Dr. Michael Eric Dyson was the guest on Talk of the Nation this morning. Dyson has written a new book entitled "April 4, 1968" about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and its effect on America. In the interview, Dyson talked about the temptation to construct MLK mythologies that ultimately fit our own agendas. These mythologies are the result of a combination of amnesia and nostalgia. He put it this way: "Whites want [Dr. King] clawless; blacks want him flawless." Dyson explained in the interview:
Many white Americans have denied that Martin Luther King, Jr. was hounded and harassed for most of his public career in America. The FBI failed to warn him of credible death threats. White racist hate groups were out to get him. And millions applauded when King's death was announced...[We forget] that many white Americans felt him to be, as the second in command at the FBI called him, the most dangerous Negro leader in America. Now we have removed those claws...His danger has been sweetened. His threat has been removed.
This reminds me of the time California Republicans used images of Dr. King at the 1963 March on Washington and perhaps that speech's most famous line ("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.") in advertisements attacking affirmative action. (Dyson discusses this episode in his exceelent book "I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.")
Dyson describes the second half of the clawless/flawless trap:
On the other hand, many African-American people...want [Dr. King] to be this perfect icon of saintly achievement without the marks of his striving, without the failures and his foibles and his fragility in the flesh; they don't want to acknowledge that he made mistakes.
In this fascinating and wide-ranging interview, Dyson goes on to talk about how King wrestled with death, came to grips with it, and used it for his cause. Toward the end, King was so sure of his impending death that he suffered from fits of hiccups that would last for hours. He felt safest in rooms with no windows, but really did not feel safe at all. Still, King pressed on.
Dyson also says that he thinks King would have supported women's rights and gay rights. This assertion and the form in which it is given - a fictional interview in "April 4, 1968" between Dyson and King - has been highly controversial. Dyson acknowledged on Talk of the Nation that he has no way of knowing this for sure and admits he may be guilty of some mythologizing of his own. But Dyson is confident that this is where King would have ended up, had the trajectory of his convictions been given a chance to run their course.
I had hoped to read "April 4, 1968" and offer a review before tomorrow's anniversary. I just haven't had the time and probably won't for a while. Instead, I've decided to post a short excerpt from "April 4, 1968" (from the NPR website).
You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death. You might hear the words "I have a dream," but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is – and was – death that ultimately defined him. Born into a culture whose main solace was Christianity's Promised Land awaiting them after the suffering of this world, King took on the power of his race's presumed destiny and found in himself the defiance necessary to spark change. He ate, drank, and slept death. He danced with it, he preached it, he feared it, and he stared it down. He looked for ways to lay it aside, this burden of his own mortality, but ultimately knew that his unwavering insistence on a non-violent end to the mistreatment of his people could only end violently….
From the time he began to speak out, King was haunted by death – mugged by the promise of destruction for seeking an end to black indignity and the beginning of equality with whites. After a few years spent up North acquiring his education, King chose to return to where he would be needed most in the coming years—the white-hot center of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and Montgomery, Alabama. At twenty-six he took on the responsibilities of a Baptist pulpit, joining forces with the local NAACP, and dug in for the year-long bus boycott created to end the Jim Crow law of racial segregation in public transportation. During this conflict his house was bombed—his wife Coretta and their ten-week-old daughter Yolanda were home, but escaped injury. It was the first time King would be tested with violence aimed at his life, but far from the last. Later in the boycott a shotgun blast was fired into King's home. King did not capitulate, but instead he emerged from the ashes of these attempts as the true Phoenix of the newly minted movement. Once again, his mortality challenged, he accepted his calling without hesitation.
A couple of years after the boycott ended, King was in Harlem at Blumstein's department store signing Stride Toward Freedom, his account of the movement's success. From out of nowhere, a clearly disturbed black woman, Izola Ware Curry, sunk a letter opener into his chest after asking if he was Martin Luther King. Though considered an act of instability, this attack was still colored by Curry's irrational hatred of what King and the NAACP were trying to do, and by her own fear of being killed because of his constant stirring of the pot. Even so, it was one of the rare instances of black public hate directed at King, the kind that would later be famously associated with his colleague and competitor Malcolm X.
As he took flight to snip the bullying wings of Jim Crow, King ruffled the feathers of white racists who grew more determined to bring him down. There was striking physical intimidation of King. In a show of naked aggression, two white cops attempted to block his entry into a Montgomery courtroom for the trial of a man who had attacked his comrade Ralph Abernathy. Despite a warning from the cops, King poked his head inside the courtroom looking for his lawyer to help him get inside. His actions ignited their rage. The policemen twisted his arm behind his back and manhandled him into jail. King said the cops "tried to break my arm; they grabbed my collar and tried to choke me, and when they got me to the cell, they kicked me in." A photographer happened by to capture the scene. The shot of King – dressed in a natty tan suit, stylish gold wristwatch and a trendy snap-brim fedora – wincing as he is banished to confinement is an iconic civil rights image.
As King addressed the 1962 convention of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a two hundred pound young white man rushed the stage and landed a brutal blow on his left cheek. The crowd reacted in hushed disbelief. The diminutive King never flinched or retreated, even as the young brute delivered several more blows, first to the side of his face as he stood behind King, and then two blows to his back. King gently spoke to his attacker as he continued to pummel his body. He knocked King backward as the orator dropped his hands – legendary activist Septima Clark, in attendance that day, said King let down his hands "like a newborn baby" – and faced his assailant head on.
Finally, SCLC staff leader Wyatt Tee Walker and others intervened as King pleaded, "Don't touch him! Don't touch him. We have to pray for him." King quietly assured the young man he wouldn't be harmed. The leader and his aides retreated to a private office to talk with his assailant, who was, King told the audience when he returned, a member of the American Nazi Party. As King held an ice-filled handkerchief to his jaw, he informed the crowd he wouldn't press charges. Most in attendance were amazed at King's calm as violence flashed.
Obviously nonviolence was more than a method and a creed; it answered assault with acts of steadfast courage.
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