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A dream dishonored after 30 years
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff
Certain phrases from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s I
Have a Dream speech are nearly as well-known to Americans today as lines
from Abraham Lincolns Gettysburg Address. Yet according to an
expert on King, many Americans have forgotten -- or perhaps never knew -- what
the civil rights leaders now-familiar words meant to the man who uttered
them.
The result, according to Roger D. Hatch, a professor of religion
at Central Michigan University, is that Kings 1963 message has been
twisted and exploited by opponents of civil rights.
Hatch summed up his findings in a paper delivered at this
years national meeting of the American Academy of Religion, held in
Orlando, Fla., in late November. The paper was titled Martin Luther King
Jr. After 30 Years: Trivializing, Distorting and Ignoring His Vision.
Kings I Have a Dream speech became linked to the
civil rights leader as no other words he uttered. Since he spoke them from the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, his name is rarely uttered except
in conjunction with the word dream.
Unfortunately, says Hatch, just as the Lorraine Hotel has become a
civil rights museum, a monument to Kings assassination there on April 4,
1968, some of Kings most ardent ideals seem frozen in time.
Much has transpired to further the cause of racial equality since
Kings death, but for some who were deeply inspired by his ringing call
for justice in 1963 -- justice that rolls down like waters and
righteousness like a mighty stream -- the distance of 30 years can be
traced just as well by ambivalence, setbacks and political games as by any
lasting signs of integration.
Silly season of nostalgia
The distortions are particularly evident, Hatch said, from Jan.
15, Kings birthday, through the end of Black History Month in February.
Hatch calls this annual six-week period the silly season of King
nostalgia -- a time when King is dishonored by efforts to honor him.
In a predictable array of winter rituals, Hatch said, King
is portrayed as a dreamer, as standing for motherhood, apple pie and
Chevrolet. Americans are subjected to platitudinous, vacuous
speeches -- speeches that inspire good feelings and ignore the setbacks
to racial equality that have marked the years since Kings death.
You can buy every manner of kitschy item with Dr.
Kings face on them, Hatch said -- and pay for them with credit
cards bearing Martin Luther Kings face.
One mark of the problem, he said, is the way Kings speech is
often referenced today. All too frequently, Hatch said, it is by this line,
which comes toward the end of Kings famous speech:
I have a dream that my four 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.
That line, when removed from the context of the rest of the
speech, suggests that it is the character of the black person that is on trial
rather than the character of a nation. Yet the speech, taken as a whole, is a
harsh indictment of the national character, a demand for justice and equality
in education, in housing and in access to the benefits of a free society
historically denied to blacks.
The irony, Hatch said, is that King is not only dishonored but
exploited. The character line has become a weapon in the hands of
those who propose a colorblind society -- that is, people who oppose
racial justice in general and affirmative action in particular.
Some who use Kings words even hope to repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
which prohibits discrimination by any business or institution that receives
federal contracts.
Prelude to harder work
King was no fool, Hatch said. He foresaw the hard work ahead. In
his final book, Where Do We Go From Here, published in 1967, King
recognized that the decade leading from the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of
1955-56 to adoption of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, however difficult an
era, was only a prelude to harder work.
Those who came together in those years were the best of
America, he wrote, but they were not all of America. Outside
of those stalwart marchers and champions, commitment is shallow, he
said. He knew that full educational equality, creating jobs and abolishing
slums were far harder than passing laws.
What King could not have foreseen, he said, was
how formidable the opposition would be in resisting even those civil rights
gains that King himself was able to see during his lifetime ... nor could he
have foreseen how his opponents in the struggle for racial justice would twist
his own words until they were routinely used as a weapon against measures
seeking more racial justice.
The undermining of Kings vision at the highest American
political levels, according to Hatch, began with Gov. George Wallace, who
personally stood at the door of the University of Alabama to keep black
students from entering. It continues right up to the present, in the Clinton
administration, he said.
Among highlights of the opposition:
- Wallace made bids for the U.S. presidency in four successive
elections from 1964 to 1975. Though unsuccessful in gaining the highest office,
he succeeded in breaking up the Roosevelt coalition in the Democratic party and
galvanized a group of voters who would later be known as Reagan
Democrats.
- Richard Nixon sought to divide white and black voters by
portraying the Democratic Party as the black party. He ousted or fired
officials who favored enforcing desegregation laws, including Holy Cross Fr.
Theodore Hesburgh, retired president of the University of Notre Dame who
chaired the Civil Rights Commission. Nixon fought vigorously against
busing, the new code word for race, vowing to oppose it
at all costs.
- Nixons successor, Gerald Ford, opposed affirmative
action in universities and opposed busing as a means of desegregating schools,
even when ordered by the courts.
- Jimmy Carter, Fords successor, sent mixed messages on
race, appointing many black Americans to government and judicial positions. But
he also named Griffin Bell as attorney general. Bell belonged to two segregated
mens clubs in Atlanta and had tried to block school desegregation in
Georgia.
- Ronald Reagan symbolically opened his 1980 campaign in
Philadelphia, Miss., where four civil rights workers had been killed in 1964,
and called for a return to states rights. His politics of racial
backlash included a judicial campaign against affirmative action.
- George Bush continued Reagans anti-affirmative action
agenda and became the first president to veto a civil rights bill. But, said
Hatch, his most cynical and perhaps most long-lasting move was the 1991
appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. The conservative
Thomas, a black man who opposes affirmative action, took the seat previously
held by the liberal Thurgood Marshall, architect of the civil rights
movements legal strategy.
As for education, the enduring legacy of the
Reagan-Bush era is a retreat from school desegregation as a goal,
Hatch said.
- While President Bill Clinton has pushed programs that would
reduce racial discrimination in education, job training and health care, and
appointed blacks to high posts, he has also been responsible for eliminating
traditional welfare, rejecting race-specific solutions to problems related to
urban poverty and advocating capital punishment for an ever expanding
list of federal crimes. The president went so far in a talk to black
ministers in 1993 as to suggest that if King were alive today he would be
backing Clintons most recent crime bill.
Clinton advocates personal responsibility -- a theme, Hatch said,
that is reserved exclusively for speeches before black
audiences.
Twisting his words
Such political maneuvering is often given a gloss of justice when
Kings own words are twisted, taken out of context and watered down, Hatch
said. Opponents of Kings view of racial justice have tried to get
the image of King the dreamer to crowd out and overpower every other aspect of
Kings life and work.
Twisting language, Hatch said, was part of the campaign in
California two years ago for Proposition 209, which prohibited public
universities from considering race in admissions decisions. Kings words
are distorted to suggest that King would have favored what the Reagan
administration called colorblindness -- that is, denying blacks an
edge through affirmative action programs. Opponents of affirmative action
unabashedly assert that the goal of abolishing preferences based on race and
gender is in keeping with Kings dream of a colorblind America.
In a further assault on language, Ward Connerly, a black
businessman from Sacramento, Calif., and others have formed the American Civil
Rights Institute, an organization whose name suggests the opposite of what it
stands for: promoting repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Affirmative action
Another example, Hatch said, is a recent book by Terry Eastland,
Reagan administration activist, called Ending Affirmative Action: The Case
for Colorblind Justice. Throughout the book, Hatch said, Eastland uses
lines from Martin Luther Kings 1963 speech and other examples from the
civil rights movement in support for his argument that affirmative action is
a bargain with the devil.
Yet, said Hatch, the Sunday before King was shot in 1968, he gave
a sermon denouncing the bootstrap philosophy -- the belief that
blacks can pull themselves out of poverty -- without aid from society. The
sermon was titled Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.
When conservatives quote from the 1963 speech to advocate
colorblindness, they ignore the core of the message: Kings
portrait of blacks shackled by segregation and discrimination and mired in
poverty, said Hatch.
In many ways, he said, America today is no closer, and possibly
further removed, from the realization of Kings dream.
Setbacks to school desegregation under an increasingly
conservative Supreme Court have prompted almost a return to the 102-year-old
doctrine of equal but segregated schools, Hatch said.
Affirmative action has been severely limited in the courts and
what laws remain are under continued assault.
Meanwhile, those who remember King and rallied to his vision in
the 1960s are getting older. To many of a younger generation, the civil rights
leader is one-dimensional, another face in a history book.
King knew that the road to full racial equality, to a just
society, would be hard, Hatch said. What he didnt know was how hard it
would be just to keep from losing ground.
National Catholic Reporter, January 15,
1999
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