The Misremembering of ‘I Have a Dream’
The Misremembering of ‘I Have a Dream’
Fifty years after the March on Washington, Dr. King’s most famous speech, like his own political legacy, is widely misunderstood.
Gary Younge
August 14, 2013 | This article appeared in the September 2-9, 2013 edition of The Nation.
In this Aug. 28, 1963 file photo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington. (AP Photo/File)
Adapted from The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream, by Gary Younge. (Haymarket Books)
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took the podium on August 28, 1963, the Department of Justice was watching. Fearing that someone might hijack the microphone to make inflammatory statements, the Kennedy DOJ came up with a plan to silence the speaker, just in case. In such an eventuality, an official was seated next to the sound system, holding a recording of Mahalia Jackson singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” which he planned to play to placate the crowd.
Half a century after the March on Washington and the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the event has been neatly folded into America’s patriotic mythology. Relatively few people know or recall that the Kennedy administration tried to get organizers to call it off; that the FBI tried to dissuade people from coming; that racist senators tried to discredit the leaders; that twice as many Americans had an unfavorable view of the march as a favorable one. Instead, it is hailed not as a dramatic moment of mass, multiracial dissidence, but as a jamboree in Benetton Technicolor, exemplifying the nation’s unrelenting progress toward its founding ideals.
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Perhaps the best way to comprehend how King’s speech is understood today is to consider the radical transformation of attitudes toward the man who delivered it. Before his death, King was well on the way to being a pariah. In 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him as a favorable one. Life magazine branded his anti–Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church “demagogic slander” and “a script for Radio Hanoi.”
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It is implausible to imagine that, were King to be raised from the dead, he would look at America’s jails, unemployment lines, soup kitchens or inner-city schools and think his life’s work had been accomplished. Whether one believes that these inequalities are caused by individuals making bad choices or by institutional discrimination, it would be absurd to claim that such a world bears any resemblance to the one King set out to create.
Nor is there anything to suggest that view would have been much altered by the presence of a black man in the White House. The claim that Obama’s election has a connection to King’s legacy has some substance. As Obama himself has often conceded, his election would not have been possible without the civil rights movement, which created the conditions that allowed for the arrival of a new generation of black politicians. But the aim of the civil rights movement was equality for all, not the elevation of one.
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http://www.thenation.com/article/175764/misremembering-i-have-dream
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America cares for you – until you start asking questions
Manning, Snowden and Trayvon Martin: a series of legal cases is making US citizens re-evaluate what the state is really for
Gary Younge
The Guardian, Monday 12 August 2013
A protest in New York against government surveillance programmes and the NYPD's stop and search. ‘Put bluntly, Americans have been told that they are being spied on and misinformed for their own good.’ Photograph: Edward Leavy Jr/Demotix/Corbis
When Ray Kelly, the man Barack Obama is currently considering to lead homeland security, was the New York City police commissioner, he allegedly had a policy of terrorising black and Latino neighbourhoods.
A hearing into the city's stop-and-frisk policies in spring heard how Kelly told state senator Eric Adams that "he targeted and focused on [black and Latino youth] because he wanted to instil fear in them every time they left their homes that they could be targeted by the police". The hearing also heard a secret recording of South Bronx deputy inspector Christopher McCormack telling a subordinate to stop "the right people at the right time, the right location", and focus stop-and-frisks on "male blacks" between 14 and 21.
... (must read at link)
The state is right to be worried. For while it has aggregated power, it has failed to garner the influence to sustain or justify it. Manning said he hoped by releasing the cables he would spark "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms". The leaks informed the Arab spring, revealing the venality of the leaders and the complicity of the US. When Snowden came out as a whistleblower, he said his greatest fear was "that nothing will change". As Obama moves to modestly reform the NSA, the public he claims to be protecting shows growing support for Snowden. Neither the government nor the judiciary has been able to point to a single credible example of how its secrecy, neglect, deception or persecution in these cases has protected anybody or anything. When they insist such measures are crucial for security, they evidently mean security of the state – not the people who live in it.
Following Zimmerman's acquittal, Obama was keen to point out that "America is a nation of laws". Nobody doubts that. What is less clear is whether it is a nation of justice.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/us-justice-laid-bare-paternalistic-logic
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