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King portrait seems too black and white

BY DAVID L. CHAPPELL | Special to Newsday

March 30, 2008

Martin Luther King's murder, 40 years ago this Friday, had a surprising long-term psychological effect. Though it traumatized American society, it soon served to mark a decisive, dramatic end to the confusions and deflated expectations of the civil rights movement's final years. It answered a longing for what people now call closure.

The movement, in its early years, demanded unsustainably great sacrifices. It inspired commensurate hopes. But the movement's climactic victories - the 24th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act - turned out to be the limit of its reach. The image of a unified and courageous black America, backed by huge numbers of white sympathizers, yielded the stage to self-destructive rioting and mediagenic but empty threats of armed rebellion. As a martyr, King came to symbolize what had really ended three years before: the lost early period of victory and unity.

Michael Eric Dyson, a prolific and influential authority on race, thinks the national memory of King has become too soothing. Cynical and complacent image-makers have hijacked King's most resonant proclamations, turning prophetic provocations into wet blankets.

So Dyson argued in his bestselling corrective, "I May Not Get There With You," published in 2000. Now, in "April 4, 1968," Dyson repeats his complaint that our greatest modern prophet has been "domesticated" to the point that he now appears "a toothless tiger."

But "April 4," like Dyson's previous book, lacks evidence that conservatives have claimed King's mantle in any sustained way - or stifled any revival of liberal progress by watering down his legacy. Conservatives never relied much on the insinuation - patently false - that King opposed affirmative action. The only major "conservative" enlistment of King's ghost was in the battle against abortion, where the picture is far murkier than Dyson allows. King never spoke out on abortion, though later civil rights activists would champion the anti-abortion cause, including, for a period, Jesse Jackson. Yet Dyson pretends it is self-evident that King's legacy is incompatible with the "pro-life" movement.

At his best, Dyson makes an impassioned plea: To honor King truly, Americans must sacrifice our personal comforts and ambitions, even our safety, for the poor - of all races - as he did. To spend King Day parroting his "dream," rendered meaningless by mass-mediated repetition, accomplishes no more than to go shopping or skiing.

At his worst, Dyson provides a more comforting and anachronistic King than any conjured up by the right. Dyson conveniently suppresses King's evangelical Christian disdain for rock music and what he called "humanism in the modern world." His King is kinder and gentler than the real one, who scolded followers lacking bourgeois habits of personal grooming. Dyson's King is soft on his "militant" rivals. The real King insisted that racial separatism, practiced by the Klan or the Nation of Islam, and violence, preached by the Pentagon or the Panthers, were impractical as well as immoral. Dyson assures his audience that King supported gay rights. But King made no statement on that issue. Dyson's posthumous mind-reading is as fanciful as his imaginary "interview," where King returns from heaven in 2008 to profess his devotion to Oprah Winfrey.

Dyson, ironically, repeats the most widespread error in King scholarship: that King became radical only in the last years of his life. Dyson ignores the evidence that even before Montgomery, King sought fundamental changes in America's economic structure. He ignores King's early statements that persuasion was never enough to bring justice. Blindness to King's early radicalism allows conservatives to champion a mild-mannered "original" King, uncorrupted by later Stokely Carmichael-types, and Monday-morning radicals to give their own hotheaded heroes the credit for talking sense into a naive King who had faith in persuasion alone.

Dyson's portrait of King is well calculated to assure his readers that they are in greater harmony with the sainted King than they allowed themselves to think. How it will inspire them to drop what they are doing and devote themselves to King's unfinished work - or change the views of those who fail to see the abiding urgency of that work - is unclear.

APRIL 4, l968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America, by Michael Eric Dyson. Basic, 290 pp., 24.95.