Through the Eyes of a King: Negro Perspectives on the American Dream

 

The American Dream may be defined as the opportunity to pursue a better life unfettered, and unimpeded, according to one’s ability and ingenuity. This “dream”, hinted at in “Harlem”, and delineated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s, "I Have A Dream" speech, the American Dream; was, and for Negroes, had always been the American Nightmare. For Negroes, the American Dream was jealously and viciously guarded by the system of Jim Crow, by white lawmakers, and by the Ku Klux Klan.

All of that would change on May 17, 1954, with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Ks. Supreme Court decision in which the Court found segregation in public schools to be “unconstitutional”. This landmark decision ignited a storm of protest from white Americans and gave birth to the black Civil Rights Movement, which reached its zenith in August of 1963, with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Today, if you ask most Americans, even black Americans, what was the name of the March, they will tell you the “March on Washington”—people forget that it was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King was unable to tackle both issues of the March, so he settled on the issue of greatest import, civil rights, and equality, and gave it everything he had. He was a true believer in the American Dream, so much so, that he likely reasoned that if the Negro had his freedom, the Negro would use his unfettered and unimpeded opportunity, and his ability and ingenuity, to secure a job and pursue a better life. In short, King wanted, not what whites at the time claimed Negroes wanted— special treatment under the law— but for Negroes to have equal access to the American Dream, and equal treatment in all aspects of American life, under the law.

By understanding the cultural context for the issues presented by Martin Luther King, in his "I Have A Dream" speech and by Langston Hughes, in his poem “Harlem”, we may be able to uncover the source of the deep and bitter resentment, dire desperation, and burgeoning rage bubbling underneath the surface of these authors’ works—works, that seem to say, “We too, dream that dream, so why can’t we have it?”

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes posed this question in his poem “Harlem”. In the poem, Hughes asks the reader, “Does it dry up…Or fester…Does it stink like rotten meat?” Hughes then shifts to a tone of resignation—“Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.”—yet he ends the poem with this cryptic, even prophetic, warning: “Or does it explode?” Hughes does not answer this question for us; instead, he allows us to mull over the issue: to decipher his meaning and evaluate for ourselves the meaning of his insinuation. (Hughes)

In “Harlem”, Hughes appears to be commenting on the condition of racial inequality that existed in America at the time—a condition that had existed since the institution of slavery in America in 1640, when the state of Maryland became the first colony in America to institutionalize slavery.

Prior to 1640, Africans in America were indentured servants—laborers who were bound by law, to serve out and repay their debt of indenture—but who had the legal right to be freed once that debt had been paid. By 1641, beginning with the state of Massachusetts, laws were passed and instituted, declaring that bondage was “legal”, and African laborers suddenly found themselves considered “chattel” under the law—slaves—who were the “property” of their masters, and could be bought and sold as the master desired. This condition of forced servitude; the enslavement of the Negro race in America, existed in its legal form until January 1, 1863, when president Abraham Lincoln actuated the Emancipation Proclamation, and legally ended slavery in America. Later that year, on November 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, where he resolved,

[T]hat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. (King) 

On August 28, 1963, one hundred years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and gave the Gettysburg Address, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivered what was to become his most famous speech: the I Have a Dream speech, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., with a throng that numbered at least 250,000, a fifth of whom was white, King laid out in graphic detail, the grievances and continued suffering of the Negro people. The purpose of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as it was called, was to dramatize inequities between whites and blacks in labor and civil rights. Prior to the March, President John F. Kennedy had proposed a bill that would have provided equal protection under the law to blacks, but the bill had been stalled in Congress by Southern Congressional members, all of whom were white, who resisted the idea of granting to blacks, equal status with whites for any reason.

In a gathering that included labor leaders, members of the clergy, film stars, folksingers, as well as citizens from all walks of life, King opened his famous speech by paralleling the language in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He then reminded America that,

One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. (King)

Throughout the speech, King reminds America of the promises guaranteed to all Americans in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and lays out in stunning, and eloquent detail how these promises have yet to be granted to Negroes. King states,

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. (King)

By reminding Americans of the promises granted to all citizens of America, and that Negroes are also citizens, King attempts to establish a tone of commonality with the American white majority, implying that the aim of the Civil Rights Movement is not to force America to grant special privileges to Negroes, but rather to grant Negroes the privileges due them as citizens of the country—privileges denied them since the founding of the nation.

From the beginning, King knew that this was a historic moment: in his opening lines King noted,

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. (King)

Of Abraham Lincoln he says,

[A] great American, in whose symbolic shadow [referring to the man and to his massive statue seated as if sitting in judgment, in the background], we stand today. (King)

Of the Emancipation Proclamation (Lincoln; 1863) he says,

[It] came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. (King)

…reminding Americans of that great promise that was made to blacks in the Emancipation Proclamation, but not kept. King then states in no uncertain terms that,

[O]ne-hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. [T]he Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. [T]he Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. [T]he Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. (King)

Though he is careful not to alienate his audience, King does not pull any punches as he lays out for America, and the world, the crime of discrimination. He reminds America that in its inception as a nation, America made a promise to its citizens that it is honor-bound to fulfill; a promise, which he and the people gathered there, had come to collect. Using language taken directly from the Declaration of Independence King states,

In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (King)

King then blasts every citizen who considers him or herself to be a real American, with the following words,

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. (King)

That day in Washington, D. C., King was a man with a divine mission: to make America become in reality, that dream that was set on paper at its founding. King said,

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off, or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. (King)

referring to President Kennedy’s, and other sympathetic liberals’ persistent urging to be patient; instead, King threw down the gauntlet, stating,

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice, to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. (King)

King then issues this eerie warning to the white power structure in America and anyone else who might attempt to put this genie back in the bottle, or ignore, or marginalize the meaning of that day’s events—

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hoped that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content, will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest, nor tranquility, in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. (King)

 

This is not the Martin Luther King that we have always heard about in school: the peaceful orator who preached non-violence went to jail and was beaten, without ever lifting a hand to harm his fellow man. Although he was not advocating violence with his statements, King was making a critically important point to the entire nation—Negroes had had enough! That the practice of racial inequality must come to an end! Implicit in King’s warning was the same cryptic, prophetic, explosive situation posited in Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem”; and Hughes’ question, “Or does it explode?” had a very real chance of being answered if America did not take the March seriously, and do the right thing. (Hughs)

King then, in a brilliant stroke of diplomacy, perhaps born out of a legitimate fear of inciting the nation to riot, quickly acts to quell the tempers of the more militant members of the gathering by reminding all present of the policy of non-violent protest that had brought together such an unprecedented assembly, in such an unprecedented show of support, that crossed all racial, religious, and ethnic boundaries for an American ideal, common to them all. King astutely acts to acknowledge and include all people who extol the values of brotherhood, justice, and equality: thereby calming, and unifying the crowd in their common purpose. King says,

[I]n the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. [W]e must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous, new militancy, which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. (King)

King next announces to America that the old ways of doing things have died:

[W]e cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto, to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied, until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness, like a mighty stream. (King)

Perhaps evident of the death of the old ways, and the transformation of the American collective consciousness into a mind that has learned of the concept of civil rights, is the fact that King himself, at the very moment when he is speaking of conditions that occur only to Negroes, ceases to refer to Negroes, and instead addresses “the devotees of civil rights”; thereby including all Americans who value equality and justice in every aspect of American life. King then tells the crowd to go back home, and to take with them the faith that somehow, something will change;

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can, and will, be changed. (King)

King has just introduced a new concept to the American collective consciousness—a concept, so common to us today, that we can scarcely comprehend its impact at the time it was first said. Prior to King making the above statement, Americans as a whole, and white Americans in particular, did not understand what the Negroes were doing. Even many Negroes didn’t understand what those Negroes were doing! They did not understand why those Negroes were angry, what those Negroes meant by freedom, and why those Negroes were allowing themselves to be jailed, hosed, beaten, and killed because very few Americans truly understood the concept of “civil rights”; they had never seen it! Up to that day, in the history of this country, civil rights had never been a reality.

The ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’, was truly an act of revolution: it was a changing of the guard; a regime change from the old ways, symbolized by Jim Crow, to a new enlightenment, symbolized by the eclectic representation of every stratum of American society gathered there at the Lincoln Memorial. White Americans were terrified by the sight of so many Negroes who, at least as best as they could understand it, didn’t want to live in America anymore! Black Americans who opposed the March, often did so because they were either fearful of mass reprisals from whites, or out of a cynicism that white America would never grant Negroes equal rights, so why not just separate from white America, or rise up? Martin Luther King had dropped such a bomb on the nation with the size, and diversity of the people gathered there at the Lincoln Memorial, that he had to comfort everyone within earshot, and within view of a television with the reassurance that,

[S]omehow this situation can, and will, be changed. (King)

For the first time in American history, Americans got to see the power of passive resistance; they were slapped square in the face with the fact that massive protesting held a real possibility of forcing America to change whether it wanted to or not. But to what?

With their minds now prepared, King finally arrives at the true purpose of this gathering—the raison d’être—his “dream”. He starts out with a message of faith before he teaches America how Americans will make this change occur—in short, he teaches America the basic tenets of civil disobedience, and in the process, the meaning of “civil rights”.

[T]his is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. (King)

[A]nd if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi – from every mountainside. Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring - when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics - will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (King)

With these words, America entered its second infancy. America would be reborn as a nation where legal discrimination against a person because of his or her race, would no longer be tolerated by society as a whole. Americans would soon realize that they did not have to believe blindly, everything the government said, and follow the President without question, to prove their love of, and loyalty to, the country. American youth, an amazing number of whom were affluent whites, would soon rebel, and take to the streets in droves to protest the drafting of mostly poor white, black, and Hispanic men to fight in the war in Vietnam. The behavior of American soldiers in Vietnam, as well as the escalation of the war, would be called into question—and the uncensored broadcasts of the war on American television, would lead to a rash of violent protests throughout the country. Langston Hughes would die of cancer, in 1967, without ever seeing the American Dream become the Negro reality. The year 1968 would become one of the most violent years on record in American history, as over 100 riots raged throughout the country, and threatened to tear the nation apart. And by the end of the decade, President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Minister Malcolm X, and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the linchpins of the Civil Rights Movement, would all be assassinated as America erupted, and the foundation of the old society was ripped apart.

Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred” and Martin Luther King’s quest to partake of the “American Dream” are foreign concepts to us now. In this age of massive consumerism, and harried, fractured, cell phone-driven lives, we know only that something is missing, but rarely do we know what is missing. In many important ways, the dream expressed by these two men was for us, simply a birthright. Most of us did not have to march, or be jailed, or be beaten, or struggle to receive the fruits of that dream—we needed only to be born. Most of us have never known an America that was anything like the America in the time of Hughes and King.  In our America, we are, for the most part, judged by the “…content of our character”, and “not by the color of our skin.” The success of the Civil Rights Movement secured for us the right to pursue health, wealth, and education with such unobstructed ease, that we give nary a thought to the bloodshed and suffering, and utter, sore travail our forebears and our traumatized nation suffered to provide us with these luxuries that we consume with such flippant ease.

In the end, I suppose that it is the tragedy of all children that we must live in the shadows of our forefathers. If they be great, however, then great be our offenses if we do not advance the handiwork that they have so nobly set before us. We do not seem to dream today the way that Hughes and King dreamed of the society that presently surrounds us—and that may be the greatest tragedy of all.

A Historical Note:

A fact that is not commonly known, but is, nevertheless, an interesting footnote of the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’, is that Martin Luther King had not planned to give the "I Have A Dream" speech that day in Washington, D. C. He had been planning to give a more standard speech, and was about to ascend to the podium when Mahalia Jackson, a famous gospel singer of the time, shouted out to him as he was approaching the podium, “Tell ‘em about your dream, Martin!” King took a moment to reflect, and then, drawing upon several of his older speeches, he formulated the "I Have A Dream" speech. King was clearly moved by a force greater than himself. The power of his oratory, the eloquence of his message, and his thundering delivery of the speech shouted down the walls of Jericho of the “separate, but equal”, racially discriminatory system in America forever. His willingness to include whites and other races in the movement made the issue the problem of all Americans and gave the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the power to transform our national identity forever. We owe a debt to those who fought, suffered, and died to bring us one step closer to embracing the true American Dream of harmonious equality.