Saving Race

Forty years after his death, MLK's message has never been more relevant.

by Nathaniel Popkin

Matt Carr DYSON, DOGGED: The author argues that MLK paved the way for black leaders like Barack Obama. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Muralist Joseph Tiberino is sitting in the living room of the Powelton Village house/museum named for his late wife, painter Ellen Powell Tiberino. One of his latest paintings leans against a cabinet at his knees. In the tradition of Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists, Tiberino, who wears a gray beard and customary black hat, uses his work to confront injustice, ask questions and tell stories. He crowds his murals with people — religious and political figures, Italian immigrants and African-Americans — historical references and allegory. This canvas, which now hangs at Chris' Jazz Café on Sansom Street, is no different. Here is Barack Obama surrounded by JFK, RFK and MLK. William Rehnquist, across the way, points to Obama; two men who might be Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois look on.

"What do you think?" Tiberino asks. "Is he the one?"

Provocative intellectual and former Penn (now Georgetown University) professor Michael Eric Dyson thinks so. April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America, due out next week from Basic Books, assesses King's legacy for contemporary African-American leaders, including Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Barack Obama. In it he concludes, "[Obama] may be our best hope to tie together the fraying strands of our political will into a powerful and productive vision of national destiny, one for which Martin Luther King Jr. hoped and died."

Dyson's uneven book, named for the day King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, is one of a spate of recent academic reconsiderations of civil rights, including Matthew Countryman's Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press); Risa Goluboff's carefully argued The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard University Press); Tom Sugrue's forthcoming epic Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North; and Thomas F. Jackson's exhaustive treatise on King, From Civil Rights to Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press). A central message runs through each of these works: The original hope of economic justice got pushed aside in favor of campaigns for integration, education and self-esteem. "This new civil rights would prove fundamentally unable to redress the economic hierarchies of Jim Crow America," says Goluboff of the movement's ultimate focus on these softer targets.

It's a point not lost on Dyson, who takes a full three chapters in April 4, 1968 to review the troubled state of black America. "How are we to reconcile King's vision of a promised land for blacks with the stubborn reality of wilderness for too many?" he asks, introducing nine straight pages of statistics on black progress and, all too often, social and economic regression. "Downward mobility is a fact of black life," he states. April 4, 1968 responds not by imagining real ways to alter that reality. Instead it falls into the familiar mode of considering celebrity, style and symbolism instead of urban policy, tax structures and economic development.

Dyson seems to confront this disconnect early in the book when he writes, "In the best black oratory, style is not juxtaposed to argument; in fact, style becomes a vehicle of substance. Paying attention to how you say what you say doesn't mean you have nothing to say." Indeed, Dyson is instructive on Obama's modes of oratory and positively gorgeous on King's rhetoric and linguistics, even going so far as to define King's language of death as automortology, one that "permits him to strike a solemn blow against death by delivering his eulogy in advance of the event."

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Dyson's book follows King from his April 3 "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech to the moment the bullet severed his spinal cord, concluding, 40 years on, "Whites want him clawless; blacks want him flawless." But if we're to embrace King's claws — anti-war, anti-consumerism, pro-social democracy — it's frustrating to see the author fall so easily into the trope of celebrity. Dyson ends April 4, 1968 by imagining an interview with King on his 80th birthday. It's a terrific conceit, but bungled; he concludes the interview — and the book, dedicated to Oprah Winfrey — with King's imagined sleepy retort, "I must say, I love Oprah."

This sort of focus on iconography is what is so original but also so frustrating about Dyson's work. He wants performance to account for more than history really allows. After King's assassination, according to Penn historian Tom Sugrue, 168 cities and towns exploded in riots. Philadelphia had one of the best-organized and disciplined movements for civil rights in the nation and on April 5, 1968, it stood out for having avoided the worst of the violence. Part of the credit goes to the Rev. Paul Washington, who in the 1960s turned the Church of the Advocate at 18th and Diamond streets into a center for civil and women's rights and black power. "Father Paul," who, like King, was a follower of Gandhi, walked the streets of North Philadelphia, calming and restraining those whose instinct was to turn anger into violence. But to Washington's family and colleagues in North Philly, legend isn't enough. To them, King and Washington's hopes have never been realized.

Today, the Advocate, one of the best examples of French Gothic architecture in America, is a soaring monument that swims uncomfortably in the choppy post-industrial streetscape. In the 1970s, Father Paul commissioned artists Richard Watson and Walter Edmonds to paint Afro-centric interpretations of the Bible on the stone walls of the nave. Those searing murals — of devastation, despair and hope — beg the question that some are now asking: Is America willing to address urban black poverty? "I tell you what," says Washington's widow, Christine, founder of the Advocate Community Development Corporation. "We hear middle-class this and middle-class that. Poor folks have dropped out of the vocabulary."

Like Dyson and Christine Washington, the Advocate's current leader, Isaac Miller, thinks Obama is the one. He sees in the Democratic candidate the chance for real urban policy, increasingly ignored since King's death. "I can tell you what folks who live in places like this see [in Obama] is an intention to lift up these issues," says Miller, who was in seminary when King was killed. For Miller, Obama's strength isn't speaking, but listening. He recalls that King was much the same way.

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Michael Eric Dyson is making two free book appearances in Philadelphia, reading on Wed., April 9, 7 p.m., Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, library.phila.gov, and Thu., April 10, 7 p.m., Broad Street Ministry, 320 S. Broad St., 215-735-4847, broadstreetministry.org.