The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (55 page)

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.”
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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:

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:

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,

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.

In fact, in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, King clearly stated that his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream.”
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When King confronted the massive and abusive legal, social, and political structures that thwarted the materialization of Afro-American freedom, justice, and equality in any concrete sense, he appealed to these documents in calling for the realization of the norms and ideals they espoused. King said in Washington, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’”
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King believed, despite the fact that black people were slaves when this creed was written, that any fair-minded interpreter would be bound to enlarge its vision of liberty and equality to include all people. The principles articulated in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence struck an authentic chord of truth for King that could not be nullified even by the shortsightedness of their original authors in regard to people of color. These documents provided a substantial foundation for American society to accord all people the status of persons with rights. King stated: “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
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King refused to permit the interpretation of democracy, liberty, justice, and freedom to be monopolized by those who would truncate and distort the understanding of American history and ideals. King refused to allow either the overt
barbarity of bigoted segregationists like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council or the covert but no less pernicious racism of prejudiced politicians to define democracy. On the rhetorical battleground of American public ideology, King wrested from them the prerogative of describing and defining what is authentically American, and in the process transformed the terms of American political and civil discourse. Martin Luther King’s moral vision, then, which was rooted in Afro-American religion and which advanced a creative American moral hermeneutic, was a powerful and often persuasive means for structuring a protest movement to secure basic rights for black Americans.

Another way of accounting for King’s heroic character and genius is his insistence on militant nonviolence as the means of obtaining freedom, justice, and equality for black people. King’s advocacy of militant nonviolence was important for two interrelated reasons. First, it appealed to the African-American religious heritage of black culture, while linking that heritage to other powerful models of resistance and social transformation. Second, it presumed the heroic character of everyday black folk to resist evil and located transformative agency within their grasp.