April 4, 1968 by Michael Eric Dyson

Author:Michael Eric Dyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

JOSHUA CHARISMATIC BLACK LEADERSHIP IN A PROPHET’S SHADOW

CHAPTER SEVEN

A MESSIAH MEASURES LEADERSHIP

BEFORE HIS BODY WAS EVEN LAID TO REST, Martin Luther King, Jr., had slipped into the long night of myth. He quickly became the most overworked martyr since Abraham Lincoln. The folk who loved him got up the courage to say so; those who despised him couldn’t afford to say so as loudly—their hatred of King was no longer in vogue. He’d gone from nuisance to saint in a matter of days. It took fifteen years to get him a national holiday, but as honors like that go, it was a heartbeat. George Washington received the same honor a long eighty years after his death. It now seems inevitable that King’s memory would be forced to carry the burden of our deepest desires as a country. After all, given the racial chasm his death revealed, King—or rather the eminently useful godlike image of the leader postmortem—was commissioned to achieve in death what he had been denied in life: the forging of racial harmony amidst the conflict of color. The price paid for becoming an outsized American hero was the manufactured appearance that the nation had agreed with him all along. The last thing the country needed was the image of King being killed because he was more faithful to core American ideals than the white mainstream that bitterly opposed him.

A large part of King’s posthumous makeover focused on his role as the consummate and, judging by the articles and books that poured out after his death, the only leader worth mentioning in the civil rights movement. Crowning King as his people’s Moses began immediately with his organization’s attempt to situate him in a field of rivals as the leader best suited to get racial equality for black folk. King was an intriguing mixture of inspirations and impulses: he was at once the most humble big black leader around and yet extremely conscious of his messianic function in the drama of black freedom. Paraphrasing theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King claimed that “the battering rams of historical necessity” had thrust him into destiny. His calling came from on high.

As early as 1957, King declared himself a Moses to his people. “If I had to die tomorrow morning I would die happy because I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the Promised Land and it’s going to be here in Montgomery” was a refrain he would voice many times. He was constantly lauded as a messiah by jubilant well-wishers whose praise countered the vicious criticism King regularly received. In 1956, a Baptist minister wrote to King that “I have longed for a Baptist Messiah like you since 1932!!” And as King made his way to a mass meeting the evening he was convicted of conspiracy for leading the bus boycott, a preacher exclaimed: “He who was nailed to the cross for us this afternoon approaches.”

As King’s fame grew, so did the jealousy and criticism of his peers. Many older civil rights

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