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King's legacy tied to 'Dream' speech

BY REID J. EPSTEIN | reid.epstein@newsday.com

8:42 PM EST, January 20, 2008

Fresh from a three-week study abroad trip to Ghana, Stony Brook University professor Floris Barnett Cash said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy as a civil-rights leader stretches worldwide.

"It is now an international or a global recognition of Dr. King," said Cash, the chairwoman of Stony Brook's Africana Studies department. "In various places there were photographs of Dr. King. We saw calendars with his picture on and there were paintings that you could buy in the streets."

But some academics say King is facing the same fate that has befallen many a historical figure -- being frozen in a moment in time that ignores the full complexity of the man and his message.

"Everyone knows, even the smallest kid who knows about Martin Luther King, can say his most famous moment was that 'I have a dream' speech," said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo.

"No one can go further than one sentence," he said. "All we know is that this guy had a dream, we don't know what that dream was."

In the five years after the famous speech on the Washington Mall, King worked on anti-poverty and anti-war issues.

Were he alive today, King would be protesting the Iraq war and the government's reaction to Hurricane Katrina, said Harvard Sitkoff, a University of New Hampshire professor. Sitkoff wrote the recently published book "King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop."

"We've made him an icon of progress about what once was bad about the United States, rather than someone who speaks to us today about problems that still exist," Sitkoff said. "We've domesticated the image of Martin Luther King and turned him into a very tame symbol about the past."

But Cash said King's legacy remains with his Washington speech because it resonates with the most people.

Cash said that in 1968 the country "didn't seem to be ready for his emphasis on social justice and some people questioned that. So he wasn't seen as a hero because of his agenda of controversial issues.

"We can certainly place him with other figures who fought for causes ahead of their time," she said.

This story was supplemented with an Associated Press report.