The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  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.