On August 28th, we celebrated the 55th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s widely celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech. The only part of this sixteen-minute speech that most of us ever learn or recall is, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” For most of us, this is the extent of our knowledge of this event and Martin Luther King.
It’s not an accident that public memory has fixated on this one specific sentence from this particular King speech. Taken out of context, this line has been co-opted and distorted to maintain the system of white supremacy behind a veiled curtain of colorblind rhetoric. Many in the majority group have inaccurately interpreted this line to mean that King aspired to a society that is colorblind, a society in which we pretend that race does not matter or impact our lives. Nothing could be further from what King was articulating. King advocated racial consciousness, not racial obliviousness.
It is curious that we have not fixated on another line from the same speech. How might our national politics look and how might we understand race and racism today if instead we all remembered and celebrated the line, “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.” If this line were lodged in public memory it would speak to the need for policies that affirmatively work to offset the accumulation of historical injustices that people of color face everyday.
King understood this history very well, too well for comfort for many in the majority group who were threatened by his message. This is precisely why the dominant white historical narrative of this country has sanitized King and his legacy for public consumption in an effort to make him a palatable hero for mainstream white culture. If people studied King and understood the full scope of what he spoke out against in his lifetime, many would be opposed to most everything King stood for.
The mainstream narrative of King does not discuss or acknowledge the King who referred to capitalism as inherently destructive and inconsistent with democracy. We never mention in polite company the King who once referred to the United States as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” And we certainly never recognize the King who called for reparations not just for those who inherited the consequences of historical racial injustice but also for poor people of all colors.
Having achieved major legislative victories for racial justice with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in 1968 King set his sights on a Poor People’s Campaign aimed at achieving economic justice for all workers. Given his previous success as an organizer and orator of social justice, the launch of this campaign sent shock waves and fear through those who had everything to lose from the demands of a multi-racial democratic coalition demanding social and economic justice. By April of 1968 King was assassinated, and just two months later Bobby Kennedy, who posed a similar threat to power, was also assassinated.
King understood better than anyone in modern history the power of democratic movements and intersectional coalitions. King held a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from Morehouse College, and his ability to use his Sociological Imagination and clearly articulate complex issues, educate, and motivate people was unparalleled. King’s radical legacy currently lies in hibernation, waiting for the next generation of leaders to rediscover it and move the arc of the moral universe one step closer towards justice and the realization of his dream. As former Senator Ted Kennedy once observed, “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
The Sociological Post 