African-American History

Memories of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are annually rekindled by the national commemoration of the date of his birth, even as the details of  his struggles blur in our collective memory. THE BLACK COLLEGIAN was founded in 1970, two years after Dr. King was assassinated. College students were deeply involved in the movement symbolized by him, especially those who served through the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or SNCC.  Those 30-years-old and under have no personal recollection of Dr. King’s era. This article is intended to help the college generation answer the question of  “How Fares the Dream?"

For Dr. King, everything was on fast forward: B.A. degree from Morehouse College at 19; B.D. degree in Divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary at 22, a Ph. D. and leader of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott at age 26, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize at age 35; the youngest person so honored. From the mid-50s to his death in 1968, Dr. King became the dynamo of the massive Black rejection of legalized racial subordination and separation. During this period, he evolved into a medium in which our past and present were annealed into an energizing image of our desired future. In so doing, he generated an implicit standard now used to monitor our pace toward what a just society should be.

After leading the Montgomery Improvement Association through a successful 381-day boycott of segregated buses, Dr. King was elected head of a region-wide group of ministers, organized in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Without a doubt he was the hardest working individual in the civil rights movement. One year he delivered over 450 speeches. He often worked 15-20 hours a day.  He traveled tens of thousands of miles annually. For his community work---demonstrations, marches rallies--Dr. King was handcuffed and jailed 29 times, a record of political incarceration unmatched by any other American.

In addition to hundreds of sermons and scores of memorable letters, Dr. King wrote some 50 articles and five books, the latter now available in French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish, among other languages. One measure of his impact may be seen in the worldwide reaction to his death. Immediately following his assassination on April 4, 1968, racial disturbances erupted in 125 American cities, leaving a half dozen people dead. Schools and community centers, streets and avenues, boulevards and bridges throughout the United States were named after him. In Rome, Italy, his name was given to a middle school. In Sweden, a grand space in front of the University of Uppsala was named Martin Luther King Plaza. In Israel was planted the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Forest. Over three dozen nations have issued commemorative stamps bearing his image. Artists in many countries have rendered his likeness in drawings, paintings and sculptures.

Beyond accounts of the life of Dr. King arises the question: How Fares the Dream? In his 1956 prophecy that, “We can get rid of segregation in most areas of  American life by 1963,” did indeed foretell the end of legal racial segregation and discrimination through the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964  and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  However, the prediction failed to anticipate the rising white backlash, which was to burst forth in the 1970s and 1980s to dilute the Dream for the next generation.

Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963 was an eloquent voicing of the venerable African-American liberation dream dating to the 1790s’ Reverend Richard Allen, Black America's first Black public spokesperson. Standing behind a bank of microphones, Dr. King refined the contents of the Dream and the complexities connected with its attainment. At that time, Dr. King recognized that, “We are all in this together: ministers, professional people and the masses.” He proposed these tactics: keep the struggle non-violent; use the ballot to the full; cultivate allies; continue to protest brutality; press for economic as well as social justice and combat racism everywhere. He envisioned a nation converted in “an oasis of freedom and justice” in which could be heard “a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

During the 30-odd years since Dr. King’s death, the Dream has been buffeted bya discordant three-fold conservatism: 1) the 1970s federal slow down on civil rights issues, 2) the 1980s rejection of affirmative action seen as a return to “true Americanism,” and 3) the 1990s pseudo racial “color-blindness” as a social reality.

The election of 1968 made Richard Nixon president and George Wallace the apostle of white supremacy, both being opponents of Dr. King’s Dream. Together they signaled harder times for African Americans whose greatly increased presence in electoral politics was insufficient to maintain all of the gains of the King  Years.

White resistance to African-American advances increased almost in direct proportion of the civil rights shift from politics to economics and from the South to the North. The national coalition of African Americans and whites weakened. The moral cohesion of many African-American communities eroded to the point that many of the low-income areas were hazardous to life and limb. At the 1981 U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings, witnesses concluded that the majority group’s social focus changed from responding to complaints of racial and gender discrimination to supporting calls for the reduction or even elimination of affirmative action and equal opportunity programs. Neither the Southern Christian Leadership Conference nor the NAACP appear to have prepared for a major withdrawal of federal support for a Dream hitherto seen as improving America.

On the other hand, the decade saw the emergence of academic interest in the history and culture of African-American people in the context of  America’s larger experience. This unanticipated development led to a revitalization of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, which changed Black History Week to Black History Month. Over 200 predominantly white higher education institutions had some sort of African-American or Black Studies programs or units. In 65 institutions, students could earn a B.A. degree from curricula centered on research and study involving persons and communities of color. The boastful 1980s have been called the Reagan Years by some, and White Nationalism by others, a period when mainstream white males attempted to picture themselves as hapless victims of reverse racial discrimination. President Ronald Reagan tried to justify the nation’s shift from the inclusion goals of the Civil Rights Movement with the slogans “America is Back” and “It’s Morning Again in America.”  Reaganomics called for partiality toward America’s wealthy “supply siders” whose bounty would be Bush. As an act of benevolence, this suggested that the affluent bestriding the corridors of power would furnish a “thousand points of light” to illuminate the hovels of  poverty. Far more attention was given to the defense build-up, with its “Star Wars” fantasy of an automatic anti-missile umbrella covering the rich and poor alike. In 1986, Congress and the president did heed Congressman John Conyers 18-year-old plea that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday of January 15 be made an official holiday, an action which respected the past more than it forecast the future.

The decade of the 1990s opened with the rancorous nomination and appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court of the stunningly conservative African-American Clarence Thomas who, throughout the period kept his promise to be a “color-blind" Associate Justice, with consequences mocking the values and visions of his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, as well as those of Dr. King and the civil rights advocacy communities. The idealized inclusion Dream of the 60s was smothered in the 1990s by the pseudo color-blindness of a false race-gender neutrality in the conduct of our common life. The use of the phrase  “affirmative action” was seen as undemocratic special pleading. The demonizing of the word “liberal” was in vogue.

At the start of the new millennium, the Dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was far from being a reality. Conservatism is still on the increase threatening the considerable social and economic gains African Americans have made since Dr. King's assassination. As such, African Americans need to revive the moral fervor contained in the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in order to make his dream a reality of developing a truly colorblind society, which is inclusive for all in America.

Dr. Russell L. Adams is the chairman of the Department of African-American Studies at Howard University.