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DePaul professor in search of the true MLK Jr.
The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating. This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michael D. Wamble talks with DePaul University Professor Michael Eric Dyson. The image is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The text asks that his legacy be remembered. The problem is that one’s burger and fries might block this message from reaching the masses since it’s written on a disposable fast-food placemat. DePaul University Professor Michael Eric Dyson believes like fast-food, discussion of King too often has become a commercialized product. Is this the best place to learn about the Baptist minister that
U.S. Catholic bishops have been reported to consider a martyr?
(This non-canonical effort is specifically not a beatification
or a veneration.) “The problem I have with fast food or other corporations is that sometimes while celebrating [King’s] legacy the very kids who are King’s great-grandchildren, metaphorically speaking, are being ‘dissed.’ They may not be earning a fair wage. “So don’t have a celebration with King on a mat, go to the mat for the people King represented,” said Dyson. This is but one of many issues Dyson takes to the mat and wrestles with in his latest offering, “I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr.,” a controversial book that alternately critiques the practices of the King family guarding the slain activist’s legacy and makes connections between King’s iconography to that of murdered hip-hop artist, Tupac Shakur. Dyson will sign and discuss the book at Afrocentric Books, 333 S. State St., on Feb. 23 from 5 p.m.-6:30 p.m. The DePaul professor will appear at Borders, 830 N. Michigan Ave., Feb. 24 at 7 p.m.
Catholic New World: U.S. Catholic bishops have considered adding King’s name to a list of Christian [non-Catholic] martyrs. Do you see King as a martyr? Michael Eric Dyson: No question. I think the Catholic Church’s welcome recognition of King’s tremendous contribution to American culture and ... Christendom is a very good thing. He’s a figure whose contribution not only to African-American culture but indeed to American democracy in general makes him worthy of being ranked among the great martyrs of the faith through the centuries.
CNW: In the introduction of your book, you seem to be differentiating King as martyr from King as saint. MED: Exactly; ‘saint’ in the narrow, ascetic understanding of that term: a person who divides or divorces himself from the larger flow of human community. I think, in that sense, King was certainly a vigorous flesh and blood human being whose warts and pimples live next door to his great obeisance and burnished skin. There’s no question in my mind that making him a paper saint—a saint that is so without blemish or contradiction—we turn him into something that’s not useful or only useful to people who are not interested in transforming society.
CNW: Has the third Monday of January, in too many cases, turned into an extra floating holiday for many Americans? MED: Well that’s the tragedy, in one sense, of being incorporated into these rituals called holidays that allow us to mark sacred time in a collective sense. One of the tragedies in being incorporated into this cycle is that King has an equal opportunity to be dismissed with Jefferson, with Lincoln or any other figure who is the subject of a holiday. In a sense, real equality has been reached in that King is dismissed like these other figures. But since he is an unique figure, and since there was so much blood spilled over the legacy he represents, people who fought for his birthday to be recognized certainly must be appalled at the “white sales” that are held on his holiday and must continue to fight for its deeper meaning beyond the commercial surface.
CNW: When King came to Chicago, you wrote that the racism he encountered was more severe than that found in the South. How did his experience here cause King to change his tactics? MED: That was a turning point. King said he had never witnessed so much hostility and racial hatred as he had in the North. That’s a quite statement to make. First of all, the visceral encounter with racial animosity shocked King into an awareness that the movement had to pay attention to the “Up South” variety of racial hatred. Secondly, it forced him to consider that a different approach
must be taken in Chicago than what was done down South. You can’t
have the same kind of marches you had in Alabama where you had
a cartoonish figure like Bull Connor, who was the commissioner
of police there. You had a very shrewd guy here named [Mayor]
Richard [J.] Daley who had black congressmen and black ministers
in his pocket, who had a machine that was well-oiled and in one
sense allowed black people to organize their political lives and
exercise their political lives in ways that were not available
to them in the South. So for the first time there were black people
explicitly opposing King’s work.
CNW: Those changes seem to coincide with King’s dramatic drop in popularity near the end of his life. How is it that 30 years later, according to a recent Gallup Poll, King is named the second most influential person of the century, second only to Mother Teresa? MED: Martyrdom resolves conflicts. The strong wave of martyrdom will push back an ocean of opposition. When King was killed he was already dead philosophically, dead metaphorically. But his death revived him. It’s unavoidable, but just as Jesus said, “If I die, I will draw men onto me.” Well, King is not God, but he is a figure of such epic magnitude that people have been attracted to him because he is a figure that serves a useful role in American society. Toward the end of his life, it was exactly his opposition to the Vietnam War that cost him support. But he refused to give up his principles and I think people posthumously appreciate that. Sadly, we’ve frozen King in this “I Have a Dream” gesturing before the Lincoln Memorial while refusing to engage him as a figure of radical proportions. So the reason he is so celebrated now is because his radical legacy is being slighted.
CNW: The first time I heard that speech from the start, in which King said that “100 years later the Negro still is not free” was in a House mix (a brand of Chicago dance music) at a dance. In your book you speak about the “hip-hop generation.” Is the prevailing desire that drives this book to put this martyr back into flesh for future generations of young people? MED: Yes. “One-hundred years later the Negro still is not free.” Yes. “One-hundred years later he finds himself marooned on a tiny island of poverty in a midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One-hundred years later…” And he continues calling down the roll of things that are wrong within African-American culture as a result of the suffering that’s been endured in the midst of an American culture that’s been quite prosperous. These are the ideas that have been nullified by focusing on the cheery hopeful optimism found in the latter part of that speech. We have to fight against one part of the speech with the other part. It’s not that we deny the necessary hopefulness King encouraged within that speech, it’s just later in that year he said he saw his dream turn into a nightmare. He saw that nightmare in the event that occurred in Watts, (Los Angeles), in Detroit and in Birmingham in 1967. He was speaking about what happened in terms of bombings and attacks on freedom riders. King, with his radical message and with his faults and failures, must be brought into the debate to help connect young people to the ways in which they confront racial justice, economic inequality, and the ways they struggle each day against social evil and even death.
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