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Canonizing Martin Luther King by
Mark Royden Winchell Holidays in America aren't what they used to be. Back when I was an elementary school student in the 1950s, February (now known as Black History Month) was a time for remembering two famous presidents--George Washington, who was the Father of Our Country, and Abraham Lincoln, who pretty much made us what we are today. We learned that Washington chopped down a cherry tree, tossed a silver dollar across the Potomac River, and weathered the worst winter ever at Valley Forge. Honest Abe was born in a log cabin, walked to Hell and back to give a woman a penny he owed her, and freed the ancestors of some dark-skinned people who lived across town. By the sixties, however, we learned that Washington was both a slaveholder and a tobacco farmer and that Lincoln was just another honkey. Their birthdays were subsequently folded into a generic President's Day, where they can now be honored with the likes of Millard Fillmore and William Jefferson Clinton. The military has Memorial Day in May and Veterans Day in November. Unfortunately, in an age of smart bombs and undeclared wars, valor on the battlefield is fast becoming a distant memory. The Fourth of July is still a good time for fireworks and a day at the beach, but after the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century, George III no longer seems quite so fearsome a tyrant. (At least, he was never accused of seducing Sally Hemmings.) Labor Day used to be a bash for blue collar workers, but union membership is down, even as industrial jobs are shipped overseas and menial tasks are performed by immigrants who managed to bypass both Ellis Island and the Border Patrol. What is perhaps our most controversial holiday honors America's first illegal alien. As it turns out, Christopher Columbus was not an intrepid explorer but a genocidal madman, who either believed he had found a short route to India or wanted to scam the Spanish monarchy into thinking he had. Although Europeans had "discovered" North America nearly five hundred years earlier, there is no Leif Erikson Day because the Vikings don't have as much political clout as the Italians. Religious holidays have fared even worse in an age of political correctness. Thanksgiving used to be a time for celebrating religious liberty--until we were reminded that, in addition to eating turkey with the indigenous inhabitants of Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims hung witches and made Hester Prynne wear that tacky red "A." For centuries, Christmas was a time of good will and peace on earth. But then, the sensitivity police told us that, even with Santa Claus, Tiny Tim, and Frosty the Snowman, the birth of Christ was an affront to Muslims and atheists.1 (The Jews never seemed to mind all that much.) So now, we have a completely secular wassail roughly coinciding with the Winter Solstice. Easter, which coincides with the Spring Solstice, was never much of a problem because it is always celebrated on a Sunday, when nobody works anyway. (Governor Meldrim Thompson did catch hell from the ACLU for flying the flag at the New Hampshire capitol at half staff on Good Friday.) The thoroughly pagan celebration of New Year's has also lost something of its gusto--with sobriety checkpoints at selected intersections throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas and every college football team with a .500 record qualifying for some "bowl" game, even if it means playing on blue Astroturf in Boise, Idaho, at 10:00 in the morning. In the wake of all this postmodern cynicism, there is one sacred holiday left on the American calendar. On the third Monday of January, the nation comes to a halt. The mail stops. The stock exchange closes. Schools across the nation shut their doors. And politicians from the President of the United States to the municipal diversity czar join arms with local black pastors to sing a rousing chorus of "We Shall Overcome." The man being honored is, of course, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. A controversial figure in his own time, King has been quickly transformed into America's only remaining secular saint. The fact that King has become such a singular national icon (and that much abused word surely applies here) may tell us more than we would like to know about our current sense of national identity. In a sense, King's martyrdom was assured by his brutal murder in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. Regardless of their ideological persuasion, Americans do not want to believe that they live in a banana republic, where murder is used as a means of solving political disputes. For that reason, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was such a transforming event in recent American history. For a time, Kennedy was elevated in death to a level of reverence that he never enjoyed in life. (The same was true of Abraham Lincoln nearly a century earlier.) But, in time, revisionist historians cut Kennedy down to size. Revelations about his reckless personal life and questions about his policies as president have reduced him to the status of a charming but flawed human being. King, however, has been spared that process of revision. To compare criticism of King to blasphemy is to understate the case. No God, except for Allah in a fundamentalist Islamic country, is considered as sacrosanct as Martin Luther King in the United States of America. As I shall try to show, this canonization of the Reverend King is evidence of nothing less than a third American founding.
A bill calling for a holiday to honor King was first introduced by Congressman John Conyers on April 8, 1968, four days after The Dreamer's death. In 1971, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference collected three million signatures on a petition asking Congress to approve a King Holiday. Congress, however, refused to act, and by 1975, only Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey had enacted such a commemoration on a state level. Part of the resistance was purely financial. The burden of yet another paid holiday seemed an extravagance in a time of economic stagnation and rising deficits. Also, many politicians were leery about conferring such an honor on a man so recently deceased. It wasn't long after the FBI building was named for J. Edgar Hoover that embarrassing information about the legendary lawman caused many to wish they could chisel his name off this public edifice. Would King's reputation be similarly tarnished by surveillance tapes that Hoover himself had instructed the FBI to make? Apparently, King's widow, Coretta, was sufficiently alarmed by the prospect that, in January 1977, she had the Southern Christian Leadership Conference file a federal suit to require the FBI to purge its files of any information gleaned from spying on her husband from 1963-68. The suit also asked that all of the Bureau's files on King be sealed until 2027. Despite apparent conflict with the Freedom of Information Act, Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ruled in favor of the SCLC and ordered the FBI files on King be sealed for fifty years and stored in the National Archives. With a mother lode of potentially damaging records hidden from public view, the forces pushing for a King Holiday stepped up their efforts. The National Council of Churches joined the campaign in the late seventies, and President Jimmy Carter urged Congress to approve King Day in 1979. That same year, Coretta King lobbied for the holiday in appearances before the Senate Judiciary Committee and before joint hearings of Congress. Then, in 1980, Stevie Wonder released "Happy Birthday," a song dedicated to King's memory. The following year, Wonder financed an office in Washington, D. C., established by the Martin Luther King Center to promote the holiday. Finally, in 1983, Mrs. King and Wonder presented Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill with petitions containing six million signatures supporting the languishing holiday legislation.2 Meanwhile, the resolve of the anti-King forces was beginning to crumble. If the sequestering of FBI files initially raised suspicion about King, it also removed the primary means of confirming that suspicion. A crucial turn in the controversy transpired when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms filed suit in federal court to obtain release of the FBI files. The failure of that suit effectively prevented an informed vote on the King Holiday. A combination of white liberal guilt and exasperation over having to revisit this issue time and again finally tipped the scales. In August 1983, the House of Representatives approved Martin Luther King Day by a vote of 338 to 90. In October, the Senate followed suit by a vote of 78 to 22. But if the political class thought the fight was over, it was sadly mistaken. For the next two decades, the civil rights establishment and its self-congratulatory allies would browbeat any state, county, or village in the nation that failed to declare a mandatory paid holiday in honor of King. The state of Arizona held out until 1992, when national pressure groups finally extorted the required homage. By then, cosmopolitan Phoenix had been shunned like a leper colony. In 1991, the National League of Cities pulled its convention out of this playground of the Sunbelt; National Football League President Paul Tagliabue threatened to relocate the 1993 Super Bowl; and the National Basketball Association decided to play its 1994 All Star game elsewhere. (Never mind the fact that Phoenix observed a local Martin Luther King holiday.) The boycott spread to the rest of the state when the University of Virginia football team declined to play in the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe. New Hampshire thought it had solved the problem when it replaced its historic Fast Day with Civil Rights Day in 1991. Because the King forces found the honoring of all who worked for civil rights to be far too general, they continued their pressure until 1999, when the legislature renamed Civil Rights Day the Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday. The following year, in what appeared to be a gesture of genuine inclusion, South Carolina approved two new state holidays--King Day and Confederate Memorial Day, even as it struck the Confederate Battle Flag from the capitol dome in Columbia. These decisions by the South Carolina legislature simply shifted the controversy to the local level. In Greenville, birthplace of King's self-appointed successor Jesse Jackson, the county council voted to observe five fixed holidays (New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas), while letting employees vote on an additional five days chosen from a list of ten. In addition to Martin Luther King Day, the options included President's Day, Good Friday, Confederate Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and the day after Christmas. Given the reaction to this seemingly Solomonic compromise, one would have thought that it had been devised by the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Jesse Jackson, who was understandably eager to shift attention from his illegitimate progeny in Chicago, came home in the spring of 2003 to denounce the County Council's "unholy" action. He brought in busloads of agitators from Atlanta and elsewhere to interrupt the council in its deliberations by shouting, singing, and grabbing microphones. When the meeting was over, they refused to leave and occupied the council chambers all night. Deathly afraid of an economic boycott, political and business leaders urged the council to give Jackson whatever he wanted. Apparently, their greatest fear was not that county workers would reject the King Holiday but that they might also vote to include Confederate Memorial Day among their five optional days off! Such craven behavior is par for the course among many business and civic leaders. Unfortunately, that is also true of the academy, where the disinterested pursuit of truth is often ignored even as a professed goal. Martin Luther King is a figure of such historic significance that one might expect his career to receive the serious scholarly scrutiny reserved for persons of his stature. And in certain places, it has. David J. Garrow's monumental biography Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1987) is a balanced and informative portrait of a flesh-and-blood human being. Too many other scholars, however, approach King the way a hagiographer approaches a saint.(As we shall see, one rhetorician who uncovered evidence of King's massive plagiarism also developed an elaborate theory to excuse this moral lapse.) When colleges celebrate King Day, the festivities are more apt to resemble an ongoing eulogy than an act of historical analysis. The example of my own school, Clemson University, is in many ways typical. At Clemson, the annual King bash is planned by a group called The Martin Luther King Enhancement Committee. A committee to study, understand, or even appreciate King might be in order. Enhancing his already formidable image sounds like a job for a public relations flack. The activities commemorating King resemble a cross between a church service and a pep rally with a high-priced outside speaker reminding us of how badly we have failed to realize the martyr's dream. These speakers are invariably left-wing blacks. (Although the militant Stalinist Angela Davis has been on the short list of prospective speakers, black conservatives are notable by their absence.) At the same time, the best students in the local secondary schools (grades 6-12) are invited to enter an essay contest to explain what Martin Luther King means to them. Of six such essays I read recently, two were convinced that King's "I Have a Dream" speech freed the slaves. Even in a time of supposed austerity, when faculty don't get cost-of-living raises and tests are written on the chalkboard because there is no money for supplies and duplication, the King committee is always lavishly funded. One year, when it looked as if the committee might not spend its entire allocation, it decided to purchase flashlights so that anyone who wished could spread The Dreamer's light into all the darkened corners of our racist society. Confederate Memorial Day has not fared nearly so well. Although it is just as much a state holiday as Martin Luther King Day, Clemson University keeps its doors open on the grounds that the second week in May is too busy a time to close. (Classes and finals are actually over by then, whereas the spring semester is a two week or two old when everything stops for King Day.) Indeed, Confederate Memorial Day is not even mentioned on the official calendar that the university distributes to students and faculty, even though just about every other separatist movement on the face of the earth is recognized. From May through August, the Clemson calendar acknowledges the independence or liberation days of the Czech Republic, Paraguay, Jordan, Samoa, Portugal, the Philippines, Iceland, Mozambique, Madagascar, Ghana, Burundi, Rwanda, Venezuela, Argentina, France, Columbia, Liberia, Peru, Niger, Bolivia, Jamaica, Cote d'Ivoire, Burma, Singapore, Ecuador, Pakistan, the Congo, India, Korea, Gabon, Indonesia, Afghanistan, the Ukraine, Uruguay, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Slovakia, Brazil, Tajikistan, Mexico, Chile, Belize, Armenia, Mali, Turkmenistan, China, Nigeria, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Zambia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Antigigua-Barbuda, Chechnya, Dominica, Panama, Cambodia, Poland, Latvia, Morocco, Lebanon, Suriname, Albania, Mauritania, Barbados, Finland, Tanzania, Haiti, Burma (again), Sri Lanka, Grenada, Lithuania, Gambia, St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic, Bosnia, Ghana (again), Tunisia, Namibia, Greece, Bangladesh, Senegal, Syria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela (again), Sierra Leone, and Israel. The university has designated June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month (Flag
Day, which is celebrated elsewhere in the country on June 14, didn't make
the cut). October 11 is National Coming Out Day, a time for "thousands
of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people . . . [to] hold workshops,
speak-outs, rallies, and other events to make the public aware of their
presence and to encourage others to 'come out,' be honest, and show their
pride." Clemson recognizes at least eight high holy days of the Baha'i
faith and an equal number of festivals of the Wiccan cult. More familiar
religious observances are also duly noted, including May 14, which is
the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed.3 (Some of his followers may fly
planes into buildings, but at least they don't sing "Dixie"
while they're doing it.) To add insult to injury, the university's Board
of Trustees scheduled spring commencement of 2002 on Confederate Memorial
Day. That way, even those benighted few who wanted to celebrate the holiday
couldn't do so if they were involved with graduation exercises. As fate
would have it, those exercises were held in the outdoor football stadium.
About midway through the ceremony, the tribal god of the Confederacy opened
up the heavens and poured a torrential rainstorm on the festivities, forcing
all involved to take sanctuary underneath the stands. When J. Edgar Hoover persuaded attorney general Robert Kennedy to spy on King, the ostensible purpose was to uncover his subversive political connections. What was more often captured on tape was evidence of King's numerous extramarital trysts. Curiously enough, as our society has become more relaxed in its sexual morality, it has shown an ever more voyeuristic interest in the erotic misbehavior of public officials. Virtually everyone in Washington knew that FDR had a mistress and that Jack Kennedy was a compulsive lecher. J. Edgar Hoover was widely rumored to be a cross-dressing homosexual, and even straight-arrow Dwight Eisenhower had a thing for his female chauffeur. But the press and fellow politicians observed a gentlemanly code of silence. The era of investigative journalism brought on by Vietnam and Watergate changed all this. Reaching back into history, not even Thomas Jefferson has been immune to salacious speculation about his private life. Nevertheless, when admirers of King such as David Garrow and Ralph Abernathy revealed that great man's weakness of the flesh, they were automatically branded as traitors. Part of the reason for this reaction no doubt lies in the fact that J. Edgar Hoover tried to blackmail King with evidence of his lechery. Hoover was so obsessed with King that he even tried to intimidate the civil rights leader into committing suicide. (Spiritually speaking, this would seem like an even more loathsome act than an outright FBI hit.) Even King's critics are apt to feel soiled using information provided by the egregious Hoover. Nevertheless, King's behavior was so reckless that it would have eventually become known even if J. Edgar Hoover had never existed. As early as March 23, 1957, long before the FBI surveillance of King had begun, the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's leading black newspapers, warned ominously that "a prominent minister in the Deep South, a man who has been making the headlines recently in his fight for civil rights, had better watch his step." Detectives hired by his opponents were hoping "to create a scandal by catching the preacher in a hotel room with a woman other than his wife, during one of his visits to a Northern city."5 No one in King's inner circle had any doubt whom the Courier was referring to. The following year, a longtime friend of King's family, Los Angeles pastor J. Raymond Henderson, issued an even more direct rebuke to his fellow man of God. He reminded "young M. L." to avoid even the "appearance of evil." ". . . . You are a 'marked man,'" Henderson continued. "All sorts of subtle attempts will be made to discredit you. Some Negroes right in Montgomery would be glad to witness your downfall. . . . One of the most damning influences is that of women. They themselves too often delight in the satisfaction they get out of affairs with men of unusual prominence. Enemies are not above using them to a man's detriment. White women can be lures. You must exercise more than care. You must be vigilant indeed."6 Far from heeding this friendly advice, King increased his extramarital activity even as he grew more prominent and became a more inviting target to his enemies. As he was out to save the world, King neglected his own family, staying on the road from twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month. During this time, he maintained continuing relationships with at least three different women, while engaging in numerous one-night stands. As Henry Kissinger once observed, "power is the greatest aphrodisiac." One aide describes a typical New York fundraising party as follows: "I watched women making passes at Martin Luther King. I could not believe what I was seeing in white Westchester women. . . . They would walk up to him and they would sort of lick their lips and hint, and [hand him] notes. . . . After I saw that thing that evening, I didn't blame him." Others, however, did blame him. In 1965 (two years after addressing the March on Washington and a year after receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace), King turned a deaf ear to warnings from two prominent colleagues in the civil rights movement, James Farmer and Wiley Branton. Again, these men were not FBI stooges but allies and friends, who were concerned about the damage King's prodigious sexual appetites posed to the cause that he championed.7 Apparently, King's behavior was not unique among civil rights activists. There was an element of licentiousness in the entire movement, which seemed to anticipate the bacchanalian excesses associated with the New Left later in the sixties. "'[T]his was not a sour-faced, pietistic' endeavor, Michael Harrington remembered. 'Everybody was out getting laid.'"8 The general situation became something of a scandal among socially conservative blacks throughout the South. Young civil rights workers who were supposed to be registering voters often spent far too much of their time living high and wild on the movement's money. Being an incredibly indulgent father figure and an indifferent administrator, King was reluctant to clean house. But then, he could hardly discipline subordinates for following his personal example. The woman who seems to have been closest to King during the final years of his life was Georgia Davis, the first black woman in the Kentucky state senate. "How did it happen?" Powers asks in her kiss-and-tell memoir I Shared the Dream. "Did we suddenly become so overcome with passion that we fell into each others'[sic] arms? Oh no, he was much too cautious for that--and so was I." (Obviously, the woman wrote her own book without professional help.) It appears that, after a few official political encounters, Martin dispatched his younger brother and official procurer, the Reverend A. D. King, to invite Georgia to a rendezvous at the Rodeway Inn in Louisville. "After that first night, I knew there was no turning back. Guilt notwithstanding, I would come whenever he called and go wherever he wanted."9 One of the places to which "M. L." summoned her was Memphis in April of 1968. But on that particular occasion, Ms. Davis would have to wait her turn. On Wednesday night, April 3, after telling an enthusiastic throng of followers that he had "been to the mountaintop," King and two of his closest colleagues, Bernard Lee and Ralph Abernathy, were invited to a steak dinner at the house of one of Martin's lady friends. After dinner, Lee and Abernathy preferred taking cat naps to pursuing a closer relationship with the two women who had been provided to keep them company. When Abernathy awoke, some time after one a. m., he noticed King and their hostess coming out of her bedroom. When they got back to the Lorraine Motel, Bernard Lee retired for the evening, but King and Abernathy noticed a light on in A. D. King's room. Although A. D. was occupied with a white woman, Georgia Davis was also there to greet Martin. Seeing that his friend had plenty of company, Abernathy excused himself and headed for the room he and Martin were sharing. Leaving the door unlocked, Ralph went to sleep around three a. m. Although King had not come back to his room by dawn, a third woman had arrived looking for him. Between seven and eight a. m., King finally made it upstairs to his floor of the motel. But instead of returning to his room, he stopped off to see the woman who had been seeking him earlier. By the time King did get back to his room, he had obviously had a fight with this most recent paramour and now implored Abernathy to call her to make things right. Unfortunately, she was so angered that she hung up on the dutiful aide after a string of abuse. Minutes later, the woman was in the room of the two legendary civil rights leaders, engaged in a shouting match with King, which ended when he shoved her across the room. Her bags packed, this young woman took the next plane out of town. That evening, King was gunned down on the hotel balcony.10 Although such revelations should not detract from King's social and political
accomplishments, they inevitably compromise the image of personal sanctity
that has surrounded the man. Everyone knew that Adam Clayton Powell was
a drunkard and a skirt chaser, and many held such behavior against him
(others saw it as an attractive part of his image as a high-living defiant
black man), but no one accused him of hypocrisy. King's message, however,
was based almost entirely on an appeal to Christian morality. Not only
were traditional notions of chastity an implicit part of that morality,
they occasionally became subjects for King's own public pronouncements.
As he told one interviewer: "Sex is basically good when it is properly
used . . . and marriage is man's greatest prerogative in the sense that
it is through and in marriage that God gives man the opportunity to aid
him in his creative activity. Therefore, sex must never be abused in the
modern world." This view of sexuality is one shared by both King's
Baptist church and Malcolm X's Islamic faith. It would seem from the available
evidence, however, that the much vilified Malcolm was actually more personally
circumspect than the saintly King.11 Although the full extent of King's plagiarism did not become widely known
until the early 1990s, evidence of his pilfering was uncovered by Ira
G. Zepp, Jr., in a Ph.D. dissertation that he completed at St. Mary's
University and Seminary in 1971. In his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958),
King appropriated "phrases, sentences, even large parts of paragraphs"
from Paul Ramsey's Basic Christian Ethics and Anders Nygren's Agape and
Eros, both of which were required reading in a course that King took at
Crozer Theological Seminary in the spring of 1951.12 What Zepp and few
other people realized at the time was that the dissertation for which
King received his doctorate in theology from Boston University in 1955
included substantial unattributed passages from a similar dissertation
written by a student named Jack Boozer, which had been accepted in that
same department three years earlier. In one of the more revealing passages in her shameless memoir, Georgia Davis Powers recalls the time in 1968 when The Dreamer got off the phone with a close advisor, the Communist apparatchik Stanley Levison: I didn't hear all the conversation, but I heard Martin repeat something
Levison said to him. After he hung up, he was still repeating this phrase.
"Cowardice asks, is it safe? Expediency asks, is it political? Vanity
asks, is it popular? But conscience asks, is it right?" He smiled, "I will use it when it is appropriate." I said, "M. L., is anything we do and say original?" He replied, "Originality comes only from God. Everything else has, is, and will be used by someone else before you."14 Pappas is surely correct in arguing that the bigger scandal is not what King did but how the intellectual community has responded to his conduct. One can argue that what a man does in his bedroom is his own business, but the fraud of plagiarism is a public transgression. At least, universities have always pretended to treat it as such. An essential part of almost every course in freshman composition is the unit on how to avoid committing this offense. Students convicted of academic dishonesty can suffer penalties ranging from a lower course grade to expulsion from school. For several years, I have sat on a university committee that adjudicates such cases. Each January, the bulletin board in the lounge where defendants wait for their cases to be heard invariably contains flyers touting the legacy of "Dr." King. The practice of plagiarism was not limited to arcane academic work, which might have been beyond King's intellectual competence, but extended as well to some of his best known public utterances. Consider, for example, the historic "I Have a Dream" speech. Building to a crescendo, King quotes the memorable first verse of Samuel Smith's patriotic song "America," beginning with "My country 'tis of thee" and ending with "Let freedom ring." There is nothing wrong with that, since just about everyone knows the song and would not take King to be its author. What very few people know is that King's fellow black minister, Archibald Carey, had quoted this same song in a speech he gave to the Republican National Convention in 1952. After citing the lines "From every mountainside / Let freedom ring," Carey concluded his address with these stirring words: "That's exactly what we mean--from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia--let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States but for . . . the disinherited of all the earth--may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!"15 If this sounds vaguely familiar to millions of Americans, it is not because of repressed memories of the 1952 Republican Convention but because King shamelessly "borrowed" his friend's rhetoric while standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. This is how the words sounded coming from King: So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. As Keith Miller points out, the incremental repetition of the words "let freedom ring" makes King's delivery more memorable than Carey's. But the speech is still derivative. Miller justifies this fact by arguing that black preachers frequently borrowed sermons from each other and generally regarded their language as a common resource from which all could freely draw in a practice Miller calls "voice merging." In any event, King's avaricious family certainly doesn't believe in sharing the rhetorical wealth. As Theodore Pappas points out, "the King estate now enforces copyrights and demands royalties on work which King often stole in the first place. In a just world, the royalties would go to the estates of Jack Boozer, Archibald Carey, Paul Tillich, and the scores of other writers, ministers, scholars, and social activists who work fell prey to King's 'voice merging.'"17 King's most famous published work is "Letter from Birmingham Jail." This is an impressive essay, which is frequently anthologized and often compared to Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government." Unlike King's sermons, the tone of his "Letter" is intellectual and even scholarly. It refers to such figures as St. Paul, St. Augustine. St. Thomas, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, and T. S. Eliot. But there are also lesser known sources King neglects to mention. Miller shows conclusively that ideas, images, and actual phrases in King's praise of nonconformity were lifted from Harry Emerson Fosdick's book Hope of the World (1933) and a sermon by H. H. Crane, neither of whom are credited directly or indirectly. King's definition of civil disobedience sounds very much like a passage published in his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958), which actually originated in an article written by Harris Wofford--a white labor and civil rights activist who later served briefly as U. S. Senator from Pennsylvania. King's argument that segregation represented a variation of what Martin Buber called the "I-It" relationship was initially suggested by George Kelsey, one of King's professors at Morehouse College. It is one thing to use hired ghostwriters, as King did for his entire career, but something else to represent previously published work as ones own thoughts and ideas. Not even King's Nobel Prize lecture was off-limits, as much of it comes directly from the sermon "Drum Major Instincts," preached by the popular radio cleric J. Wallace Hamilton in 1949.18 One could go on (and Miller does for an entire book), but the expected outrage from the media and the academy simply failed to materialize. If anything, there seemed to be an effort to ignore or even suppress the story of King's plagiarism. Theodore Pappas's book on the subject was rejected by forty different publishers until it was finally accepted by Halberg, a small firm in Tampa, Florida. By the 1990s, the investment in King's sanctity was so great that his critics had to be demonized. Despite the fact that the distinguished historian Eugene Genovese and the equally distinguished religious scholar Jacob Neusner wrote forewords for Pappas's book, it was dismissed as an irresponsible right-wing screed, and Pappas himself became the object of verbal and physical abuse, as well as several death threats. The special treatment of King began at least as far back as his student days at Boston University. The first reader on King's dissertation was L. Harold DeWolf, who had also been first reader of the dissertation by Jack Boozer, which King so thoroughly cannibalized. Even after his second reader, S. Paul Schilling, pointed out that King had "almost exactly quoted" another writer without using quotation marks, the dissertation was accepted without the requested revisions. The members of King's committee were either incredibly negligent scholars or were deliberately holding him to lesser standards than they would have expected of a white student. Although the system of racial preferences known as affirmative action had not been heard of in 1955, it is reasonable to assume that the patronizing attitude behind such preferences existed for many years before being codified. Consider, for example, the letter of recommendation written to Boston University on King's behalf by Morton Enslin, one of his professors at Crozer Seminary: The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to [the office of student body president] and be popular [in] such a situation is in itself no mean recommendation. The comparatively small number of forward-looking and thoroughly trained Negro leaders is, I am sure you will agree, still so small that it is more than an even chance that one as adequately trained as King will find ample opportunity for useful service. He is entirely free from those somewhat annoying qualities which some men of his race acquire when they find themselves in the distinct higher percent of their group.19 As Theodore Pappas points out, "King was recommended for doctoral studies for reasons other than intellectual distinction and academic achievement. . . . [On the Graduate Record Exam], he scored in the second lowest quartile in English and vocabulary, in the lowest ten percent in quantitative analysis, and in the lowest third on his advanced test in philosophy--a subject central to his doctoral thesis."20 What made King an attractive candidate for graduate study was that he was a reasonably well socialized Negro, who (in today's parlance) would add a measure of diversity to Boston University's student body and then go back South, where he could bring a pretense of intellectual culture to his backward race. Given such a circumscribed future, his academic mentors simply didn't care whether he got his footnotes right or engaged in original scholarship? They apparently reasoned that the words and ideas he stole from white folks were likely to be better than anything he could come up with on his own, and the members of his congregation would probably be too dumb to know the difference. Those who support honoring King might argue that his impact on American history does not ultimately depend on his having been either a model husband or a towering intellectual. Because the civil rights movement he led profoundly transformed our society in ways that most people approve of, persons across the political spectrum have been quick to claim the King legacy. It is every bit as important for present day Americans to get right with King as it was for their ancestors to get right with Lincoln. Some of King's best informed admirers believe that such facile and universal approval threatens to distort and eviscerate what King actually stood for. In a sermon delivered at Riverside Church in New York in July 1998, the Reverend Charles Adams made just such a point. According to Adams, "the ease-ee-est way to get rid of Martin Luther King, Jr., is to worship him. . . . It is easier to praise a dead hero than to recognize and follow a living prophet. The best way to dismiss any challenge is to exalt and adore the empirical source through which the challenge has come."21 It therefore seems only reasonable to ask what it is we venerate when we venerate Martin Luther King. For years right-wing opponents of King have suggested that he was little better than a Communist stooge. For almost his entire public career, the good doctor relied heavily on the counsel of Stanley D. Levison. (References to Levison take up more than half a column in the index to Garrow's highly favorable biography of King.) Not only was Levison a trusted advisor to King during most of his public career, he was also a longtime member and important financial backer of the American Communist Party.22 Although no informed person denies these facts, many try to minimize their importance. Leftist historians and journalists ignorant of history often depict concern about domestic Communism in the forties and fifties as the paranoid delusions of Senator McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. These days, it is not uncommon to read wire service stories suggesting that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were victims of a national witch hunt and that Paul Robeson was nothing more than an early advocate of civil rights. In fact, Hiss and the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies, while Robeson was an unrepentant Stalinist. Unlike the manufactured threat recently posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Soviet Union was an actual superpower with real weapons of mass destruction, which had been obtained through its covert influence in American society. In retrospect, it does not appear that our national security was compromised by King's association with Levison and a couple of other Communists who briefly passed through his movement. However, concern about Communist influence in the civil rights movement was not inherently irrational. An accurate history of the times would show that it was not the American right but democratic socialists who were most concerned about keeping progressive political movements free of Communist taint. (Many conservatives assumed that the difference between Communism and socialism was merely one of degree rather than kind, anyway.) Some leftists date their disaffection with the Soviet Union from the time that Stalin expelled Leon Trotsky from that country in 1929; others became disillusioned in the thirties during the Spanish Civil War or the infamous Moscow Show Trials; for still others the decisive turning point was the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. By the late 1940s, left-wing anti-Communists had formed the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in our own country. If George Orwell was the most famous anti-Communist on the left, the most typical may have been the contributors to R. H. S. Crossman's The God That Failed. A symposium of six former Communists (Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender), this book speaks with the authority of experience. Anyone interested in the way that Communists exploited the aspirations of black people should read Richard Wright's essay in this volume or the relevant section of his memoir American Hunger. Democratic leftists who opposed Communism and its henchmen made a serious (and sometimes difficult) moral choice. King's failure to extirpate Communist influence from his own movement and his decision to lie to both John and Robert Kennedy about the matter was also a serious moral choice. Ironically, his decision led to the wiretapping that inadvertently exposed his seamy sex life. If it is imprecise to accuse King of being an actual Communist, it is absurd to think of him as any kind of conservative. And yet, the effort to get right with King has caused many neoconservatives to wrap themselves in his mantle. This would have been unimaginable during King's lifetime. When Barry Goldwater, the foremost conservative of his generation, received the Republican nomination for president in 1964, King denounced the choice as "unfortunate and disastrous" because Goldwater articulated "a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist." Three years later, he was even harsher in his criticism of Ronald Reagan, saying, "When a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor, can become a leading war hawk candidate for the presidency only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events."23 During the sixties, one could find criticism of King and the entire civil rights agenda in such mainstream conservative magazines as Modern Age, Human Events, and the Freeman. But nowhere were the denunciations more pointed than in the pages of National Review and the writings of its acerbic editor William F. Buckley, Jr. At that time conservatives believed in the sovereignty of local government, while distrusting the federal leviathan. When King won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, the black conservative George S. Schuyler, wrote the following: Although accustomed to seeing the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a succession of pious frauds for the purposes of political propaganda, the leading Norwegian newspapers were shocked and puzzled when they got the announcement that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the peripatetic parson, was the 1964 recipient. . . . [N]either directly nor indirectly has Dr. King made a contribution to the world (or even domestic) peace. Methinks the Lenin Prize would have been more appropriate for him, since it is no mean feat for one so young to acquire sixty Communist-front citations, according to the U. S. government. . . . Dr. King's principal contribution to world peace has been to roam the country like some sable typhoid-Mary, infecting the mentally disturbed with the perversion of Christian doctrine, and grabbing lecture fees from the shallow-pated.24 By the time that King had become a national hero with his own holiday, many self-proclaimed conservatives were singing a much different tune. The administration of John Silber, the neoconservative president of Boston University, defended King against charges of plagiarism committed at the university he now headed. Nearly a decade earlier, Congressmen Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich had been among the most passionate advocates of a King Holiday. The editors of the American Spectator also joined in the effort to redefine the good doctor's legacy. In its November 1986 issue, the magazine published an article called "Giving Shape to Cultural Conservatism," in which Reagan's chief education advisor, Chester "Checker" Finn, proposed a patriotic calendar that stressed the achievements of King and the triumph of the civil rights movement. Lectures sponsored by such mainstream conservative organizations as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Institute for Humane Studies regularly extol King as a model for conservatives. Think tanks and legal foundations such as the Center for Equal Opportunity and the American Civil Rights Institute ritualistically invoke King's name in their opposition to racial preferences. Designer conservatives such as Dinesh D'Souza, Lynne Cheney, Roger Kimball, Charles Sykes, and Linda Chavez have all claimed King as an ideological and spiritual ally. Not surprisingly, Harry Jaffa places him in the Lincoln tradition. Dan Himmelfarb, writing in the May 1988 issue of Commentary, saw him as the endpoint of the "Western Liberal Tradition." Bill Bennett has a stock speech called "The Conservative Virtues of Martin Luther King."25 One might be amused by this appropriation of the King pedigree, except for the total absence of irony in the endeavor. Several commentators have noted that King's "conservative" hagiographers tend to be recent converts--i. e.,neocons--or (as in the case of the bratpack that now runs National Review) prodigies who were in diapers when James Earl Ray slew The Dreamer. Such folks either marched with the saints from Selma to Birmingham or wished they had. The King they lionize is the man who led the Montgomery bus boycott, who helped to desegregate lunch counters, who marched for the right to vote, and who longed for a day when his four little children would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." As long as King was fighting the forces of institutional bigotry in the South, he was on the side of the angels. And that is the man his "conservative" admirers choose to remember. It is no wonder that the black radical Michael Eric Dyson decided to put an end to this disingenuous nonsense by publishing an account of King's authentically revolutionary views. There is very little in Dyson's I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000) that couldn't have been gleaned from Garrow's earlier biograpahy. Dyson's book, however, is half as long as Garrow's tome and is devoted exclusively to rescuing King from those who would turn him into a house nigger for the establishment. The term "Uncle Tom" is so frequently abused by people who have never read Harriet Beecher Stowe that one is reluctant to invoke it here. But that is exactly what the popular image of Martin Luther King amounts to. Stowe's hero was an exemplary Christian who prayed for those who abused him. He longed for freedom but would never do anything unethical to achieve it. (In his refusal of Simon Legree's command to beat his fellow slaves, he even practiced a form of civil disobedience.) The end result of his submissiveness was to change the hearts of his oppressors. The real Martin Luther King may also have been interested in changing hearts, but he was even more concerned with altering the basic institutions of American society. Back in the 1960s, the John Birch Society used to circulate a picture postcard of a very young Martin Luther King at the Highlander Folk School, an alleged Communist front nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. The implication is that King's radicalism was deeply rooted even before he began his public career. Other observers believe that King was well within the mainstream of American progressivism as long as he was battling Jim Crow practices in the South. If the task was not easy, at least it was simple in the sense that legally enforced segregation was a specific and visible target. Also, it was a battle that required nothing of northerners other than sitting in front of their TV sets and cheering on the forces of righteousness. When King moved his operation north, there were no segregation laws to attack. Theoretically, black kids could attend public schools with their white contemporaries. But de facto segregation in housing, combined with the practice of using real estate taxes to finance education, meant that the public schools in many northern cities were both separate and unequal. Even more disturbing was the absence of the kind of stable black community that had sustained the civil rights movement in the South.26 A different situation required a different strategy. In 1965, when King began to focus his attention on the misery of the black proletariat in Chicago, he concluded that nothing short of an economic revolution would bring social justice to America. Although he was too discreet to call for socialism in his public utterances, he was far more frank when addressing his inner circle. Speaking to his staff in 1966, King said: We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with . . . capitalism. . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.27 One wonders how many members of the various chambers of commerce who lobby for a King Holiday would support such a position. Neoconservatives who argue that King would oppose racial preferences were he alive today are obviously ignorant of positions he took during his lifetime. In his book Why We Can't Wait (1964), he wrote: "[I]t is obvious that if a man is entered in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat to catch up with his fellow runner." He went on to tell of a conversation he had with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru concerning "the difficult problem of the untouchables, a problem not unrelated to the American Negro dilemma." In addition to passing anti-discrimination laws and spending "millions of rupees annually developing housing and job opportunities in villages heavily inhabited by untouchables," the Indian government required that when "two applicants compete for entrance into a college or university, one of the applicants being an untouchable and the other of high caste, the school is required to accept the untouchable." When King's traveling companion, Lawrence Reddick, asked the prime minister if this didn't amount to discrimination, Nehru replied, "Well it may be. But it is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustice we have inflicted upon these people."28 King clearly advocated that America go forth and do likewise. It is unclear whether King would have endorsed the payment of outright reparations to African Americans, but he agreed with the principle behind this demand and saw both affirmative action and social welfare programs as down payments on the debt that America owed to the descendants of slaves. A few pages after describing his encounter with Nehru, King drives this point home: No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. . . . Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.29 It should be noted that King made this observation before he was radicalized
by his experience in the Windy City. Although one could have opposed the Vietnam War on conservative grounds (Richard Russell warned against our getting involved in a ground war in Asia, and J. William Fulbright helped lead a principled opposition to the conflict in the U. S. Senate),31 King's anti-war rhetoric was tainted by the same hatred of America and unblinking admiration for Third World butchers that would later become commonplace in the oratory of the New Left. He was also dismayed by the fact that the war machine was diverting needed resources from the welfare state. A paleoconservative might believe that, in regard to Vietnam, King took the right position for the wrong reasons. His neoconservative admirers, who believe that the sun should never set on the Stars and Stripes, have no choice but to ignore virtually everything The Dreamer said about foreign policy. It could be argued that the unthreatening image of King, appealing to the better angels of our nature on that August afternoon in 1963, is an American hero worth honoring. Whatever personal flaws he may have possessed, whatever extreme views he may have held, the man who urged us all to sit down at the table of brotherhood was, at least for that brief shining moment, a saint. King in Washington, like Lincoln at Gettysburg, altered our understanding of the very nature of the American Republic. That fact alone may make him worthy of a national holiday. But before we carve his face on his own personal Mount Rushmore, we might well ponder the consequences of King's dream for all Americans. In retroactively making equality the founding principle of our nation,
Lincoln did not necessarily alter the meaning of the concept. Equality
meant that all citizens should be treated according to a single set of
standards in their dealings with the government. As a Hamiltonian, Lincoln
believed in a much more expansive role for government than Jefferson did.
Nevertheless, he viewed equality as one of the fundamental ground rules
of government not as the end that government was instituted to achieve.
In rhetorically transforming the war to preserve the Union into a crusade
to free the slaves, Lincoln set in motion a process that would logically
assure black Americans the full rights of citizenship. It may be that
his ardent support for repatriation was a way to achieve the emancipation
he desired without creating the bi-racial society he dreaded. But Lincoln
was killed, and the slaves got their freedom with the Thirteenth Amendment
and their citizenship with the Fourteenth. If African Americans often
seemed less than citizens and little more than slaves, they at least had
what King would call a promissory note to take to the bar of justice.
To the extent that he was simply trying to get America to honor that note,
King was operating in the tradition of Jefferson and Lincoln, which is
to say the tradition of our first and second founding. But he was finally
asking for more than membership in a constitutional republic. Because
his view of equality was substantive rather than merely procedural, King
was calling for nothing less than a third American founding. Once the affirmative principle of integration had been given constitutional sanction in government-sponsored activities, it seemed like the next logical step to extend that principle to private establishments that were generally open to the public. In boycotting the buses in Montgomery in 1955, black patrons were simply exercising consumer choice in an effort to pressure the bus company into treating them better. In marching on Washington in 1963, the advocates of civil rights were asking the federal government to force the owners of motels and restaurants to serve black patrons whether they wanted to or not. Again, this kind of equal access struck most Americans as wise and just. Some might have been troubled by the assault on property rights, but the decent majority of Americans found it easy to caricature those who would assert such rights as "axe-wielding bigots."32 So the notion of equality was expanded once again. There is a problem, however, when the people give their government the power to make other folks behave as they should. This problem is compounded when the government in question is located in Washington, D. C., and the power is exercised not simply as policy but under the cloak of newly discovered constitutional rights. This became evident to many northerners when the principle of racial equality was used to justify open housing, forced busing, and a whole host of racial preferences. Once equality was transformed from a procedural to a substantive right, the genie was out of the bottle. Equality of opportunity is a snare and a delusion because no two people ever begin life's race with equal abilities and equal advantages. The only way even to approach the ideal of an equal society is to rig the results so that disadvantaged people are assured of ending up with their "fair share" of the spoils. Neoconservative blather to the contrary notwithstanding, today's advocates of "race norming" and quotas are the true heirs of Martin Luther King. At the time of his death, King was intent on extending the principle of equality even further. Because of his concern for the plight of the nation's poor, he advocated a monumental redistribution of income from the haves to the have-nots. When he was killed in Memphis, he was in the process of organizing a Poor People's Campaign to descend upon Washington, D. C. This would not be the kind of orderly march that had culminated in the memorable oratory of 1963. He was planning a massive campaign of civil disobedience that would bring the government to a halt until Congress had passed a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. Once equality became a substantive constitutional right, there could be no logical end short of a classless society. Although King died before he could bring this particular dream to reality, the sort of class warfare that permeates contemporary American politics suggests that--even here--he has profoundly influenced the terms of the debate. Martin Luther King possessed an undeniable gift for dramatizing the plight of African Americans and for painting a utopian vision of racial reconciliation. It is no wonder that persons of good will join him in longing to see the day when people of all races can join hands as children of God. But one can desire that end without uncritically accepting the means that King advocated for achieving it. If an immensely larger and more powerful federal government succeeded in freeing the slaves in the nineteenth century and integrating their descendants into the mainstream of American society in the twentieth, it did so at a cost to individual liberty and local sovereignty. To say that this was a price worth paying is not quite the same as saying that no price was paid at all. Moreover, as the demands of disadvantaged minorities increase, the sacrifices required of the majority also increase. The elites in our society have forced working class white people to bear the brunt of busing and affirmative action and then branded them as racist when they expressed normal human resentment. What we see is the same kind of self righteousness that characterized segments of the abolitionist movement prior to the War Between the States. The assault on white southern tradition and history has become part of this new abolitionist mentality. As Eugene Genovese has observed, King's vision of the descendants of slaves and of slaveholders sitting together on the hills of Georgia as southern brothers . . . will be realized when, and only when, those descendants, black and white, can meet with mutual respect and appreciation for the greatness, as well as the evil, that has gone into the making of the South. . . . It is one thing to demand--and it must be demanded--that white southerners repudiate white supremacy. It is quite another to demand that they deny the achievements of their own people in a no less heroic struggle to build a civilization in a wilderness and to create the modern world's first great republic.33 It is only in brotherhood, not recrimination, that we can find true equality. That indeed is a dream worth celebrating. Mark Royden Winchell is Director of the LOS Institute for Southern History and Culture. His next book, Reinventing the South: Essays on the Literary Imagination, will be published by the University of Missouri Press later this year. Notes 1. See, for example, Tom Piatek, "How the Left Stole Christmas,"
American Conservative (January 19, 2004): 20-22. |