Turning King's Dream into a Nightmare

Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly
ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has
become a day to celebrate ourselves for "overcoming" racism and
"fulfilling" King's dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites
about little black children and little white children that, given the
state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social
reformers, once they are dead, are kidnapped by the power elite and
turned into harmless props of American glory. King, after all, was not
only a socialist but fiercely opposed to American militarism and
acutely aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice
without economic justice was a farce.

"King's words have been appropriated by
the people who rejected him in the 1960s," said Professor James Cone,
who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York and who wrote the
book Martin & Malcolm & America. "So by making his birthday a
national holiday everybody claims him, even though they opposed him
while he was alive. They have frozen King in 1963 with his 'I Have a
Dream' speech. That is the one that can best be manipulated and
misinterpreted. King also said, shortly after the Selma march and the
riots in Watts, 'they have turned my dream into a nightmare.'"

"Mainstream culture appeals to King's
accent on love, as if it can be separated from justice," Cone said.
"For King, justice defines love. It can't be separated. They are
intricately locked together. This is why he talked about agape and not
some sentimental love. For King, love was militant. He saw direct
action and civil disobedience in the face of injustice as a political
expression of love because it was healing the society. It exposed its
wounds and its hurt. This accent on justice for the poor is what
mainstream society wants to separate from King's understanding of love.
But for King, justice and love belong together."

Malcolm X, whose refusal to appeal to the
white ruling class makes it impossible to turn him into an
establishment icon, converged with King in the last months of his
life. But it would be wrong to look at this convergence as a
domestication of Malcolm X. Malcolm influenced King as deeply as King
influenced Malcolm. These men each grasped at the end of their lives
that the face of racism comes in many forms and that the issue was not
simply sitting at a lunch counter with whites - blacks in the north
could in theory do this - but being able to afford the lunch. King and
Malcolm were deeply informed by their faith. They adhered to a belief
system, one Christian and the other Muslim, which demanded strict moral
imperatives and justice. And because neither man sold out or
compromised with the power elite, they were killed. Should King and
Malcolm have lived they would have become pariahs.

King, when he began his calls for
integration, argued that hard work and perseverance could make the
American dream available for rich and poor, white and black. King grew
up in the black middle class, was well educated and culturally
refined. He admitted that until his early twenties life had been
wrapped up for him like "a Christmas present." He naively thought that
integration was the answer. He trusted, ultimately, in the white power
structure to recognize the need for justice for all of its citizens. He
shared, as most in his college-educated black class did, the same value
system and preoccupation with success of the whites with whom he sought
to integrate.

But this was not Malcolm's America. Malcolm grew up in urban poverty,
dropped out of school in eighth grade, was shuttled between foster
homes, abused, hustled on city streets and ended up in prison. There
was no evidence in his hard life of a political order that acknowledged
his humanity or dignity. The white people he knew did not exhibit a
conscience or compassion. And in the ghetto, where survival was a daily
battle, non-violence was not a credible option.

"No, I'm not an American," Malcolm said.
"I'm one of 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism.
One of the ...victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So,
I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or
a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver - no, not I! I'm speaking as a victim
of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the
victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare!"

King, especially after he confronted the
insidious racism in Chicago, came to appreciate Malcolm's insights. He
soon began telling Christians that "any religion that professes to be
concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums
that damn them, the economic conditions that cripple them, is a
spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood."

"King began to see that Malcolm was right
in what he was saying about white people," Cone told me. "Malcolm saw
that white people did not have a conscience that could be appealed to
bring justice for African-Americans. King realized that near the end of
his life. He began to call most whites 'unconscious racists.'"

The crude racist rhetoric of the past is
now considered impolite. We pretend there is equality and equal
opportunity while ignoring the institutional and economic racism that
infects our inner cities and fills our prisons, where a staggering one
in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated. There
are more African American men behind bars than in college. "The cell
block has replaced the auction block," the poet Yusef Komunyakaa
writes. The fact that prison and urban ghettos are populated primarily
with people of color is not an accident. It is a calculated decision by
those who wield economic and political control. For the bottom third of
African-Americans, many of whom live in these segregated enclaves of
misery and deprivation, little has changed over the past few decades;
indeed, life has often gotten worse. In the last months of his life,
King began to appropriate Malcolm's language, reminding listeners that
the ghetto was a "system of internal colonialism." "The purpose of the
slum," King said in a speech at the Chicago Freedom Festival, "is to
confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness. ...
The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its
inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated
and humiliated at every turn." The chief problem is economic, King
concluded, and the solution is to restructure the whole society. Life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness were, as King and Malcolm knew,
meaningless slogans if there was no possibility of a decent education,
a safe neighborhood, a job or a living wage. King and Malcolm were also
acutely aware that the permanent war economy was directly linked to the
perpetuation of racism and poverty at home and often abroad.

In a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam" he
gave at Riverside Church a year before his assassination, King called
America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," a quote
that won't make it into many Martin Luther King Day celebrations.
King's strident denunciation of the Vietnam War and economic injustice
at the end of his life saw many white liberals, members of his own
staff, as well as allies within the political power structure, turn
against him. King and Malcolm, in the final days of their lives, were
lonely men.

"There are many ways in which Malcolm's
message is more relevant today," said Cone, who also wrote A Black
Theology of Liberation. "King's message is almost entirely dependent on
white people responding to his appeals for nonviolence, love and
integration. He depends on a positive response. Malcolm spoke to black
people empowering themselves. He said to black people, 'You may not be
responsible for getting yourself into the situation you are in, but if
want to get out you will have to get yourself out. The people who put
you in there are not going to get you out.' King was appealing to
whites to help get black people out. But King gradually began to
realize that African-Americans could not depend on whites as much as he
had thought."

"King did not speak to black self-hate and
Malcolm did," Cone said. "King was a political revolutionary. He
transformed the social and political life of America. You would not
have Barack Obama today if it had not been for King. Malcolm was a
cultural revolutionary. He did not change the social or political
structures, but he changed how black people thought about themselves.
He transformed black thinking. He made blacks love themselves at a time
when they hated themselves. The movement from being Negro and colored
to being black, that's Malcolm. Black studies in the universities and
black caucuses, that's Malcolm. King never would have done black
studies. He taught a course at Morehouse on social and political
philosophers and did not include a black person. He didn't have W. E.
B. Du Bois or Frederick Douglass. None of them. He had all the white
figures like Plato and Aristotle. Malcolm helped black people to love
themselves."

King and Malcolm would have excoriated a nation that spends $3 trillion
dollars waging imperial wars in the Middle East and trillions more to
fill the accounts of Wall Street banks while abandoning its poor. They
would have denounced the liberals who mouth platitudes about justice
for the poor while supporting a party that slavishly serves the
interests of the moneyed elite. These American prophets spoke on behalf
of people who had nothing left with which to compromise. And for this
reason they did not compromise.

"You can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress," Malcolm said.

"I've decided what I'm going to do," King
preached at one of his last sermons at Ebenezer Baptist Church. "I
ain't going to kill nobody in Mississippi ... [and] in Vietnam. I ain't
going to study war no more. And you know what? I don't care who doesn't
like what I say about it. I don't care who criticizes me in an
editorial. I don't care what white person or Negro criticizes me. I'm
going to stick with the best. On some positions, cowardice asks the
question, 'is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'is it politic?'
Vanity asks the question, 'is it popular?' But conscience asks the
question, 'is it right?' And there comes a time when a true follower of
Jesus Christ must take a stand that's neither safe nor politic nor
popular but he must take that stand because it is right. Every now and
then we sing about it, 'if you are right, God will fight your battle.'
I'm going to stick by the best during these evil times."