Vol. 3, Number 2	Summer 2000

 

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Americans don’t like history. Icons, sure, and movies, and, in the South, some Civil War battles; that’s about it. But we don’t really feel comfortable with the drama and intensity that made history and that history makes; most of all, in a country based on self-creation, we don’t like to think that history made us.

We go for myths instead, big wondrous fables that leave the sweat and muck and details of the past to enter the charmed world of national allegory. Thanksgiving. Paul Revere. Tara. Graceland.

And, Michael Eric Dyson claims, Martin Luther King. King is, according to Dyson, both “the greatest American who ever lived” and “the defining American of our national history.” But for King to define the national history of America means he must leave it, must become a symbol, a byword, an icon rather than a revolutionary.

In I May Not Get There With You, Dyson argues that “we have trapped King in romantic images or frozen his legacy in worship.” We have forgotten his radical economics, ignored his pacifist internationalism, and disregarded his intellectual development. We allow his sanitized image to give the imprimatur of sainthood to causes he would abhor, and, in worshipping him, neglect the still-extant problems he sought to change.

Dyson’s stated aim is to provide a true portrait of King, to restore his revolutionary complexity and enable us to use his memory rather than simply genuflect to it. (He proposes, for instance, a ten-year moratorium on the clichéd quotes from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in favor of later, more provocative speeches and writings.) But his version of King is just as utilitarian and contemporary-minded as any other. He would use King to promote democratic socialism and racial justice, King’s own aims; but he would still use him. I May Not Get There With You comes to read as something of a self-indictment.

Dyson is at his best when he takes on the reactionaries who would claim King’s legacy to eviscerate affirmative action and race-sensitive public policy. The pose of allegiance to King is reactionary when it prevents serious work on the here-and-now. The ideas we associate with King-as-American-icon are so familiar, Dyson writes, that “many whites now assume such ideas were always warmly received and are therefore loathe to find new remedies for what they think are exaggerated or, worse, nonexistent problems.” History has become, rather than an ongoing challenge, both a means of self-congratulation and a dead issue.

But the thematically organized book isn’t a biography or a history. Dyson does have a lot to say about King’s life, and about the differences between the making of history and the writing of it. But in multiple-page digressions on affirmative action, school vouchers, Bill Clinton, the contemporary black church, and hip-hop, Dyson travels far from “the true Martin Luther King, Jr.” of the book’s title.

Dyson wants to challenge us with King’s radicalism, with the post-“I Have a Dream” King that he finds most appealing. This is the King who said, “for years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” It is hard to contest Dyson’s argument that, in the last four years of his life, King became a democratic socialist, with a new emphasis on class analysis and the limitations of legal desegregation. The chapter on King’s evolving economic views and their continued relevance is the most compelling, perhaps because it is the side of King we remember least.

The chapter on King’s opposition to the Vietnam War also recalls a forgotten side of King’s life, the extent to which even liberals opposed his extended platform. He was accused of Communist sympathies and, more devastatingly, of doing “grave injury” (The Washington Post) to civil rights by attacking the war. We now remember King as someone with whom we all agree, and that, Dyson preaches, is the most dangerous aspect of mythologizing history. If we can remember King’s life-and history in general-as struggle rather than inevitable moral victory, then we are far more able to struggle in our own time.

Like King, Dyson has a way of putting overly familiar issues into new terms so that we can begin to think them through again. He even brings a few new issues to the table, as in a fascinating section on King’s and rappers’ views of death and evil-a far more effective comparison than the strained list of King’s and Tupac Shakur’s biographical similarities that begins the chapter called “Two Generations of the Young, Gifted, and Black.”

That’s the hit-and-miss nature of I May Not Get There With You, which combines historiographic critique, social history, intellectual biography, first-person memoir, movement sociology, and contemporary political commentary. Without any overarching narrative or drama, Dyson’s various extended riffs, on everything from the proper home for King’s papers to the ethics of musical “sampling,” seem almost random. If one is temporarily uninterested in Jesse Jackson’s work on Wall Street, the lack of narrative provides little imperative to read further.

If you’re looking for a biography of King, I May Not Get There With You will disappoint. Many pages pass without quotes or dates, and we have little choice but to accept Dyson’s claims without proof or to reject his argument entirely. He’s writing contemporary history, attempting to recover and explicate Martin Luther King’s multifaceted universe, but he’s no historian; each of his angles are quickly sketched and often less-than-convincing. King remains a metaphor, just a more radical, complex one.

Maybe that’s all we can get from history, though-a usable past to interpret ourselves through. Interpretation, however, is only helpful if we recognize the complexities of history-and if we recognize ourselves as the results of unfinished struggles, not pretty myths. We need what Dyson describes as King’s perspective: “critical”; “complex and vigorous”; a “patriotism of loyal opposition.” Dyson asks us to stop sanitizing King with “soapy tales of how he wanted us to like each other very much.” Instead, he would have us recognize King, not just celebrate him, as “a much more demanding hero, a fiery icon whose hot breath continues to melt plastic portrayals of his social intentions.”