King Prophecies Foreshadowed Obama and Wright, Says Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson, at the Los Angeles Times, seeks to rehabilitate the hate sermons of Jeremiah Wright by conflating the Chicago reverend's black liberation America-bashing with Martin Luther King's late-1960s-era sermons, where the civil rights leader assuaged his frustration at the glacial pace of integration by increasing the intensity of his promised-land theological preaching.

Here's Dyson's

Before 1965, King was upbeat and bright, his belief in white America's ability to change by moral suasion resilient and durable. That is the leader we have come to know during annual King commemorations. After 1965, King was darker and angrier; he grew more skeptical about the willingness of America to change without great social coercion.

King's skepticism and anger were often muted when he spoke to white America, but they routinely resonated in black sanctuaries and meeting halls across the land. Nothing highlights that split - or white America's ignorance of it and the prophetic black church King inspired - more than recalling King's post-1965 odyssey, as he grappled bravely with poverty, war and entrenched racism. That is the King who emerges as we recall the meaning of his death. After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettos or to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 "were at best surface changes" that were "limited mainly to the Negro middle class." In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks "are now making demands that will cost the nation something. ... You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then."

King's conclusion? "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." He didn't say this in the mainstream but to his black colleagues.

Similarly, although King spoke famously against the Vietnam War before a largely white audience at Riverside Church in New York in 1967, exactly a year before he died, he reserved some of his strongest antiwar language for his sermons before black congregations. In his own pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, two months before his death, King raged against America's "bitter, colossal contest for supremacy." He argued that God "didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world today," preaching that "we are criminals in that war" and that we "have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world." King insisted that God "has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, 'Don't play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power.' "

Dyson goes on to extrapolate from King's frustration to the current controversy over Barack Obama's Wright affair:

Obama has seized on the early King to remind Americans about what we can achieve when we allow our imaginations to soar high as we dream big. Wright has taken after the later King, who uttered prophetic truths that are easily caricatured when snatched from their religious and racial context. What united King in his early and later periods is the incurable love that fueled his hopefulness and rage. As King's example proves, as we dream, we must remember the poor and vulnerable who live a nightmare. And as we strike out in prophetic anger against injustice, love must cushion even our hardest blows.

Unfortunately, the real caricature here is Dyson's.

His analysis of Dr. King's later political and theological adjustments have been ripped from the tumult of the era in which King lived. By 1965 the inner cities had begun to violently chafe at continued economic disenfranchisement and the Black Power movement had begun to marginalize traditional civil rights leaders as out of touch with demands for change. Further, the war in Vietnam had become an increasing focus to many in the movement. Dr. King was personally torn over the appropriate response to the slow pace of progress change, not to mention the stressful demands of various constituencies pulling him to and fro - all of this when the Johnson administration's civil rights and policy programs were still in the development and implemenation phase.

As David J. Garrow has shown, in Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King and the civil rights movement faced increasing political difficulties, and the wear and tear had upending Dr. King's stability:

More and more, in public and private, King spoke of the inner turmoil that plagued him. "We often develop inferiority complexes and we stumble through life with a feeling of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, and a sense of impending failure," he told the Ebenezer congregation one Sunday [in September 1967]. "A fear of what life may bring," he went on, "encourages some persons to wander aimlessly along the frittering road of excessive drink and sexual promiscuity," a more personal revelation than his listeners realized. Even in the darkest moments, faith in God gave him the inner equilibrium to face life's problems and "conquer fear." "I know this. I know it from my own personal experience."

According to Garrow's biography, the rush of fame and power weighed heavily on Dr. King, and he questioned the efficacy of his long-standing commitment to peaceful change through civil disobedience.

This context is lacking in Dyson's account. Indeed, Dyson's comparison of Dr. King's preaching discounts the significance of his most important speechs, like the "I Have a Dream" speech, considered one of the most important public statement on civil rights and political philosophy in American history.

Jeremiah Wright can't hold a candle to the King legacy, and allusions to Dr. King prophecies being reborn in "God Damn America" sermons do a grave injustice to the King family on this day 40 years after Dr. King's death.

Thankfully, Juan Williams, at the Wall Street Journal, has placed Dr. King's legacy in the proper relation to Obama's Wright controversy, suggesting the original uplifting message of the Obama campaign has given way to identity politics and racial grievance (via Memeorandum):

Mr. Obama has carried a message of pride and self-sufficiency to black voters nationwide, who have rewarded him with support reaching 80% and higher. His candidacy has become, as the headline on Ebony magazine put it, a matter of having a black man as president "In Our Lifetime."

Among his white supporters, race is coincidental, not central, to his political identity. Mr. Obama is to them the candidate who personifies the promise of equal opportunity for all. But as black support has become central to his victories, this idealistic view has been increasingly at war with the portrayal, crafted by the senator to win black support, of him as the black candidate. The terrible tension between these racially distinct views now surrounds and threatens his campaign.

So far, Mr. Obama has been content to let black people have their vision of him while white people hold to a separate, segregated reality. He is a politician and, unlike King, his goal is winning votes, not changing hearts. Still, it is a key break from the King tradition to sell different messages to different audiences based on race, and to fail to challenge racial divisions in the nation.

Mr. Obama's major speech on race last month was forced from him only after a political crisis erupted: It became widely known that he'd sat for 20 years in the pews of a church where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lashed out at white people. The minister cursed America as worthy of damnation, made lewd suggestions about the nature of President Clinton's relationship with black voters, and embraced the paranoid idea that the white government was spreading AIDS among black people.

Here is where the racial tension at the heart of Mr. Obama's campaign flared into view. He either shared these beliefs or, lacking good judgment, decided it politically expedient for an ambitious young black politician trying to prove his solidarity with all things black, to be associated with these rants. His judgment and leadership on the critical issue of race is in question.

While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.

When King spoke about the racist past, he gloried in black people beating the odds to win equal rights by arming "ourselves with dignity and self-respect." He expressed regret that some black leaders reveled in grievance, malice and self-indulgent anger in place of a focus on strong families, education and love of God. Even in the days before Congress passed civil rights laws, King spoke to black Americans about the pride that comes from "assuming primary responsibility" for achieving "first class citizenship."

Read the whole thing.

As Williams makes clear, Obama's pandering to black grievance and vicitimization is opposed to the centrality of the King legacy: As the barriers to justice and opportunities fall, black individualism and self-sufficiency have to rise to meet the coming challenges.

Michael Eric Dyson takes Dr. King's personal turmoil out of context, pushing a revisionist interpretation of the slain civil rights hero's words and legacy to legitimize a black liberation anti-Americanism that has been roundly repudiated in the court of public opinion.