When John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic President of the
United States in 1960, his brother Robert remarked that in thirty years an
African American could win the office too. In the event it took nearly fifty
– and Barack Obama's victory only now opens a new, and perhaps equally
contested, chapter in American history.
On the one hand stands a sort of Whig triumphalist narrative of progress, and
on the other a more troubled suspicion that important parts of the vision of
Martin Luther King have calcified and become obstacles to black advancement.
Sixty years ago, segregation and Jim Crow laws still reigned, most schools
were segregated, relatively few blacks could vote, and twenty-nine out of
forty-eight states continued to carry miscegenation laws forbidding
interracial marriages like that between the current President-elect’s
parents. One cannot imagine Obama’s election without the successive
desegregation of the armed forces in 1948 and (at least legally if not
always in practice) of public education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and subsequent Voter Rights Act of 1965, and their later elaboration
into bureaucracies pervading government, business and education. The
quarter-of-a-million-strong march on Washington, in August 1963, and King’s
famous “I have a dream” speech played such a crucial role that contemporary
controversialists vie to appropriate King for their side.
King himself might have been gratified, but also troubled, to learn that by
the late 1980s a higher proportion of American high school seniors could
correctly identify the source of “I have a dream” (88 per cent) than either
the opening of the Gettysburg Address (74 per cent) or even the Declaration
of Independence (66 per cent), both of which King invoked in that speech. By
2008, 98 per cent of American teenagers could do so. In highlighting the
roots and ongoing struggle over the content and use of that speech, Eric J.
Sundquist has produced one of the best short books we have on the ideas of
racial equality from the early days of the American republic up to current
Supreme Court decisions. Sundquist deals with the latest doubts about the
“dream” in his final chapter. Yet in the present climate he too pulls some
of his punches and makes one wish he had pressed his case harder.
The revealing final illustration in King’s Dream, the cover of the
left-liberal magazine the Nation at the time of George W. Bush's first
inauguration in January 2001, shows an illustration by the influential
cartoonist Art Spiegelman appropriating King’s vision in a troubling way. It
features King’s dream turned to nightmare as Bush embraces Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice as the nation’s first black Secretary of State and National
Security Adviser, respectively. “The implication, of course, was that King
would be appalled not only by Bush’s election but also, and specifically, by
his appointment of conservative blacks to his cabinet”, writes Sundquist,
accurately. “The very existence of blacks like Powell and Rice appeared here
to contradict the expectation that race – at least if one is African
American – will determine one’s beliefs and political views.” That version
of King’s dream bans ideological diversity within the race and subordinates
character to colour, contradicting King’s famous aphorism that children be
judged not “by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their
character”.
Remarkably, King improvised the entire cascading vision of the “I have a
dream” section of the speech, which was not in his prepared text, in accord
with the practice of African American oratory. Yet the meaning of King’s
dream, as of the American dream itself, remains contested to this day, from
both Left and Right, partly because of the ubiquity of the speech, and
partly because King himself spoke in different voices at different times. An
African American predecessor, Frederick Douglass, adroitly sketched the
tensions in regard to Lincoln while making clear where he himself stood.
“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold,
dull, and indifferent”, wrote Douglass. “But measuring him by the sentiment
of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was
swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” A century later, King might have
said something similar about Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson. By
1864, Lincoln could write to the Kentucky newspaper editor Albert Hodges
that “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong”. Yet Lincoln felt himself bound by the Constitution in opposing
slavery, and so did King in opposing segregation and Jim Crow.
A hefty majority of African Americans shared King’s and Lincoln’s views,
despite fire and brimstone from harsher critics like Malcolm X. In a 1963
Newsweek poll of African Americans, King ranked first among fourteen top
black leaders, receiving an 88 per cent favourable rating from ordinary
citizens and a 95 per cent one from other black leaders (last was Elijah
Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, who had Malcolm X as subordinate).
Blacks voted overwhelmingly for Republican candidates from Lincoln onwards,
until the election of Kennedy in 1960.
King’s direct action movements succeeded not only because of their high
ideals, but also because of their shrewd tactics. Sundquist points out that
King “came of age along with television news”, and that along with JFK he
swiftly grasped the political importance of that medium. The power of the
dream needed the power of television images such as Alabama police dogs
attacking non-violent civil rights marchers to swing public opinion behind
the demonstrators. Such thinking animated planning of the march on
Washington itself by King and other leaders like Bayard Rustin, “the
logistical mastermind of the march”. Rustin and others showed obsessive
concern for how the media would cover the event and insisted that marchers
avoid violence and the kind of radical slogans that would alienate mass
support. A glittering array of multiracial and multireligious speakers
addressed the crowd, punctuated by songs from Joan Baez, Odetta, Bob Dylan
and Mahalia Jackson, among others. Speakers included John Lewis, King
himself, and Joachim Prinz, President of the American Jewish Congress. The
crowd itself was about one-third white. Such religious and racial blending
suited well the ringing conclusion of King’s speech, with its vision of “all
of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants
and Catholics” joining hands.
Sundquist’s provocative final chapter brings the story of America’s long
grappling with civil rights and racial equality up to the present, looking
particularly at issues of affirmative action and its evolution from an
original focus on equality of opportunity to a more compensatory version
that sometimes looks more like racial preference. Whereas one side today
cites King’s words about judging by content of character rather than colour
of skin and introduces ballot initiatives mirroring the Civil Rights Act of
1964, the other prefers King’s main foray into group rights with the
Southern Christian Leadership Council’s “Operation Breadbasket” campaign for
proportional representation in jobs.
Sundquist finds a hint of what King’s view might be now in a letter to the
editor of his manifesto Why We Can’t Wait, urging that “Any Negro Bill of
Rights based upon the concept of compensatory treatment . . . must give
greater emphasis to the alleviation of economic and cultural backwardness on
the part of the . . . white worker whose economic condition is not too far
removed from that of his black brother”. Primarily a history of ideas,
King’s Dream misses an opportunity by omitting an empirical critique of
affirmative action, not just in the United States but internationally. In
his Affirmative Action Around the World: An empirical study the economist
Thomas Sowell studied the effects of affirmative action programmes under a
variety of names in almost twenty countries, including the oldest modern
ones in India, as well as in China, Britain, Nigeria, Indonesia, Israel,
Canada, Pakistan and the former Soviet Union and its successor states. After
initial success, such programmes tend to stall. New opportunities harden
into permanent entitlements. Sowell did not find a single affirmative action
programme that ever disappeared because it had succeeded. Predictions of the
temporary nature of such policies quietly fade away, leaving vast
bureaucracies for monitoring and enforcement in place in government,
educational institutions and business.
King’s glimpse of a shift from racial to economic forms of affirmative action
prefigures the thinking of America’s first black President, who during the
recent campaign prominently declared his own daughters “privileged” and
therefore outside the scope of such programmes. He may find one of his
greatest challenges is to combat not only the vestiges of the tyranny of
categorization by colour, but also the more recently entrenched forces of
some of its former remedies.
Eric J. Sundquist
KING’S DREAM
320pp. Yale University Press. £16.99 (US $26).
978 0 300 11807 0
George Bornstein was Professor of English Language and Literature at
the University of Michigan until his retirement in 2006. His books include
Palimpsest: Editorial theory in the humanities, 1993, Material Modernism:
The politics of the page, 2001, and (as editor) W. B. Yeats: Early essays,
volume 4 of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 2007.
