As We Prepare to Honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Remembered and Forgotten



“Why Have We Frozen Martin Luther King at the ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech?”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Keynote Address Delivered at Lewis and Clark College
January 15, 2007

By Dr. G. Mitchell Reyes

Tonight we gather around memory. Strange thing, to gather around memory. When we think about memory, most of us think about our own personal memories, our greatest triumphs and most painful defeats; but I’d like for us to consider another dimension of memory—what we might call collective memory, for it is true that we remember as individuals, but we also get remembered by others, and great leaders are remembered by whole societies.

The patterns by which we remember the past are curious and interesting, and so I enjoy thinking and writing about collective memory. I ask questions like “Who gets to be remembered” and “Who gets to do the remembering,” because the curious and interesting thing about public memory is that it’s anything but objective. In fact, I would suggest that the first step toward understanding public memory is realizing that it is more motivated by political desires in the present than by fidelity to the past. Once you realize that, you will realize there is no “real” Martin Luther King Jr. If anything, our commemoration marks his absence. We are here tonight because he no longer can be.

So when we remember Dr. King we do so in our own image, which leads me to my first question:
Why have we frozen Martin Luther King at the “I Have a Dream” speech? It wasn’t his final statement on race relations, it didn’t achieve much in the way of political results, and it offered no practical solutions to the racial problems of the day. It was an eloquent, beautiful, charismatic oration to be sure, but today we hold the speech up so high, we glorify it so that its light blinds us to the older, wiser thoughts of Dr. King.

Today we remember that speech for the dream, but King meant for that speech to narrate a nightmare. Today we remember King’s optimism, but we seem incapable of acknowledging his outrage. The angry, acerbic, realistic King has been lost in the shadows of his dream. The accomplished academic and public intellectual Michael Dyson notes that King has become “a convenient icon shaped in our own distorted political images. He is fashioned to deflect our fears and fulfill our fantasies. King has been made into a metaphor of our hunger for heroes who cheer us up more than they challenge or change us” (Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 3).

Tonight I will attempt to remember the older, wiser King and to ask this King some questions about contemporary racial problems. In doing so I hope to challenge us as King challenged himself. In the end, if I can encourage you to think of Dr. King in a different light and thus to free his legacy from the manacles of the dream I will consider this speech a success. I’m not interested in consensus tonight, I’m advocating we begin again the journey towards racial reconciliation by resurrecting the lost Martin Luther King.

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The youthful King of the “I Have a Dream” speech believed that appeals to conscience combined with the hope of a color-blind society would end racism. Shortly after the March on Washington, however, King came to understand these early views on race as naive at best and misleading at worst. They were naïve because King realized that racism breeds not only in the hearts and minds of men and women, but in their pocket books as well. Racism feeds off of material poverty and financial inequality, which is why race and class have been connected in this nation since its birth.

The Katrina disaster in New Orleans was only the most recent event that put this truth on spectacular display: race and class say the same thing in American culture. The mature King came to realize that in order to seriously challenge the causes of racism, Americans would need to address the conditions of poverty that produced it.

King realized his dream was naïve, but late in life he was more concerned with how it misled well intentioned citizens and was easily appropriated by ill-intentioned racists. In the former, what King called the “quasi liberal”, he saw a political philosophy “so bent on seeing all sides that it fails to become committed to either side” (King in Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 19). In the latter could be found the same old southern segregationists, individuals who used King’s dream of a color-blind society to stall programs promoting equality and racial reconciliation. Because these arguments dominate contemporary conversations about race in the US, we must take a few minutes to engage them.

Using King’s “I Have a Dream” as the basis of their authority, many of today’s race advocates have successfully undermined programs like affirmative action that are meant to level the playing field for disadvantaged minorities. These advocates assume that a color-blind society exists, and from that premise they reason that affirmative action programs are a form of reverse racism. These advocates are so severely confused that they believe King’s dream has become reality.

Ignoring the existence of inequality along racial lines, the fact that it is much more difficult for African Americans to get loans and, thus, to build wealth for example, they argue from a self-help, “bootstraps” philosophy, a philosophy that believes, everything being equal, people should succeed according to their merit.

One problem among many with this reasoning is that everything isn’t equal! Prior to the civil rights movement race was used as the sole criterion for education and employment decisions, creating such an unbalanced distribution of opportunities between races that the merit argument is simply invalid. Merit is a dependent good—it depends on a relatively even playing field. What these contemporary advocates have done is mistake King’s dream for reality, ignore facts to the contrary, and rebuke affirmative action advocates for betraying their greatest civil rights leader.

Here we see what King saw late in life, that “As an ideal, the color-blind motif spurs us to develop a nation where race will make no difference. As a presumed achievement, color-blindness reinforces the very racial misery it is meant to replace” (Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 22).

We should not pretend that the centuries of slavery and racism in this country that gave tremendous psychological and material advantages to whites can be eradicated by the simple elimination of state-sanctioned racial apartheid. As King noted, “the nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past” (King cited in Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 23).

King foresaw the coming of these arguments, and he did what he could to challenge them in the final years of his life, but even his grandiloquence couldn’t fight the overwhelming desire for a happy myth, one in which we could all pretend innocence to the persistence of racism, suspend our disbelief, and convince ourselves the dream was reality.

"The Age of Innocence"

That’s why we’ve frozen King in the shadow of the Lincoln memorial—as long as we embrace his dream we can continue to believe in our own innocence without seriously confronting the realities of racism. Indeed, since King’s assassination and his immediate sanctification among the pantheon of black saints, American racial discourse has been stuck in what I will call “the age of innocence.”

In the age of innocence racism is a private affair rather than an institutional or social problem. In the age of innocence racism is contained between racist and victim. In the age of innocence the Civil Rights movement washed America clean of its racist past. In the age of innocence white people can claim to be anti-racists, enjoy the financial benefits of being white, and refuse to acknowledge those benefits all at the same time. In this age where everyone is innocent, any social program that grants benefits to minorities based on race is an example of reverse-racism.

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The age of innocence is precisely what Tony Hall, a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, confronted in 1997 when he proposed that the U.S. government make an official apology to African Americans for the abuse “their ancestors suffered as slaves under the Constitution and laws of the United States until 1865” (House Concurrent Resolution 96, 12 June 1997).

In the late 90s Hall was surprised to find that Congress had never apologized for slavery—an astonishing and revealing fact in itself. Hall was equally surprised when his proposal generated a torrent of public debate and conflict. His office received nearly two thousand letters and calls. Some supported the idea, but a majority of the responses ranged from disagreement to blatantly racist condemnations of Hall as a Congressional representative.

The popular television pundit Chris Matthews said in response to Hall’s proposal: “We had a civil war in this country, and I hate to say it, but 600000 guys were killed, all of them white…They paid a horrible price for slavery.” David Horowitz wrote: “IF not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president…blacks in America would still be slaves. Where is the acknowledgement of black America and its leaders for those gifts?” and Dick Snider suggested that: “When only 275000 out of 27 million owned slaves, that leaves the vast majority of Americans, then and now, free of any involvement, or blame.”

Needless to say, Hall’s proposal was defeated. We are as incapable today of apologizing for slavery as our ancestors were during reconstruction.

These are arguments fresh out of the age of innocence, where most white people’s hands are clean of slavery, where the benefits of slavery are contained within the slave master/slave relationship, and where benevolent white people fought life and limb to free the poor and helpless slaves—who, of course, had no ability to help themselves, no history of resistance, and no role in abolition or the civil war.

When I hear these arguments given voice over and over in today’s conversations about race, I wonder what the older, wiser, and largely forgotten Martin Luther King would have to say, and then I remember the words he spoke two weeks before his assassination: “yes it is true . . . America is a racist society,” but even an older King balanced his realism with optimism: “For years,” the older King recalled, “I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

A reconstruction in the entire society, a revolution of values—is it possible that while the Civil Rights movement ended state sanctioned racism, 40 years later we have yet to begin the process of reconciliation? And is it possible that the process of reconciliation and real forgiveness begins with an apology? If I do someone a great harm, and I refuse to apologize, can I expect that person to be my friend, to forgive and forget, to let bygones be bygones? I think not. What I do believe, and this is my parting thought, is that if we are ever to escape the age of innocence and begin real reconciliation between the races, we must apologize, we must be willing to place the power of forgiveness in the hands of those who we have long since wronged.

This speech was found on the following website:

The York Center Memory Conference York Memorial Project Heroes of Color Project Homepage