January/February 2001
Resurrecting Martin Luther King
by Jonathan Tilove
Michael Eric Dyson is on a rescue mission to deliver Martin Luther King Jr. from his holiday, his halo and the hollow hero worship of a nation that has forgotten how much better it likes him dead than alive.
King, Dyson argues in his book, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. (Free Press), was "the greatest American in our history." But to understand why, Dyson says, Americans must recall and reclaim the King whom FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called "the most dangerous Negro in America."
"I have a problem with the namby-pamby, we-are-the-world, Michael-Jackson King -- I could probably add Quincy Jones," says Dyson, kicking off a national book tour before a small, rapt audience at a Washington bookstore. "I am tired of the representation of King as basically this safe Negro. I think he was a very dangerous man. He didn't get killed because he was dreaming."
On Sunday, Dyson is preaching before several hundred at Union Temple Baptist Church. He is recalling for them King's last sermon in Washington, at the National Cathedral, where, years after his "I Have a Dream" speech, King lamented that most Americans were unconscious racists, that most white people were unable to confront systematic bigotry.
"That's not the King whom you are going to be hearing about on his birthday, that isn't the Burger King King," roars Dyson, who is an ordained Baptist minister as well as the Ida B. Wells Barnett professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
In anticipation of the January 17 national King holiday, Dyson says, "I am trying to challenge people to remember that King, to resurrect that Martin Luther King. That King is a King who is useful to us right now."
Dyson's book is unflinching in its examination of King's faults. He was a plagiarizer, "He ripped off a lot of his dissertation, he stole it," says Dyson. But Dyson is more forgiving of King's penchant for borrowing material for his sermons, which Dyson feels enabled King to turn the words of white liberal theologians back on whites in ways that exposed their own prejudices.
And, Dyson says, King was also "a guilt-ridden and vigilant adulterer," though he adds that were it not for the FBI, we wouldn't know that. "The fact that we even know about that is a crime."
Dyson, now 41, was living in Detroit when King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
"I was 9 years old. I had never heard of King. I'd never heard his name until that evening on television. The newsman broke into the regular program and asserted that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been shot in Memphis, Tennessee.
I had no idea who he was," Dyson recalls. "I asked my mom which one was he, and (on the tapes on TV) he was speaking with so much power and eloquence that I was immediately converted beyond the realm of choice to a love and commitment and identification with Martin Luther King Jr. that has remained with me."
But what about today's 9-year-olds? It is a lot easier for a parent, schoolteacher or after-school special to present King as a bland apostle of brotherhood than a sometimes despairing critic of what he saw as the racist rot at the nation's core.
As Dyson says in his book, "If the bitter battle to squeeze King into the cycle of public holidays seemed to be a significant victory, as I believe it was, an even bigger challenge looms in keeping King's birthday from being turned into a festival of forgetting his challenging legacy.
"How do you accurately portray a figure who was so radically threatening to American society that it took his murder to appreciate his greatness?" asks Dyson. "If he is a real radical you are going to want to forget him. You are going to want to erase him from your historical record because he challenges the very foundation you have erected your memory, your culture and history on."
Copyright 2000 Religion News Service. All rights reserved.