Martin Luther King Jr. and the American Political Tradition
As a recurring ritual of citizenship, each Martin Luther King Jr. Day I have taken to watching a video recording of King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Like most Americans, I never cease to be inspired by the rhetorical heights King reaches as he fleshes out the contents of his dream.
King’s mastery is all the more striking considering he improvised the famous part of his famous speech. With the help of Clarence B. Jones, King had prepared bleak yet bracing reflections on the state of the civil rights movement in 1963. This was the speech King had planned and that he delivered for the first 11 minutes that day on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Then Mahalia Jackson spoke up.
Jackson was a renowned gospel singer and a friend of King’s who, at his request, had performed “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned” before he spoke. Earlier that year, Jackson had heard King give a sermon on his “dream” in Detroit. Still on stage and within earshot–and sensing King’s audience needed more inspiration than he was leaving them with–she shouted, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King paused, put his prepared remarks aside and, for the last five and half minutes of his speech, did just that.
As impressive and memorable as King’s extemporaneous riffs about his dream for his country are, however, I always find myself drawn to the first, less famous part of his speech. At its outset, King performs a remarkable act of statesmanship, positioning himself squarely within the American political tradition while delivering a compelling critique of it.
Consider his opening:
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”
Speaking in front of the iconic Lincoln enthroned in his Memorial, King symbolically takes on the mantle of America’s greatest statesman as the martyred president looks on. King’s “five score years ago” reprises and builds on the “four score and seven years ago” Lincoln used to place his Gettysburg Address in the flow of American history. King’s new milestone does not refer, as it might have, to the grand abstractions of the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln anticipated one hundred years earlier in this address. Instead, focused on the matter at hand, King invokes the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln issued on January 1, 1863, through which the United States materially began to free the slaves.
While that was indeed a daybreak, the land is once again benighted. As King continues:
“One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.”
Here King gets to the heart of the matter. Though the modes are different, a century after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans are still manacled, enchained, impoverished, languishing, and exiled in the country where, by birthright now, they are citizens. As such, they deserve more. They were promised more. So they have come to cash the check.
What are checks? At one level they are mere slips of paper, written from one person or entity to another, instructing the issuer’s bank to pay the recipient the amount specified. But it is harder to grasp now, in the era of Venmo, Apple Pay, and ubiquitous credit cards, that there is a moral component to that slip of paper.
A check presumes – and constitutes a promise – that those writing them actually have the requisite money in the bank and stand ready to pay what they owe. Checks are not just a financial instrument but an extension of one’s word, and thus of one’s trustworthiness. Whose credibility was on the line here?
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Note that King does not refer to the Founders, or to the Founding Fathers, terms that would imply obligations of veneration, obedience, or even familial loyalty. He does acknowledge their status as architects of the republic. It is an interesting word choice. Architects are not owners. They envision and design blueprints for structures that others build, live in, use, maintain, and–when necessary–repair and remodel.
King also pays homage to the “magnificent words” the architects imbued in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In doing so he joins with the great majority of Americans who also see the documents composed by these words as praiseworthy. But King’s tribute seems double-edged. What is magnificent can also be brought low, even sullied. And words are only that; they need to be embodied and given concrete meaning in the world.
King’s assertion that the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are guaranteed for all Americans, regardless of their race, is a rhetorical sleight of hand. As a claim, it is hard to argue with. But most signatories of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, including its primary author, Thomas Jefferson, so it was certainly arguable in 1776. And even now, as King speaks, many Americans, especially (but not only) in the South, still disagree, though perhaps not in polite company.
However, after Lincoln, the Civil War, and the constitutional amendments that followed in its wake, the rhetorical onus has shifted to King’s opponents. While African Americans still do not enjoy the unalienable rights meant to be held by all, it has become increasingly difficult to argue they should not. King is now in position to deliver a prophetic rebuke.
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.”
Per our earlier discussion, the bad check that King and his people have received is not simply a transactional glitch. It is a moral failure. The nation has failed to live up to its promises. In doing so it has continued to wrong a subset of its citizens in egregious ways. What should they make of what has been done to them? How should they respond? King’s answer is counterintuitive:
“We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”
When someone writes you a bad check, you might demand payment in cash, charge for expenses incurred, or take matters up with legal authorities. King proposes another course–that he and his fellow marchers try again to cash the check. They have not lost faith in America, the issuer, though they have every reason to. Indeed, they are demonstrating that they believe in the professed values of the issuer more, apparently, than the issuer does. So, they are going to seek again, and again if need be, to cash the check.
Thus in the opening of his “I Have a Dream” speech, King assumes a stance with one foot planted in the American political tradition and one foot outside of it. He joins forces with Lincoln, and acknowledges the “architects” and “magnificent words” of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But he also stands unabashed as an outsider and a critic of the tradition.
This dual stance gives him critical leverage. He uses it to hammer away at the shortcomings, broken promises, and bad checks that continue to degrade the tradition. He ensures those in positions of power with the capacity to rectify these flaws will feel more obliged to do so.
We have to avoid the temptation to domesticate Martin Luther King Jr. It is comforting to see him only as the aspirational dreamer of a color-blind society, a vision especially reassuring to white Americans, and leave things at that. But there was a prophetic radicalness to King’s statesmanship, and a telling critique of the American political tradition, that we also must reckon with, learn from, and respond to.
The great political scientist Herbert Storing made this point more broadly in introducing a volume of political writings by African Americans (including King) that he edited and published in 1970. Using the language of that era, Storing observed that,
“When young Frederick Douglass, speaking before the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847, asked, “What Country Have I?”, he put a question that circumstances compel every black American to ask. And when Douglass affirmed that he had no love for America and that, indeed, he had no country, he gave an answer that every thoughtful black in America has had to consider. This was not Douglass’s final answer, as it has not been the final answer of most blacks in America; but the question does not thereby lose its potency [Storing’s emphasis]....In important respects, then, black Americans are like a revolutionary or, more interestingly perhaps, a founding generation. That is, they are in the difficult but potentially glorious position of not being able to take for granted given political arrangements and values, of having to seriously canvass alternatives, to think through their implications, and to make a deliberate choice. To understand the American polity, one could hardly do better than to study, along with the work and thought of the founders, the best writings of the blacks who are at once its friends, enemies, citizens, and aliens.”
It is thus fitting for us to reflect on the writings, speeches, and acts of Martin Luther King Jr. on the national holiday we have established to honor this great American statesman. It is also fitting that the United States has built a memorial to King on our National Mall, poised on a line between the memorials honoring Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. It is especially fitting that, backed by Lincoln, King looks across the Tidal Basin toward Jefferson with the steadfastness of one who has come to collect an outstanding debt.
