King's Legacy Research Articles

Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the South: A New Landscape of Memory

By laying bare the racial fault lines in one community after another, by calling attention to the circumstances of life in the heart of the black community while demanding better, the streets that bear his name are Martin Luther King's greatest living memorial.--Haki R. Madhubuti Traditionally, public commemoration in the South has been devoted largely to remembering the region's role in the Civil War and the mythic Old South plantation culture supposedly lost as a result of that conflict. These memories remain deeply ingrained in the southern landscape of monuments, museums, historical markers, and place names. Yet, African Americans who seek to make their own claim to the South and its history increasingly challenge Civil War-centered conceptions of the past. Perhaps the best known of these struggles involve ongoing calls to remove public symbols of the Confederacy. At the same time, African American southerners are using direct political action to build memorials that recognize their own historical experiences, struggles, and achievements. A major pillar in this trend is the commemoration of another, quite different revolution from that of the Civil War--the Civil Rights Movement. The naming of streets after slain Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is the most widespread example of African American efforts to rewrite the landscape of southern commemoration. Despite the growing frequency of naming streets in honor of Dr. King, this new cultural phenomenon has received limited attention, even though the inscription of King's legacy onto streets is a potentially valuable indicator of where the South is in terms of race relations. On the one hand, communities name streets after King as a result of the increased cultural and political power of African Americans and the liberalization of white attitudes. While the commemorative movement is driven predominantly by the activism of African Americans, there are noteworthy instances of whites not only supporting the cause but leading it. On the other hand, naming streets for King is often a controversial process that exposes continued racial divisions. activists who seek to rename thoroughfares that cut through and connect different communities have confronted significant public opposition. This frequently leads to the placement of King's name on minor streets or portions of roads located entirely within the African American community. At the same time that Martin Luther King streets speak to how far the South has come since the Movement, they also speak to how far the region still has to go in reaching the dream of racial equality and social justice. The emergence of Martin Luther King streets increasingly marks the symbolic place that these streets occupy within the lives of southerners and Americans in general. Martin Luther King Drives, Boulevards, and Avenues are important centers of African American identity, activity, and community--constituting what journalist Jonathan Tilove has called Black America's Main Street. These streets are memorial arenas--public spaces for interpreting and debating King's legacies, grappling with questions of race and racism. For many activists, finding the most appropriate street to identify with him comes with the difficulty of convincing the white establishment that King's name belongs on major roads, that his legacy has relevance and resonance to everyone's lives. To marginalize the commemoration of King on side streets within the black community, particularly in the face of African American requests not to do so, is to perpetuate the same force of segregation that the Civil Rights leader battled. (1) Martin Luther King streets serve as points of pride and struggle in the contemporary South. The photographs here challenge negative representations of these roads. As Tilove so keenly observed in Along Martin Luther King, It has become a commonplace of popular culture to identify a Martin Luther King street as a generic marker of black space and not incidentally, of ruin, as a sad signpost of danger, failure, and decline. …

The Other Side of the Mountain

As I write these words, Martin Luther King Day 2007 has just passed. As the years have gone by—2007 marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of his death—King's membership in the pantheon of great Americans and the historical uniqueness of the nonviolent protest movement he led appear indisputable. A national holiday is a deserved tribute. Yet, even though the annual memorial is the pinnacle of King's legacy, it is a burden upon it.

The laine controversy and the study of hinduism

In 2003 Oxford University Press released a book by James W. Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, just as the monsoon's storms were arriving in the subcontinent.1 The book offered a fascinating inquiry into the historiography surrounding the Mar?th? monarch ?ivaj? (1627-80), who is best known throughout India, and in the Western academy, as a Hindu king who heroically challenged the archetypically villainous Indian Muslim ruler, Awrangzib (1658-1707). In Shivaji Laine brilliantly detailed how Marathi historians, biographers, and hagiographers have spun SivSji's legacy into a Hindu one and set it against a constructed Muslim enemy. Furthermore, Laine showed that in ?iv?jfs own time, and largely under his control, Sivaj? himself nurtured the persona of a kingly Hindu Ksatriya (warrior) through his coronation ceremony in 1674 at Raigad, in Maharashtra2 and through the creation of a regal genealogy by the Maharashtrian Br?hma?, resident in Benares, G?g? Bhatt. A study of narratives and stories, Laine's book was not intended to intercede in the history of Sivaji but rather comment on the rich parade of pronouncements and political uses that have circulated around the great Mar?th? king's legacy for three centuries. Indeed, the author makes plain in the text that his audience is made up of "those who study religion and religious identity" and who seek a "thicker description of South Asian Islam" and a "richer portrait of medieval Hinduism" (Laine 2003a: 15). In addition, Laine hoped to "rescue" ?ivaj?'s biography "from the grasp of those who see India as a Hindu nation at war with its Muslim neighbors" (2003a: 6). This rescue was to be accomplished by providing a nuanced account of how Siv?ji became a representative of "Hinduism" in multiple ways, thus providing a counterpoint to a homogenized Hindu Right historiography that takes Sivaj? as an exemplar of militant Hinduism. In this way, Laine's work joined a chorus of scholarly voices arguing multiple perspec

"My Mind Set on Freedom": A History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954- 1968.

Part 1 Preface ix Part 2 THE GATHERING STORM 3 Chapter 3 First legal challenges. The New Deal. Regional protest groups. Local organizations. The Emmett Till case. The Brown decision announced. Part 4 THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR 27 Chapter 5 Reaction to the Brown decision. Autherine Lucy. Crisis at Little Rock. Massive resistance. James Meredith at Ole Miss. George Wallace and the University of Alabama. Part 6 I HAVE A DREAM 51 Chapter 7 The Montgomery Bus Boycott. The rise of martin Luther King, Jr. King's philosophy. The formation of SCLC. Failure at Albany. The Birmingham Kennedy's involvement. The March on Washington. Part 8 SITTING-IN FOR JUSTICE, RIDING FOR FREEDOM 81 Chapter 9 The Greensboro movement. The movement spreads. Rides. Origins of SNCC. The Voting Rights Freedom Summer. Malcolm X. Part 10 THE NATIONAL RESPONSE 106 Chapter 11 The Eisenhower administration. The election of 1960. Kennedy and civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. White backlash. The Mississippi Democratic party. The election of 1964. Part 12 THE END OF THE MOVEMENT 127 13 The Selma The Voting Rights Act of 1965. The end of school segregation. Collapse of the movement. power. King's Chicago sojourn. The Poor People's campaign. The death of Martin Luther King. Part 14 THE NEW SOUTH 149 Chapter 15 Effect of the Voting Rights Act. Black political participation. School desegregation and its effects. Southern justice. The wealth disparity. King's legacy. Part 16 A Note on Sources 165 Part 17 Index 169

Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (review)

Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 141 Reviews There are many other chapters in the book that deserve mention, but space limitations preclude serious discussion. In passing, readers interested in Solomon's temple will find E. Bloch-Smith's essay, '''Who Is the King of Glory?' Solomon's Temple and Its Symbolism," a helpful discussion of the temple symbolism found in I Kings 6-7. Bloch-Smith details archaeological data known from Egypt and Syria as well as Mesopotamia. Finally, R. North's essay, "Medical Discoveries of Biblical Times," discusses a subject with which many readers may be unfamiliar. For a volume of this nature, I found almost no errors, a credit to the editors and publishers. The work is a fitting tribute to King's legacy and is highly recommended. John C. H. Laughlin Averell College Danville. VA 24541 NARRATIVE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE. David M. Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell. The Oxford Bible Series. Pp. xvi + 263. Oxford University Press, 1993. Cloth, $55.00/Paper, $16.95. This book has two agendas. Primarily, the authors "attempt to steer between discussing mechanisms of biblical narrative and reading particular texts" (p. ix). To this end, the volume alternates between chapters on narrative method and ones in which those insights are immediately brought to bear on the interpretation or "reading" of biblical texts. The first chapter , "Strategies for Reading," is illustrated by a reading of Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar. Chapter 3, "Characters and Narrators," applies its observations to the persons of Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 11-22). "Designs on the Plot" is complemented by an analysis of the plot in the book of Jonah, and "The Lure of Language" by Daniel 3. The fmal chapter , "Readers and Responsibility," discusses literature, the Bible, and ideology, illustrating its points from Genesis 2-3. In addition, there are many brief examples within the chapters on method. On the surface, this work is a welcome addition to other basic books on the art of biblical narrative. The authors indeed express their debt to Alter, Bar-Efrat, Berlin, and Sternberg, and their indebtedness is evident throughout. Guon and Fewell rightly see the original contribution of their work in the helpful didactic arrangement described above. However, they Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 142 Reviews introduce another element which imposes itself on the structure and upsets the balance. Denying the possibility of objective interpretation, the authors raise the banner of reader-oriented subjective interpretation, political criticism, feminist criticism, and deconstructionism. "Meaning is not something out there in the text waiting to be discovered. Meaning is always...the reader's creation..." (p. xi). "We claim to be supporting a significantly new way of reading narrative in the Hebrew Bible" (p. 32). The notion that all interpretation is value-laden and ideologically motivated is fully developed only in the final chapter, but by that point it has already pervaded the entire book. Sometimes it colors a chapter on method; at other times it insinuates the interpretation of a story or its heroes. For example, the opening chapter on varieties of interpretation has little tolerance for classic historical criticism and its search for objective truth, personified here by "the Jewish American scholar" (p. 21) E. A. Speiser and his commentary on Genesis in the Anchor Bible series. When Speiser notes that the verb ydt ("And Adam knew," Gen 4:1) has clear sexual connotations in Semitic, the value of this philological comment and of his whole explication of Genesis 4 is summed up with derision: His interpretation is "more interesting for what it fails to say.... Still, we do learn that in Akkadian dogs 'have experience or other dogs" (p. 22). The chapter on Abraham and Sarah shows how ideological reading affects the interpretation of character. The following assembled quotations intend to convey the unrelenting tone of the entire piece: "Abram, with a mastery of understatement, is requesting that Sarai avail herself sexually to the male population of Egypt" (p. 92); Abraham "sacrifices his wife for his own physical and economic security.... Sarai is expendable" (ibid.). "Abram leaves [Egypt], blessed with wealth, but hardly having been a blessing to other families of the earth" (p. 93). In spuming the offer...

The London Entrepot Merchants and the Georgia Colony

B ETWEEN the years 1730 and 1732, while the Georgia Charter was being processed in the various government offices, the purposes of the proposed colony remained exclusively charitable. The initial fund upon which the Georgia Trust was founded, the D'Allone Legacy, had been used by its original executor, Dr. Thomas Bray, for the religious and charitable projects for which he was so widely known. When Dr. Bray died in February I730, a corporate body designated as the Associates of Dr. Bray administered the D'Allone Legacy for the Christian instruction of Negroes in America and assumed the direction of Dr. Bray's personal project of founding parochial libraries both in England and in the colonies. Among these men were those who had been legally associated with Dr. Bray since I724 as trustees for the D'Allone Legacy; a group of members of Parliament recruited from the Committee on Gaols, which had been propitiously revived in February I730 by James Oglethorpe; and several clergymen and laymen active in philanthropic ventures. An anticipated gift from the King Legacy, solicited by Oglethorpe, was intended to augment the original funds of the D'Allone Legacy for the purpose of founding a charitable colony in America. The Associates petitioned the government for a colonial grant southward of Carolina, and those Associates who signed the petition became the charter members of the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America. Until June I733 the Trustees of Georgia and the Associates of Dr. Bray were essentially one body, since the Georgia Trust assumed responsibility for administering the D'Allone Legacy and the effects of Dr. Bray.' The phil-