This Aug. 28 marks the 60th anniversary of a moment many Americans view as a turning point in U.S. history: the Civil Rights Movement’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.
In history books, in history and film, and in so many popular recollections, King’s speech marks the beginning of an irrevocable sea change and moral awakening that would leave racism in the past. And yet, if Dr. King were to reflect on the movement’s legacy today, I believe he would find that his dream has been used in the service of a living nightmare.
King’s words have been co-opted to oppose civil rights legislation, from affirmative action to voting rights. King’s dream has been misappropriated to demonize the ugly truths of American history and to legislate against honest racial education while sanitizing and distorting the past.
This revisionist history has not just obfuscated the past — it has fragmented the social reality we live in, in the present.
A recent Pew survey on how Americans see the legacy of Dr. King revealed just how deeply we diverge in our conceptions of King’s vision and its relationship to the present state of racial inequality. In the survey, 58 percent of white adults said there has been “a great deal or a fair amount of progress on racial equality in the last 60 years” compared to 30 percent of Black adults. Even more glaringly, 67 percent of Republicans believed a great deal of racial progress had been achieved.
These conflicting perceptions are significant. They are rooted in an alternative history in which racism concluded with Dr. King, rendering present-day movements for racial justice as “anti-King” culture wars. As one white Republican wrote in the survey, “[King] would very much disagree with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. He believed ALL LIVES MATTER, and that it is not racist to say so.”
It would be easy to point to the rise of the Trump era as the culprit for this willful ignorance. After all, President Trump famously responded to the 1619 Project’s work to claim the central role of Black Americans in U.S. history with his own 1776 Project. The 1776 Project, which would be condemned by the American Historical Association for its egregious historical fallacies, wove King’s legacy throughout its pages. King’s image was juxtaposed with arguments that identity politics, like those deployed by the left, were incompatible with American principles, and that progressive groups were threats to the nation.
Yet King’s nightmare has been long in the making, and its engineers far precede Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.)
My research on 40 years of the misuses of Dr. King’s memory shows how conservative backlash has shaped reactionary politics, working strategically behind the scenes ever since the victories of the civil rights movement ushered in the “post-civil rights era.”
Ronald Reagan’s famous claim to signing the King national holiday into law in 1983 was but the first of a long trajectory of strategies that would use Dr. King as a Trojan horse for anti-civil rights causes. For Reagan, this meant rolling back civil rights protections around discrimination in housing and employment and virtually demolishing the burgeoning Black middle class. Over the next four decades, Dr. King’s dream of a colorblind future would be invoked time and again to quash collective reckonings around systems of racism, whether in housing, education or the justice system.
By 2010, right-wing commentator Glenn Beck could stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of the March on Washington and declare to thousands of supporters that the Tea Party was the true inheritor of the civil rights movement. During this “Rally to Restore Honor,” Beck would climb into King’s symbolic skin to argue that then-President Obama was racist against white people, and that the legacy of the civil rights movement was about free market and individual liberties, not racial and social justice.
When we recognize the longue durée of this revisionist history, we realize that King’s nightmare has proliferated before our eyes and that many of us have been sleepwalking aimlessly, numbed by what King called “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”
Worse yet, the tragedy of this nightmare extends far beyond its consequences for historical education. The consequences are apparent in a collective cultural ignorance that, as philosopher Charles W. Mills warned, renders many of us unable to understand the world around us. The ignorance manifests in our acquiescence during the slow and mounting rollback of multicultural democracy.
While King may have spoken of a dream, his commitment was to a world lived with eyes wide open. King knew that the story of the past holds significant power for shaping the future and that those in power would hold that story in their bloody grips until they were forced to yield.
To be sure, to recognize the continued legacies of a settler-colonial society, of enslavement and deep and unyielding systems of white supremacy is not easy. It is not comfortable. Yet truth and reconciliation require this messy and discomfiting work. Black communities have carried this truth for centuries, preserved these honest histories in their families, communities and churches, in their art and their stories, and led the unending resistance.
Let us follow their lead. Let us come together in community, to listen and learn, to amplify grounded knowledge, then organize within our own communities and draw in those who continue to sleepwalk, reminding them of King’s “urgency of now.”
In his legacy-defining speech, Dr. King said, “1963 is not an end, but a beginning.” In many ways, the path forward requires going back to that hopeful moment 60 years ago, understanding its unmistakable connections to our world today and recognizing the fight for racial and social justice not as an end but as a hopeful beginning.
Hajar Yazdiha is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute and an expert in the politics of inclusion and exclusion. She is author of the book, “The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.” Twitter: @HajYazdiha