King's Legacy Research Articles

Martin Luther King Jr. and Liberation Theology: James Cone, J. Deotis Roberts, and a Methodology of the Oppressed

AbstractAbstract: Martin Luther King's legacy as a Black, Baptist preacher and activist is widely known, but his influence in the public sphere has eclipsed his influence in Black Theology. Additionally, since the Black Power movement succeeded the Civil Rights movement, and thereby the Liberationist movement succeeded the Black Social Gospel movement, the foundations King laid became seamlessly integrated into the theology of James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts. Taking King's social analysis, his concern for crucified peoples, and grassroots activism, Cone and Roberts craft the school of Black Theology. Frederick Ware's book, Methodologies of Black Theology outlined the schools of Black Methodology, including the Black Hermeneutical School, which incorporates indigenous sources to inform theology. Walter Strickland II, building upon Ware, argues the Black Hermeneutical School has three schools of interpretive emphasis: Courthouse, Schoolhouse, and Church House. Cone's theology utilises the methodology of the Courthouse while Roberts utilises the methodology of the Church House. This paper argues that Martin Luther King Jr's activism and theology helped develop Cone and Roberts's Black Theological Method. Roberts carries King's legacy as a pastor‐theologian, and Cone carries King's legacy as a social activist.

To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry

Reviewed by: To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry Erin R. Pineda Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, editors. To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 464. Paperback, $20.00. In the summer of 2020, as cities across the globe erupted in protest after the murder of George Floyd, references to Martin Luther King, Jr. abounded: while a familiar cast of politicians evoked his memory to scold riotous protestors, others issued King's rejoinder that "the riot is the language of the unheard" (King, "The Other America," 1967). Many such invocations no doubt smacked of the "ritual celebration" and "intellectual marginalization" [End Page 339] that, as Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry observe, have long marked King's reception as a political thinker (2). But in another sense, the seemingly inevitable return to King points to the significant stakes of taking his thought seriously and the political danger of laying claim to interpretive mastery. Struggles over King's legacy and the terms of his thought are not just about King but form part of the discursive terrain on which struggles over the demands of racial justice and the means of transformative collective action are waged. Shelby and Terry's ambitious, illuminating volume, To Shape a New World, first published in 2018 (timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of King's assassination) and released as paperback in 2020 (amidst the George Floyd uprisings), invites us to take King seriously in just this sense: with an acute sensitivity to the stakes and an embrace of an interpretive pluralism that refuses the certainty of a singular, definitive reading. The collection facilitates rigorous engagement with King's thought in its own time and place but also presses the question of what we ought to do with it in this current "age of impunity and mendacity," standing amid the "unraveling" edges of "American empire," as Cornel West puts it (331). In posing and answering this question across its fifteen essays, the collection seeks to do justice to King as both a political philosopher and a political activist—a religious and political thinker whose philosophies were worked out not only behind the pulpit or within the academy, but also (and perhaps primarily) in concert with others on the field of political action. Indeed, one of its primary contributions is to challenge mainstream presumptions about what counts as political philosophy—its boundaries as a genre as well as the spaces where we imagine political philosophizing to happen and the figures we position as its primary producers. The volume is organized into four sections. The first, "Traditions," is devoted to exploring some of King's diverse intellectual influences. Here, the emphasis is less on making the case for particular traditions as the essential ones, and more on exploring the use of different interpretive lenses for shedding new light on his ideas. Three essays put King in context with thinkers he directly engaged: Robert Gooding-Williams places him in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to reveal the structure of King's account of dignity amid the constraints of racial injustice; Bernard Boxill shows how King's theory of civil disobedience builds on—and collectivizes—Frederick Douglass's account of comparative freedom; and Karuna Mantena explores the theory of nonviolent action that King, through figures like Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman, adopted and adapted from Gandhi. In contrast, Paul Taylor argues that we should read King in the company of moral perfectionists Stanley Cavell and Christopher Lebron—as showing us how practices of self-criticism, self-transformation, and experimentation enable "citizens to remain dissatisfied with things as they stand" while remaining "open to the possibility that justice will require reconstructing both society and the self" (41). In the next section, contributors turn their attention to King's "Ideals"—the ethical and political imperatives that shape the ends and means of the struggle for a new world. Like Mantena, Martha Nussbaum reads King alongside Gandhi to focus on King's insistence on channeling righteous...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara We are delighted to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of American Quarterly. In the three-quarters of a century, the field of American studies has been a site of vibrant exchange of ideas and gone through dynamic changes in terms of the agents of knowledge production and objects of study, the approaches to archives and tools of analysis, and the framing of questions and articulations of arguments. The six essays in this issue perfectly exemplify the kinds of scholarship enabled by both the accumulation of knowledge through the generations and the bold challenges to, and departures from, existing modes of analysis. The six essays all interrogate, in various contexts and through diverse approaches, the politics and expressions of the nation, state, capital, rights, body, and life. The first essay, by Emily Holloway, examines the archive of mid-nineteenth-century New York City public health administration that tracked the transit of corpses through Manhattan. Through an analysis of the intersections of biopolitics and urban space, she illuminates the layered meanings of "speculation" and its relations to surveillance and abstractions of financial value. In the essay that follows, Allan Downey also approaches New York City but through a very different lens: Haudenosaunee men who relocated from Canada and the northeastern United States to Brooklyn to work as ironworkers and their families that established the community of Little Caughnawaga. Downey demonstrates that, at a time when Indigenous peoples were removed from urban spaces and "Indian authenticity" was perceived to be the opposite of modernity, Kanien'kehá:ka citizens were central to building modernity and rearticulated their own nationhood, community, and self-determination. The next two essays look at the global circulation of text, body, voice, and their meanings in the Cold War era. In "If Books Could Kill," Mark David Kaufman mines the declassified archives of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Congress for Cultural Freedom to illuminate how these state institutions sought to manipulate the legacy of Leo Tolstoy as an instrument of the Cultural Cold War. He shows that while the US intelligence community sought to champion Tolstoy as a thinker whose individualist philosophy was assimilable neither to Marxism nor to capitalism, such appropriation conflicted with the writer's antipathy to the weaponization of culture for nationalist agenda. In the following essay, "Sonic Transness," Emmanuel David offers a reading of Christine Jorgensen's vocal performance in the 1962 Philippine film Kaming Mga Talyada (We Who Are Sexy), to analyze her voice and sonic practices in [End Page v] her self-constitution as a global, aspirational, and cosmopolitan white trans subject. By focusing on Jorgensen's performance in the Philippines, the essay also brings out the global production and extraction of value from trans and gender-nonconforming voices. The last two essays shed light on the legal mechanisms of racialization that manage knowledge, discourse, labor, and mobility of people of color. Through an interdisciplinary approach to the legal apparatuses surrounding the circulation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s image, likeness, speeches, and voice, Joseph Coppola illuminates the role of intellectual property in whitewashing King's legacy. By demonstrating how the structural commitments of the law contribute to racial hierarchy and economic inequality, Coppola addresses the power dynamics that shape the flow of knowledge production in the digital information age. In the final essay, Eram Alam traces the transformation and standardization of the first cohort of Asian physicians trained outside the United States into Foreign Medical Graduates within the United States. Analyzing the documentary regimes for verifying identity, skill, and competence, Alam shows that the documentary proceduralism operates as a racializing, disciplinary strategies across categories of immigrant labor. In Book Reviews, Paige A. McGinley discusses three recent works that advance the scholarship on the civil rights movement, and J. T. Roane examines three books on worldmaking practices, ecology, and environmental justice in the "Negrocene." In her event review, "¡No Vengan! Immigration Art in the Post-Trump Era," Maria Liliana Ramirez discusses Sergio de la Torre's exhibition put on as an artistic response to Vice President Kamala Harris's 2021 speech in Guatemala against the backdrop of the history of the history of undocumented immigrants in Santa...

The Commodification of Dr. King, or What Intellectual Property Rights Did to Civil Rights

While a large body of scholarship has emphasized the "Santa Clausification" of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, or King as a "harmless dreamer," most scholars neglect the legal apparatuses that enable (or disable) his image, likeness, speeches, and voice to circulate in the public sphere. This essay argues that intellectual property plays a vital yet undertheorized role in the whitewashing of King's legacy. Offering an interdisciplinary study of cultural history, visual analysis, and legal discourse, this essay shows that one unrecognized feature of the intellectual property system is its ability to manage civil rights discourse. It demonstrates how the structural commitments of the law—economic incentives for innovation, corporate licensing regimes, and copyright's possessive-individualist model of authorship—contribute to racial hierarchy and economic inequality. By thinking through the social justice implications of managing civil rights discourse, and by offering a model for what I call "counterstorytelling" on digital media where communities on YouTube and Twitter strategically reappropriate commercial uses of King's image, likeness, speeches, and voice on television and redeploy them for social justice causes, this essay creates space for engaging and resisting the power dynamics that structure the flow of knowledge production in the digital information age.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction Edward Timke The adage April showers bring May flowers is fitting these days. And it's not just because it's spring. The phrase is also timely considering where the world is today after enduring many harrowing months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world has gone through one of the most unpleasant and traumatic events in modern history, there is hope on the horizon for better things to come. As of writing this introduction, nearly 60 million adults in the United States have been fully vaccinated.1 Within a matter of days, vaccinations will be available to all adults in many states. There is talk of schools reopening their doors for in-person classes in the fall and people being able to travel and meet up again in small groups with family and friends. These glimmers of hope are a much-needed injection of optimism at one of the worst periods of time in recent memory. Advertising continues to adapt and make its way amid the pandemic. Advertising & Society Quarterly will continue to assess how the industry grapples with an unsettled economy, lingering political divisions, race-based violence, and calls for more diversity, equity, and inclusion in business and throughout society. This issue largely focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion. James West's (Northumbria University) original article assesses how corporate advertisers in Black consumer magazines responded to the creation of the US federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. West found that advertisers took opportunities to honor King, and by extension, Black history and the Black consumer market. However, these representations appeared while debates ensued over King's legacy, and thus provide insights into the complexities of corporations using advertisements to address social justice and commemorate important figures in American history. To continue to meet ASQ's long-term goal of preserving and sharing advertising materials, ASQ asked West to develop a digital collection for this issue featuring 40 years of advertisements and other media texts commemorating the MLK holiday. In upcoming issues this year, the journal will continue to collaborate on developing and publishing digital collections of advertisements for future teaching and research. The goals are to centralize the collection of materials related to particular issues or topics and to save items that might be difficult to access or find in the future. Kathryn Ellis (Southampton Solent University), an award-winning advertiser and professor, conducted original research focused on women in the advertising workplace in the UK. In particular, Ellis asks an important question about gender inclusivity: Why do many women choose not to pursue, or stay in, creative positions in advertising? Through a series of in-depth interviews and focus groups with women in the UK, Ellis reveals the many contributing factors as to why the industry is losing women interested in creative positions. She also offers advice on how practitioners and educators can do a better job of training, recruiting, and retaining women in creative positions in advertising. Disability is not usually the first identity that comes up in discussions surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion. Therefore, this issue organized a roundtable of leading academics and practitioners well versed in how advertising intersects with disability. Professors Katie Ellis (Curtin University) and Beth Haller (Towson University) define what is meant by disability and how disabilities have been treated in advertising over time. Practitioners Josh Loebner (Designsensory), Kathleen Hall (Microsoft), and Christina Mallon (Wunderman Thompson and Open Style Lab) share how they have taken disabilities into account in their advertising, marketing, and product development work. Unfortunately, the advertising industry and brands have not given disability enough attention, but Loebner, Hall, and Mallon describe how they have advocated for, and achieved, much-needed change through their roles in advertising. Loebner also shares how his doctoral training has informed his work as a partially blind and visually impaired practitioner. For change to be effective and lasting, he calls for more bridges to be built between academia and the advertising industry. To continue the discussion about disability and advertising, this issue includes an interview where Loebner talks with Mallon and KR Liu (Google) about how disabilities are taken into account in design work. Loebner, Mallon, and Liu share...

To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey

Reviewed by: To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey Marcia Chatelain To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. By Michael K. Honey. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018. Pp. xii, 241. $34.99, ISBN 978-1-4328-5047-0.) Each January, scholars and activists alike prepare to refute superficial and simplistic tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. The widespread celebration of the King holiday—from churches to schools to corporations—makes this difficult. King's legacy is invoked to promote empty multiculturalism and facile ideas of change, and it reflects erasures in civil rights history. Historian Michael K. Honey rights some of these wrongs in To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. With clear writing and a thoughtful voice, Honey guides readers through pivotal movements of King's life by foregrounding his tense and symbiotic relationships with the labor movement. Honey adds texture to King's journey from being a descendant of people who "experienced deep poverty in the countryside" to the supporter of striking sanitation workers in Memphis the day before his assassination (p. 22). Honey emphasizes that King's path was sometimes cleared, and sometimes muddied, by an interracial, but not always harmoniously integrated, labor movement. Honey provides a biographically driven look at how the labor movement formed King's leadership style and strategies. King's class consciousness emerged early, with his having lived in Jim Crow Atlanta, and grew sharper during his years at Morehouse College, when he partially financed his education by doing manual labor jobs. King wrote, "I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro" (p. 28). King's belief that economic injustice knew no color and demanded solidarity did not always resonate with working-class whites in labor unions. King not only had to overcome the racism within union hierarchies but also had to contend with virulent red-baiting. Honey notes that the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) led to barriers for King. "These tragic developments of the Cold War era," Honey writes, "cut short hopes that civil rights and labor organizing would move forward together" (p. 35). Although the movements unfolded at different speeds, labor unions such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and AFL-CIO affiliate the United Packinghouse Workers of America continued to provide support for King. The tensions between King and the AFL-CIO extended into other realms of Cold War politics, including King's support for a "third way" approach to reconciling impulses toward "capitalism and communism," in newly independent nations around the world (p. 61). While chronicling King's relationship to the labor leaders who supported efforts like the March on Washington, Honey connects King's work with the other signs of growing hostility toward organized workers. For instance, King was indicted in Alabama for violating "a state antiboycott law," a measure that had been passed to curtail union mobilization; and the 1964 Civil Rights Act ensured workers of color rights to "union apprenticeships" and provided other worker protections (pp. 41, 62). The second half of the book traces the years from the height of labor–civil rights coalition building, epitomized in the United Auto Workers' support of the Selma-to-Montgomery [End Page 548] march, to the day of King's death, the day after his speech that demanded a "dangerous unselfishness" in behalf of workers (chap. 6). Honey's book ends in the present, with an overview of failures to realize King's vision. Yet the sober and optimistic tone of the narrative continues as Honey describes the electoral victories and continued work of racially progressive labor organizing, and he recognizes Coretta Scott King's labor activism after her husband's death. Honey concludes the book by wondering if we are closer to King's hope for a world where "'resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity.'" "Are we moving in that direction?," Honey asks. And, with King, he...

Impractical? The curious life of a scrappy pastoral theologian

Four decades and 1 year ago, I breathed my first breath just 13 miles from where we stand. As the sun set on the hills of Atlanta, the shadows of the King legacy fell upon my household. My parents ...

Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era ed. by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey

Reviewed by: Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era ed. by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey Tasneem Siddiqui Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Edited by Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. viii, 221. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1184-4.) 2018 The prescient release of Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is extremely important in the current historical moment. Dr. King the radical, the anti-imperialist, the antiracist, and the anticapitalist is a King that desperately needs closer study in contemporary U.S. society. As the legacy of King's praxis is reinvigorated through a revival of the Poor People's Campaign, organizers, intellectuals, policy makers, spiritual advisers, and everyday people are reengaging the map, the blueprint of the dialectic of struggle that their ancestors laid out for them. To be sure, if King were alive today, he would be at the forefront of the issues of racial justice, the war against and criminalization of the poor, environmental justice, sanctuary cities, reproductive justice, sexual violence, prison abolition, and antiwar movements. King understood that the multi-issue experience of people's lives, the quotidian acts of state violence they confront, and the social problems they navigate have deep historical roots that are intertwined. To map the shifts and transformations of King's revolutionary thought and praxis, as James L. Taylor reminds in his chapter, each iteration, each stage of growth and expansion for King, must be understood as "intensely different" and as a result of King's radical participation in black social movements (p. 154). [End Page 227] King transformed, evolved his praxis, and sharpened his modalities of analysis and resistance through this process of struggle. Editors Michael L. Clemons, Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey attend to King's trajectory in this "diverse and unique collection of multidisciplinary works by scholars from around the country that focus on contemporary social policy and issue areas in American society," applying the legacy and radical sociopolitical thought of King (p. 6). Dream and Legacy is organized in three parts covering politics and public policy, foreign affairs and Africa, and social developments. Part 1 focuses on voter suppression through the implementation of voter identification laws; criminality and social justice; affirmative action policies and the dearth of faculty of color in the academy; and health, health-care disparities, and access issues as policies that adversely affect African-descended communities in the United States. Part 2 addresses the potentialities of applying the internationalism of King's sociopolitical thought and practice to issues of foreign policy through developing a framework of "foreign policy justice" (p. 83). The second portion of Part 2 considers how King might have approached the limitations and challenges of foreign policy as it adversely affects Africa, paying particular attention to the historical legacies of black and Third World solidarity during decolonization and black liberation movements from the 1940s to the late twentieth century. King is the most known and yet the least understood radical political figure. Part 3 attempts to further parse a deeper understanding of King the revolutionary by examining the contemporary relevance of his sociopolitical thought in developing critiques of racism, voter suppression, economic violence, and cultural production and resistance while conceptualizing a critical consciousness to rights-bearing discourse. The chapters in this collective work emphasize King's trenchant critique of the governing logics of the United States as a modern Western racial capitalist settler colonial society and the ways it organizes to "legitimize and promote violence and war" (p. 202). King drew attention to the ways American institutions are maintained through this logic of (policy) violence. This dialectical relationship is expressed through the contemporary conditions of "ecological peril"; the condition of the global poor and the siphoning of global wealth and resources into the hands of a few; the expansion of paramilitary violence wielded by an ever-increasing militarized police; perpetual global warfare; the...

“Being More Than an Ally”

“Being More Than an Ally” Todd C. Shaw Had the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. not been assassinated in April of 1968, the week of January 15, 2019, we would have celebrated his 90th birthday. All the same, we celebrate King's legacy for providing us no comfortable answers to bring about his envisioned “Beloved Community.” On April 16, 1963, Dr. King wrote in his now‐famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” King presents us with a challenge about what it fundamentally means to be an ally in the struggles for human equality—whether it's the rights of LGBTQ citizens, immigrants, women, African American voters, or any other movements of human rights. The thesis of this essay is that to be an ally requires us to be more than ally. As a college professor and higher education administrator, I begin with an illustration that comes from an exercise I do in my classroom. The invisible vampire This spring 2019 semester I decided to ignore the advice of my department chair (me) and teach an additional course—POLI/AFAM 364, African American Politics. It is a course that is one of my main areas of research. In this course, I have 35 very engaged students—most predominantly African American but a handful of students who I believe self‐identify as White, Hispanic, and/or Asian American. The first day of class—this past Tuesday—I decided to do an icebreaker activity that I have devised called the “Invisible Vampire” exercise. The point of this exercise is to have the students process the relationships and tensions between identity and empathy before we engage in a range of difficult conversations and debates. This semester, our conversations will include African American politics topics as wide‐ranging as the “Case for Reparations to African Americans” due to Jim Crow segregation and slavery as presented by the brilliant essayist Ta‐Nehisi Coates to the view that President Barack Obama and his administration demonstrated a “politics of recognition” but did not advance policy specifically targeted at African American women as presented by my fellow political scientist Wendy Smooth. In this icebreaker, I assigned the students to play four roles in groups of four—Role A (Victim), Role B (Ally), Role C (Critic), and Role D (Opponent). I give them the “simple” task of role‐playing the following scenario: the first person or role A—”the victim”—was bitten by an invisible vampire or a vampire that is at least invisible to everyone except the person it attacks. Her task is to convince her fellow players that this has occurred. The ally cannot see the vampire and has never been bitten by one, but inherently believes the victim. The critics cannot see the vampire and know she has not been bitten by one, thus she is skeptical although willing to be convinced. The opponent cannot see the vampire and has never been bitten by one and is certainly not willing to be convinced. The students were quite ingenious in the dramatic license they took in arguing whether the victim was bitten. (I thought I had to give out a few Oscars prior to the official ceremony…) When we processed the exercise, I asked my students the following questions (or they provided amazing observations prior to my questions) including: (1) “How did you, the victim, try to convince your fellow role players you were bitten?” (They talked about the bite marks on their arms although the critics and opponents stated they could come up with dozens of entirely more plausible reasons for such marks.) (2) “How did you, the victim, feel when you were not believed?” (Their answers ranged from militant to slightly despondent.) (3) “Instead of ‘invisible vampires’, what are the concepts I am really talking about?” (The students immediately answered “racism, sexism, classism, homophobia or heterosexism or any other system of oppression.”) (4) “What does it feel like playing the role of and being labeled a ‘victim’, an ‘ally’, a ‘critic’, or a “opponent? What does it...

Fellowship of Love: Martin Luther King's Legacy and the Renewal of the Labor Tradition

Labor—Lennon or Luther The year 1968 marked a turning point in the history of America and the wider West. The postwar settlement showed signs of strain as economic reconstruction ground to a halt and the Cold War confrontation began to take its toll. Youth protests and the Vietnam War polarized society and fueled the flames of the culture wars, pitting progressive liberals against conservatives. Millions of citizens lost trust in their system of government and their politicians, as was exemplified by President Lyndon B. Johnson's fall from grace. With the assassinations of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and…

Remember, Celebrate, and Forget? The Martin Luther King Day and the Pitfalls of Civil Religion

2016 marked the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Martin Luther King Day, which honors the civil rights leader and recognizes the contributions of African Americans. However, the holiday has also become a day of debate over King's legacy and, in turn, over the (mis)use of the nation's civil religion. On the one hand, the civil religious narrative of enduring unity, of the Promised Land, and of King as the nation's redeemer, which evolved around the implementation of the holiday during the 1970s and early 1980s, appealed to a broad audience and forged a sense of unity. On the other hand, it also masked real progress and lead to a symbolic “pseudo-integration” of African Americans. Hence, as the ideals of the Declaration of Independence seemed to be finally achieved, it is not surprising that King has been succcessfully turned into a poster boy against affirmative action.

Oratio: Address to Commemorate the 2013 Martin Luther King Day at the Law Faculty, University of Michigan

The paper commences by considering the similarity between Dr King, MK Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and argues that they are high mimetic figures who inspire us to be better. Their legacy and memory operate as a yardstick by which we can evaluate the conduct of those exercising public and private power over us. Each remains dominant in his respective society decades after passing on or leaving public life, and the paper suggests that very little societal value is had by deconstructing their lives and judging facets of their lives through the prism of latter day morality. We gain more by leaving their high mimetic status undisturbed. 
 
 There is a clear link between their various struggles with King being heavily influenced by the writings and thinking of Gandhi, who commenced his career as a liberation activist in South Africa. King was instrumental in commencing the discourse on economic sanctions to force the Apartheid government to change and the Indian government had a long and committed relationship with the ANC.
 
 The second half of the paper turns to an analysis of how Dr King's legacy impacted directly and indirectly on developments in South Africa. One of the key objectives of the Civil Rights movement in the USA was to attain substantive equality and to improve the quality of life of all. The paper then turns to assessing the extent to which democratic South Africa has achieved these objectives and concludes that the picture is mixed. Important pioneering changes such as enabling gays and lesbians to marry have taught important lessons about taking rights seriously. However, despite important advancements, neither poverty nor inequality has been appreciably reduced. One of the major failures has been the inability to provide appropriate, effective and relevant education to African children in public schools. Effectively educating previously disadvantaged persons represents one of the few means at our disposal of reducing inequality and breaking the cycle of poverty. Fortunately, there is a general awareness in the country that something needs to be done about this crisis urgently. The paper notes comments by President Zuma that the level of wealth in white households is six times that of black households. The critique is that comments of this nature do not demonstrate an acknowledgment by the ANC that, after 19 years in power, they must also accept responsibility for statistics such as this. 

A Hero to Be Remembered:EbonyMagazine, Critical Memory and the “Real Meaning” of the King Holiday

This article explores the role ofEbonymagazine as a key staging ground for competing political and ideological debates over Martin Luther King Jr's legacy, and the struggle for a national holiday in his name. In doing so, it provides an important case study into the contestations between what Houston Baker has described as “black critical memory” and “black conservative nostalgia.” In response to attempts by Ronald Reagan and other politicians to reimagine King as an advocate for color-blind conservatism,Ebony’s senior editor, Lerone Bennett Jr., sought to situate King's legacy within a radical “living history” of black America. However, the magazine's broader coverage of the King holiday movement betrayed underlying tensions within its discussion of King's legacy, and fed into the magazine's role as an inadvertent frame for color-blind ideologies during the 1980s.

“The Fierce Urgency of Now”: The Ecological Legacy of King’s Social Ethics

This essay offers a constructive, ecological extension of Martin Luther King Jr.’s social ethics using a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s classic, Walden , that King often used: “improved means to an unimproved end.” King argued that this Thoreauvian theme “summarized” modern life; in particular, he employed this idea to address the systemic, interconnected forces of racism, materialism, and militarism. This essay argues that King’s work is fertile ground for the cultivation of an ecological ethic capable of resisting the logic of commodification of the West.

The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr: Clarence B. Jones, right-wing conservatism, and the manipulation of the King legacy

The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr: Clarence B. Jones, right-wing conservatism, and the manipulation of the King legacy

Oratio: Address to Commemorate the 2013 Martin Luther King Day at the Law Faculty, University of Michigan

The paper commences by considering the similarity between Dr King, MK Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and argues that they are high mimetic figures who inspire us to be better. Their legacy and memory operate as a yardstick by which we can evaluate the conduct of those exercising public and private power over us. Each remains dominant in his respective society decades after passing on or leaving public life, and the paper suggests that very little societal value is had by deconstructing their lives and judging facets of their lives through the prism of latter day morality. We gain more by leaving their high mimetic status undisturbed. There is a clear link between their various struggles with King being heavily influenced by the writings and thinking of Gandhi, who commenced his career as a liberation activist in South Africa. King was instrumental in commencing the discourse on economic sanctions to force the Apartheid government to change and the Indian government had a long and committed relationship with the ANC. The second half of the paper turns to an analysis of how Dr King's legacy impacted directly and indirectly on developments in South Africa. One of the key objectives of the Civil Rights movement in the USA was to attain substantive equality and to improve the quality of life of all. The paper then turns to assessing the extent to which democratic South Africa has achieved these objectives and concludes that the picture is mixed. Important pioneering changes such as enabling gays and lesbians to marry have taught important lessons about taking rights seriously. However, despite important advancements, neither poverty nor inequality has been appreciably reduced. One of the major failures has been the inability to provide appropriate, effective and relevant education to African children in public schools. Effectively educating previously disadvantaged persons represents one of the few means at our disposal of reducing inequality and breaking the cycle of poverty. Fortunately, there is a general awareness in the country that something needs to be done about this crisis urgently. The paper notes comments by President Zuma that the level of wealth in white households is six times that of black households. The critique is that comments of this nature do not demonstrate an acknowledgment by the ANC that, after 19 years in power, they must also accept responsibility for statistics such as this. Keywords: Martin Luther King; Mahatma Gandhi; Nelson Mandela

Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada's World Wars, by Tim Cook

Tim Cook Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada's World Wars Toronto: Allen Lane, 2012. 472pp., $34.00 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0670065219For more than a decade, Canada and its Western allies have been at war with global terrorism, confronting enemies along an uncertain and shifting frontline that has extended through Afghanistan and Iraq, across Asia and into Africa. Though a new kind of conflict for Canadians, this shadowy war raises old questions about the nature of wartime leadership, about the balance between ends and means, political values and military need, and about the place of individual decision-makers in their country's history. Working off the larger canvas provided by the first and second world wars, historian Tim Cook tackles these questions in his timely study of Canada's wartime leaders, Sir Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King.Individuals matter in Warlords, and Canada's response to both world wars reflected the outsized personalities of its ruling prime ministers: Borden during the First World War and King during its tragic successor. Cook is a fluent narrator. He steadily marches his two prime ministerial subjects and his readers past the milestones of early 20th century Canadian history, enlivening the passage with colourful portraits of key characters encountered along the way. He opens with a Lincoln-esque sketch of the young Borden, who abandoned the family farm in Nova Scotia for teaching, lawyering, and politicking. Elected prime minister in 1911 of the first Conservative government since 1896, Cook's early Borden was an irresolute leader, trapped by recession and debt, and cautious in the face of national fissures over defence policy. There were few hopeful signs of change during the first years of the First World War. PM is undecided as usual, the veteran trade minister, Sir George Foster, complained to his diary in August 1915 (59).Over the next year or so, however, the Great War transformed Borden. The Conservative leader was shaken by the scale of the conflict and animated by a steely determination to seek a larger voice in its strategic direction. The payment demanded by Imperial Britain was Canadian manpower, a steep price that Borden proved willing to pay. As recruitment slowed in 1916 and 1917, the prime minister moved inexorably towards conscription over strong opposition from French Canadians, non-British immigrants, and farmers. For Cook, Borden's essential character was honed in the dramatic national conflict over con- scription, which the prime minister pursued with single-minded determination in 1917 and 1918. As the wartime state flexed its muscle, becoming intolerant, authoritarian (130), and even despotic (147), national security trumped national unity, and much else that Canadians field dear. For Borden, and possibly Cook, the ends clearly justified the means.Mackenzie King's legacy was different. A product of middle-class Ontario, King sat out the First World War, working for American millionaire J.D. Rockefeller, while absorbing the lessons to be learned from Borden's difficulties with French Canada. Above all, King came to understand the importance of national unity for political success. …

Searching for the Promised Land: Examining Dr Martin Luther King's Concept of the Beloved Community1

Abstract: 4 April 2008 marked the 40th anniversary of Dr King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since his murder we have seen Dr King's message of social justice, the growing threat of militarism, the threat the USA's burgeoning empire posed, and his goal of ending injustice boiled down to a few words spoken in Washington DC when he declared his dream to see his children grow up in a society free of race prejudice. This paper engages with Dr King's work and presents a more geographically sophisticated understanding of King's legacy than the oft repeated Washington speech. Through an analysis of Dr King's concept of the Beloved Community, I argue that Dr King's work stems from the experiences of the Black Atlantic world. Consequently, we should see Dr King's social theory as part of a larger anti‐colonial struggle which sought to integrate African American and Western notions of community, which holds contemporary importance as a counterpoint to current neoliberal conceptions of community.

April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.'s death and how it changed America

On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, Michael Eric Dyson re-examines the influence of the Civil Rights leader, and how his death changed America.Martin Luther King, Jr, the prophet for racial and economic justice in America, was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Earlier that day, he had ended his final public speech by saying may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.Now, forty years after his death, Michael Eric Dyson uses the assassination as a starting point for a comprehensive re-evaluation of the fate of America, specifically Black America, over the ensuing years. He ambitiously - and controversially - investigates the ways in the nation has made it to the Promised Land (the Civil Rights Bill of '64; the incredible number of black elected; the expanding black middle class and increased numbers of black entrepreneurs and CEOs) whilst shining a bright light on the many areas that still fall far short (racial profiling; police brutality; housing discrimination in the form of mortgage practices; health disparities; and, disproportionate levels of unemployment and underemployment).Rather than looking only back April 4, 1968 takes a sweeping 360-degree view of King's death-remembering all the toil, triumph, and tribulation that led to that fateful date while anticipating the ways in which the legacy of King's death will affect America's future.