A True Likeness
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Spread over four acres abutting the National Mall, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial has a single focal point: a 30-foot-tall statue of the civil rights leader himself. In a bold echo of Michelangelo and Rodin, the work portrays King half-emerged from a massive block of white granite, inscribed with an excerpt from this line of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”
The statue was unveiled in 2011, amid protests over the selection of a Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin, who was reported to have carved images of Mao from the same (Chinese) granite. Other objections arose to the stern rendering of King’s face. For example, Edward Rothstein of the New York Times wrote that its expression—furrowed brow, compressed lips, thousand-yard stare—was too severe to convey King’s warmth and charisma. In response, King’s son, MLK III, defended the same stern expression, saying, “If my father was not confrontational, given what he was facing at the time, what else could he be?”
The next time I assign King to students—I have been teaching “core text” courses for many years at Boston College—I will include this controversy. It raises an important question: If King were alive today, would he praise us for having made progress toward the “beloved community,” or would he judge us for having allowed racism and inequality to survive?
Perhaps the most daunting challenge when teaching the core texts of America is to retrieve the “moral, social and political evil” of slavery, as Lincoln called it, from the ditch into which it has been driven by our divided polity. At one extreme, students are taught that slavery has never ended, that it has just put on camouflage. At the other, the lesson is that anti-black racism persisted after Emancipation but was spiritually defeated by the civil rights movement led by King.
In my experience, the only way to meet this challenge is to admit the partial truth of both, and then to find a way to combine them in an understanding that goes beyond the two-dimensional stereotypes of received ideas. To do this, I have focused on what the historian David Chappell refers to as King’s “distinct public philosophy.” Writing in 2021, Chappell describes this philosophy as
the most practical way to understand—and to use—the power of black Americans and other oppressed minorities. At the heart of it is an insistence that means and ends must cohere: violent, undisciplined action by a small number of activists could not move America toward a stable order in which black folk could enjoy the social peace of freedom and equality.
Addressing today’s polarized attitudes, Chappell reminds us that “King’s nonviolence did not rely on appeals to any inherent goodness or generosity in powerful white people, as superficial fans and critics tend to assume. Rather it aimed to coerce them to give up privileges against their will.” In that sense, King found both “a way to right historic wrongs” that was “far more effective” and “more radical and militant” than theatrical gestures and disorganized protests.
Ideally, this should be conveyed to students through several semesters of serious history—not just of American politics, but also of American religion. By “serious” I mean capable of grasping more than one perspective at a time. Absent this kind of foundation, it is still possible to encourage students to think dialectically about, say, the relationship between King and his arch-critic, Malcolm X.
Brandon Terry, co-editor of a recent book on King’s political thought, has written that “For Malcolm X, King’s brotherly rhetoric was simply disingenuous because King actually relied upon the threat of violent rebellion from below.” But as Terry also notes, there is more than one way to look at this. King was not naïve about the dangers of black people taking the law into their own hands. He knew full well that, in the real world as opposed to the hothouse of ideology, they would find themselves outgunned.
This is why, instead of assigning the classic King speeches full of soaring rhetoric about the nation’s ideals, I ask students to consider his reaction to the bombing of his house during the early weeks of the Montgomery bus boycott. According to historian Taylor Branch, a crowd of black citizens gathered at the house, along with dozens of police and reporters, and some black men in the crowd were brandishing guns and knives. At that point King stepped out, and in a tone of “exaggerated peacefulness” urged the crowd to take their weapons home, because, “We must meet hate with love.” Then he added, “If I am stopped, this movement will not stop … our work will not stop.”
The latter point is the harder one. Those were early days, but King could already see the outlines of what was possible, if only the solidarity and spiritual discipline of the movement could be sustained. It is not hard for college students to understand this, once they realize it is the exact opposite of today’s campus politics.
And about the King statue: One area of agreement is that it just doesn’t look like him. It’s close enough to be a brother or a cousin, but a familial resemblance is not a likeness. The fine-tuning of visual perception that causes people to say, “That’s not King,” has its pedagogical equivalent in a fine-tuned understanding of why the movement he led was a near-perfect match for the forces arrayed against it. When that is better understood, perhaps we can move on to consider what a similar match might consist of today.
