he spoke to the
United States Senate shortly before he was
assassinated: "the values of the marketplace supersede
the goals of social justice." Looking out toward the
White House he might conclude by reflecting on the
nation’s identification of its democracy with those
very marketplace values and how it seemed to be on a
messianic mission to spread the values of what it
called "free market capitalism" to its newly conquered
lands and their neighbors. It would not be a pretty
speech.

We miss the man who might say these things and regret
the way we missed understanding what he did say to us;
and we hope for the day when his message will be heard
in the voices of an aroused citizenry ready finally to
bring about "a radical restructuring of the
architecture of American society."

Paul M. Gaston, Professor Emeritus of Southern and
Civil Rights History at the University of Virginia, is
a past president of the Southern Regional Council and a
contributing editor of Southern Changes.