MLK at the LA Riots: Civil Rights, Memory, and Neoliberalism in Charles Johnson’s Dreamer

Abstract

As writers, I think we are obliged not so much to always add new layers of interpretation onto what we know as we are to strip away as best we can the that prevent us from undergoing a fresh experience with our subject. --Charles Johnson, Lessons Martin Luther King Jr. is invoked indiscriminately today. His name and image can be found everywhere and yet rarely with any context or complexity. It is this ambiguous legacy that animates Charles Johnsons Dreamer (1998), which fictionalizes the civil rights leader's Northern campaign in 1966. Johnson began writing and researching the project that would become Dreamer just months after the 1992 LA Riots, a historical moment that inflects his fictionalization of 1966 Chicago. Johnson points to a need to reimagine and remember the civil rights era in order to combat the pernicious effects of neoliberalism on processes of racialization at the end of the twentieth century. In revisiting King's life in the 1990s, Johnson works to rematerialize King's antiracism and contest his co-optation as a champion of deracialization or colorblindness. In positioning Dreamer as a presentist consideration of the civil rights movement and of Martin Luther King Jr., I first consider the state's response to the LA Riots as it relates to the civil rights movement. Second, I discuss the confluence of neoliberalism, race, and the disremembering of King that this response demonstrates. Third, I read Dreamer as a response to and correction for this racial-neoliberal entanglement, one that, as Johnson notes in the epigraph, casts off official interpretations that function to obfuscate King's career. Tracing a direct historical line from the civil rights movement to the LA Riots, his novel underscores the urban dimension and class politics of the movement as they persist into the neoliberal present. Johnsons fiction thereby encourages us to rethink black freedom struggles not as frozen in history but as ongoing and under threat. Invoking the civil rights movement in 1992 On April 29, 1992, Los Angeles erupted. In response to the acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged in the Rodney King police brutality case, citizens in South Central began an episode of protest, assault, arson, and looting that would bring Los Angeles to a standstill for close to a week. Mayor Thomas Bradley instituted a dusk-to-dawn curfew. President George H. W. Bush sent in the National Guard, then the Army and the Marines. LAX shut down, as did the Rapid Transit District, Amtrak, and the local interstates. In total, the LA Riots left 54 people dead, 2.328 injured, 862 buildings razed, and almost 900 million dollars in damages (Cannon 347). Considering its apparent similarities to the 1965 Watts Riots, commentators were quick to cast the 1992 riots in relationship to the civil rights era and the racial unrest that took place across the nation in the mid- to late 1960s (Applebome; Norris). (1) The Bush administration, on the other hand, reacted to this historical semblance in contradiction. Whereas White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater blamed the riots on the social reform programs of Lyndon Johnsons Great Society--programs that were in part responses to the unrest of the 1960s--Bush refused to grant the LA Riots the rhetorical weight of a comparison to the civil rights movement or the programs it mobilized. Addressing the nation on May 1, 1992, Bush asserted, What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. It's not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold. It's not a message of protest. It's been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple. And let me assure you: I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order. Occurring fourteen months after he proclaimed Vietnam syndrome kicked at the conclusion of the GulfWar and six months before the 1992 presidential election, Bush and his staff struggled to address what a race riot in Los Angeles meant as an outcome of and direct historical line to the 1960s. …