22. Prathia Hall was the student whose prayer in Albany at a service King attended included the phrase “I have a dream” (Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 93). As Lischer notes, her inspired prayer was charged by a resonant notion in black communities of a dream or vision animating civil rights activists. King, moved by her prayer, seized its central metaphor and enlarged its yearning into a prophetic vision of hope for racial justice. Archibald Carey was the Chicago preacher, jurist, banker, and politician whose speech to the Republican National Convention gave King a galvanizing image for his “I Have a Dream” speech (Miller, Voice of Deliverance, p. 146). After quoting from “America the Beautiful,” Carey rose to oratorical splendor: “That’s exactly what we mean—from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for. . . the disinherited of all the earth—may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!” (cited in Miller, Voice of Deliverance, p. 146). King snatched this passage nearly word for word from Carey to cap his most famous oration.
23. Miller, Voice of Deliverance, pp. 192–193.
24. King, Strength to Love.
25. Lischer, The Preacher King, pp. 4–5.
26. Ibid.
27. In truth, however, the case of Milli Vanilli, the multimillion record selling pop duo who won 1990’s Grammy Award for best new artist, is not as simple as it seems. The duo, composed of black Europeans Rob and Fab, went down in infamy after it was revealed that they hadn’t sung a note on their award-winning album, and they were subsequently forced to return their Grammy. Rob and Fab were talented and handsome performers. Desperate to land a record deal, they agreed to be the faces for a studio-produced album of songs engineered by a manipulative white European producer. Neither the duo nor their producer had any idea that the album would do so well and that it would garner Milli Vanilli international fame and fortune. Disagreements between the duo and their “producer”—especially over Rob and Fab’s desire to represent their own work on wax—led to a falling out that forced the duo to confess their mendacity publicly. Despite their extreme embarrassment and shame, Rob and Fab eventually were able to make an album featuring their own work, proving that they had genuine talent. By then, however, their downfall had eclipsed widespread interest in their work. Later, they split up, and in 1998, Rob committed suicide after several unsuccessful attempts. Their story is not simply one of the massive attempt to defraud the public while capitulating to the seductions of fame, fortune, and women. It is as well a bitter and tragic update of an old phenomenon: a white music executive exploiting vulnerable black artists for commercial gain. The tragedy is that Rob and Fab’s authentic artistry was buried beneath the scandal of their misdeed. See “Behind the Music,” VHl, March 28, 1999.
28. Carson et al., eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Volume 1: Called to Serve, January 1929–June 1951, and Volume 2: Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951–November 1955; Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 162.
29. Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 66. Branch says that King borrowed his first sermon from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “Life Is What You Make It.”
30. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, “The Student Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.,” pp. 28–29; Lewis, King, pp. 37–38; Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 72, 76; Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 90.
31. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project; Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 162.
32. Genovese, The Southern Front, pp. 164–168, 173.
33. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, pp. 23–31.
34. Ibid., p. 27.
35. Genovese, The Southern Front, pp. 157–191, esp. p. 173; Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, p. 24. Also see Carson, Holloran, Luker, and Russell, “Martin Luther King Jr., as Scholar.”
36. Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 173. It is also interesting to note that during his second fall in Boston as a graduate student, King received a D+ on a philosophy paper, which had scribbled over it caustic comments from his professor. King subsequently earned three straight A’s on papers about Descartes, William James, and Mahayana Buddhism (Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 96). As with many other students, the awful embarrassment and ego deflation of a poor grade perhaps drove King to redouble his efforts, or perhaps it reinforced his habit of borrowing others’ work to express his ideas.
37. Martin Luther King Jr., Papers Project, p. 29; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 41.
38. Pappas, ed., Martin Luther King Plagiarism Story.
39. Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King Jr.,” p. 81.
40. Ibid., p. 83.
41. Ibid., p. 85.
42. Ibid., p. 82.
43. Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 86.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Cone, “Martin Luther King Jr., Black Theology-Black Church,” pp. 409–420; Cone, “The Theology of Martin Luther King Jr.,” pp. 21–39; Cone, Martin and America and Risks of Faith; Baldwin, “Understanding Martin Luther King Jr., Within the Context of Southern Black Religious History,” pp. 1–26; Baldwin, “Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Church, and the Black Messianic Vision,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 12, Fall 1984–Spring 1985, pp. 93–108; Baldwin, There Is a Balm and To Make the Wounded Whole; Branch, Parting the Waters, esp. pp. 1–26; Miller, Voice of Deliverance, esp. pp. 13–40, 169–185; Lischer, The Preacher King.
47. Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King Jr.,” pp. 84–85; Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 175. The second reader of King’s dissertation, S. Paul Schilling, denied that there was “favoritism toward black students and therefore a lowering of standards for them,” and in response to a question about whether King “was given a free ride because of reverse racism,” responded “I would reject that completely” (Thelen, “Conversation Between S. Paul Schilling and David Thelen,” pp. 65, 77). It may be true that King’s thesis adviser, L. Harold DeWolf, was in King’s case a “lax mentor who did not demand of King the analytical precision that might have prepared him for a career of scholarly writing” (Carson, Holloran, Luker, and Russel, “Martin Luther King Jr.,” p. 101). But that contradicts what other students knew about DeWolf. “Once he took them under his wing. . . he really worked with them,” Cornish Rogers says. “He saw to it that all of them lived up to a certain quality that he demanded. And he kept after them until they did.” Furthermore, Rogers rejects the reverse racism argument, saying of DeWolf and Schilling, “I knew how tough they were on me. I had taken courses from both of them.” Therefore, it would be both unfair and inaccurate to overlook the plausible reason for DeWolf’s strict inattention to King: DeWolf was overburdened as one of the few Boston University professors who was willing to work with black students. Rogers says that DeWolf “took on a lot of dissertations from, especially, black students or others whom other professors would not take on. If you were willing to be guided by him, he would take on students whose topics were not in his field. I got the impression that he helped a lot of folks who had difficulty getting someone to be their readers” (Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” pp. 53–55). Thus, the greater threat to black students was not racial paternalism, as bad as that might have been, but racist neglect, a far more harmful factor in the intellectual lives of black graduate students.
48. Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 58.
49. Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 90.
50. “ Moreover, although many black scholars had passed through Boston University’s doctoral program in religion, one peculiar and tragic legacy of racism involved the pernicious self-doubts that could have plagued any developing black scholar. Qualities of self-worth, competence, talent, and skill are not developed in a vacuum, but are in part s
ocially constructed and reproduced. In the mid-fifties it is certainly conceivable that a young talented black doctoral student who was uncertain of his real worth, despite the encouragement of his professors and colleagues. . . could be tempted to rely on work that had already been accepted and viewed as competent” (Dyson, Reflecting Black, p. 242). Also see Jerry Watt’s brief but powerful discussion of the sometimes crippling self-doubt and insecurity that can smother even the most able budding scholar. Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual, p. xii.
51. Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism,” p. 90.
52. Hegel, The Philosophy of History and Phenomenology of Spirit. Also see King, Stride Toward Freedom, pp. 95, 100–101.
53. Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” p. 50.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., pp. 50–51.
56. John Williams captures the significance of the degree for those times when he writes: “And if a young man could take graduate studies in the white universities of the North, his status was increased manyfold. Morehouse College has sent countless numbers of its graduates north where an overwhelming majority of them have made good in professional and academic circles. The A.B. soon enough became almost nothing in terms of status; the M.A. became the target, and finally, the Ph.D. How grand to roll around on the tongue the word ‘doctor’! How marvelous to be addressed as ‘doctor’!” (Williams, The King God Didn’t Save, p. 152).
57. Thelen, “Conversation Between S. Paul Schilling and David Thelen,” pp. 76–77.
58. Reagon, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” pp. 113–117. Reagon says that in black culture, those who straddle “are born in one place, and we are sent to achieve in the larger culture, and in order to survive we work out a way to be who we are in both places or all places we move. . . . King was a straddler; he was who he was wherever he was—in the African-American church, on the march, in a rally, in jail, at the great and small universities, in Stockholm. We, his people, could look at him and feel him and know that he was one of us. He succeeded in embracing the sound of our forefathers, and he never left that sound ; no matter where he was, he was in the pulpit” (Ibid., pp. 114, 116).
59. Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 58. Lischer says that in “the fifteen years from 1942 to 1957 only five Boston students completed doctoral dissertations on race-related topics. King was not among them.”
60. Genovese, The Southern Front, p. 173. It should be noted that King is not now known for his facility with Plato, Hegel, formal logic, or modern philosophy—all of which proved to be in his hands little more than rhetorical fodder for Sunday sermons and inspired speeches. As David Lewis writes, King “was not an original philosopher, although, after Morehouse, it was perhaps the thing he most desired to be. There are legions of audiences that spent Sunday mornings, convocation periods, and evenings in auditoriums listening to him rhapsodically enumerate the principal ideas of Western philosophy from Thales to Miletus to Camus. . . . Such displays of encyclopedic knowledge sprang partly from a Baptist preacher’s love of showmanship, and Mike [Martin] was a super actor. Partly, too, this was the venial intellectual arrogance of a young man who held a doctorate from one of the nation’s better universities. But there was, undeniably, also an element of self-deception and self-mystification as to his philosophical acumen” (Lewis, King, pp. 44–45). King is known, however, for his brilliant abilities to translate the meanings of grand thinkers into the stuff of human action, thus enfleshing ideas with a genius that few others have possessed. It might have done King some good to have wrestled intellectually within the province of ideas that would motivate him to take to the streets out of disgust with merely thinking about the world. Some courses on Gandhi and race relations might have given him even deeper insight into the nature of the beast he was to confront when he left graduate school. As Marx famously said, many philosophers have thought about the world. The point was to change it. King took that imperative seriously and thus became a derivative philosopher but a world-class activist and a pioneer in social democracy.
61. Cone, Martin and Malcolm, p. 30.
62. Ibid., p. 31.
63. Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” pp. 46–49. Also see Garrow, Bearing, p. 48; Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 93–94. Apparently, however, these issues were not strongly enough debated for students like George Thomas, who was “one of a tiny minority of Negro students who lost interest in the Dialectical Society precisely because Jim Crow and other political matters were relegated to the joke period [held after the formal meeting]” (Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 93).
64. Cone, Martin and Malcolm, p. 31.
65. Thelen, “Conversation Between Cornish Rogers and David Thelen,” p. 50.
66. Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King Jr.,” p. 85. More exactly Lewis states of King and his professors that “neither he nor they knew who Martin Luther King was then.” On that basis, it is easy enough to see that in not knowing who King was then, they had no knowledge of who he would become.
67. “Thin Ice: ‘Stereotype Threat’ and Black College Students,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1999, pp. 44–54.
68. Ibid., p. 44.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., p. 45.
71. Ibid., p. 46.
72. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 24.
73. New York Times, Nov. 13, 1990, p. A30.
74. Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America, pp. 149–193; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, p. 157; Hine, Hine Sight, pp. 37–47.
CHAPTER 20. X MARKS THE PLOTS: A CRITICAL READING OF MALCOLM’S READERS
1. These personal and political understandings can be described as paradigms, or theories that explain evidence or account for behavior, that shift over space and time. For a discussion about paradigm shifts in the history of science, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). According to Kuhn, revolutions in science occur when a given paradigm fails to account for an increasing degree of disconfirming evidence, called anomalies. Failure of the paradigm creates a crisis, and can be resolved only with the emergence of a new scientific paradigm. For an application of Kuhn’s work to moral philosophy and religious experience, see Jon Gunnemann, The Moral Meaning of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
2. The lack of a significant body of scholarly literature about Malcolm reveals more about the priorities, interests, and limitations of contemporary scholarship than about his importance as a revolutionary social figure. There is no dearth of interest in Malcolm, however, in the popular press, and though cultural curiosity about him is now undoubtedly at a peak, he has unfailingly provoked popular reflection about his life and career among journalists, activists, and organic intellectuals since his death in 1965. This is made abundantly clear in two book-length bibliographies on Malcolm: Lenwood G. Davis, with the assistance of Marsha L. Moore, comps., Malcolm X: A Selected Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984), and Timothy V. Johnson, comp., Malcolm X: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986).
3. For an illuminating discussion of the philosophical issues and problems involved in understanding and explanation in the humanities, see Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 25–71.
4. For the notion of thick description, see Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973).
5. Michael Eric Dyson, “Probing a Divided Metaphor,” in Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 115–128. For discussion of Malcolm’s motivations for his autobiography, and Alex Haley’s role in shaping the narrative of Malcolm’s life, see also Arnold Rampersad, “The Color of His Eyes: Bruce Perry’s Malcolm and Malcolm’s Malcolm,�
�� and Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II,” both in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), pp. 117–134, 155–175, respectively.
6. For more of my comment on other books about Malcolm, see Dyson, “Probing a Divided Metaphor,” pp. 115–128.
7. For a good overview and discussion of these groups, see Raymond Hall, Black Separatism in the United States (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1978).
8. For an excellent discussion of the links between Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, of which he was a precursor, with discussions of SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panthers, see Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 21–88. For a discussion of the economic programs and comparisons of the social visions of each group, see Hall, Black Separatism in the United States, especially pp. 139–196.
9. See especially John Ansbro, Martin Luther King Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1982); Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); and David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955–196 8 (New York: Morrow, 1986).
10. John Henrik Clarke, ed., Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (1969; Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990).
11. Charles Wilson, “Leadership Triumph in Leadership Tragedy,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clarke, pp. 36–37.
12. James Boggs, “The Influence of Malcolm X on the Political Consciousness of Black Americans,” and Wyatt Tee Walker, “Nothing but a Man,” in Malcolm X, ed. Clarke, pp. 52, 67. 13. Albert Cleage, “Myths About Malcolm X,” in ed. Clarke, p. 15.
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