Eric J. SundquistReed Hutchinson
The touchstone Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye argued influentially, 50 years ago, that literature derives from literature, rooted, ultimately, in archetypal stories. African-American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr. adapts Frye, insisting that black-written texts are "double-voiced," responding to previous "black" and "white" works (as well as black oral traditions).
Eric J. Sundquist's King's Dream affirms both Frye and Gates. Indeed, although the University of California at Los Angeles literature professor studies Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington address, known by its refrain as I Have A Dream, situating it "in both the context of the postwar civil-rights movement and the context of American debates about issues of racial equality," his book is also an antiphonal reply to U.S. scholar Garry Wills's acclaimed examination of president Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (2001).
Sundquist underlines the greater resonance of King's speech over Lincoln's in current U.S. consciousness (one poll indicates that 88.1 per cent of high-school seniors could correctly identify the author of "I have a dream" as opposed to 73.9 per cent who could name the Gettysburg orator) and thus its role in remaking the Republic anew via its "panoramic account of the civil-rights movement in its many dimensions."
True: Sundquist elects King - the African-American orator, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and civil-rights movement leader assassinated, at the age of 39, on April 4, 1968 - to a pantheon of primarily American freedom-dreamers, talkers and occasional doers (principally presidential, featuring Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, with a rightly restrained nod to John F. Kennedy, and a single international embrace - of India's Mohandas Gandhi).
Yet, King's Dream is also simply the latest, 40-years-on, book-length examination of a cultural icon and "happening" of the 1960s. Hence, it is also another de facto paean to that era of popular struggle for expanded civil and human rights, as well as an elegy for the Dreamer Generation - the Boomers - whose protests made that progress happen.
Eloquently, encyclopedically and exhaustively, Sundquist catalogues networks of juxtaposition and conjunction in relation to King's address. Classical allusions rub up against quotations from (or references to) movies, videos, comic books, TV shows and the Internet.
Sundquist's commentary establishes that King's peroration echoes African-American folk traditions (stump preaching and spirituals), the King James Bible and its Hebrew sources (hear the prophets Amos, Daniel and Isaiah), Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address, popular culture (cue the Everly Brothers' All I Have to Do Is Dream and Roy Orbison's In Dreams, etc.), pro-segregationist constitutional assertions of "States Rights" (King's words, "interposition" and "nullification," answer to this subject) and patriotic anthems (see America).
Borrowing - or plagiarizing - from others, as well as extemporaneously inventing and reusing his own rhetorical terms and formulae, King succeeded, Sundquist argues, in articulating a "Second Emancipation Proclamation," pointedly doing himself what he could not persuade a too-cautious president Kennedy to do, to help make liberty and equality for "Negroes" a fact rather than a bitter fiction. Sundquist also names King's speech "a new national scripture."
Partly as a result of this triumphant and transcendent act of oratory, King has become, Sundquist says, "a kind of Rorschach test on the meaning of racial equality in the United States. If true believers turned him into 'Holy Martin,' a figure beyond reproach, others turned him into an 'elastic fetish,' conveniently stretched to fit any cause." Worse, King, I Have a Dream and the civil-rights movement, though heroic, epic and transformative, have fossilized into mere Americana, a brand of kitsch.
"Sound bites and misappropriations of the Dream speech are everywhere imaginable, sacred and meaningless," Sundquist writes. Hence, as he reports, one can buy thong underwear "for women and girls, featuring King's likeness and his famous line about his children being judged by the 'content of their character.'"
Surely the most audacious revision of King's speech has been executed by the opponents of "affirmative action" (or "employment equity" in Canadian usage), who point to King's character-over-colour formulation as proof that he would deem black-focused advancement measures as out-and-out racist. Here Sundquist provides a brilliantly nuanced and richly historicized essay positing that King, while "colour-blind" in his individualism, was less so when it came to social group dynamics.
Sundquist asserts that King's "aspiration to colour-blindness did not contradict his commitment to compensatory treatment - so long as both are seen as matters of economic justice, which included but transcended racial justice."
While he was researching and writing his book, Sundquist could not have known that its publication would also occur, not just in time for the annual Martin Luther King holiday (Jan. 19 this year), but on the eve of the swearing-in of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States, the first African American to occupy that august office and one whose own impressive oratory and grassroots political mobilization skills have brought him just comparison to King.
Some consider Obama's election the explicit fulfilment of the implicit prophecy of King's speech, that African Americans, like Jews, Catholics and other once-downtrodden - or still-oppressed - minority communities, along with the poor in general, would one day inhabit a United States where all could equally enjoy liberty and the opportunity to pursue advancement and prosperity, without prejudice. No wonder so many wept last Nov. 4, when Obama achieved the miraculous and became the most powerful person on the planet, chosen by a nation that once defined black people as articles of property.
Sundquist closes his tome with the rhetorical question: "Who now does not stand in King's shadow?" But it may be just as correct to wonder whether King himself does not now stand in Obama's, especially in light of the latter's majestic, probing address of March 18, 2008, on the history of U.S. race relations.
On that day in Philadelphia, Obama was, in the hackneyed leftist phrase, "speaking truth to power." But coming as it did from the leading contender for - and eventual recipient of - the Democratic Party presidential nomination, his speech also represented power speaking truth - a deed exceedingly rare, and thus as exponentially significant as a dream come true.
George Elliott Clarke's latest books are I & I, a novel in verse, and Blues & Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke, edited by Jon Paul Fiorentino. He admits he dreams in Technicolor.