Dreaming on

IN AUGUST OF 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Most of us know what he said. More than 250,000 people witnessed the speech in person during the March on Washington, and radio and TV recordings preserved his words. They include: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

But what do his words mean for us six decades later? As Americans continue to debate the role race should play in society, those with very different views cite King for support. Was the great civil rights leader “radical” as some claim, and does he speak to ­principles that conservatives champion?

One recent interpretation is Jonathan Eig’s 2023 award-winning biography King: A Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Writing the first biography of the civil rights leader in over 40 years, Eig based his narrative on hundreds of new interviews as well as years of research into sources like White House recordings, an unpublished biography of King’s father, and recently released FBI files. The result is an eminently readable 800-page portrait of a deeply flawed but truly great man—in Eig’s words, a “Christian radical.”

Eig first situates King within his Christian family—his mother a tender influence and his father a disciplinarian and pastor of a prominent black church in Atlanta. After graduating from a liberal Northern seminary (where he rejected some liberal ideas and embraced others), King became a pastor and a national public figure for leading the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, ending legal segregation on America’s buses. King soon moved to the forefront of a national civil rights movement, and Eig devotes two ­chapters to (perhaps) the apex of King’s influence—his “I Have a Dream” speech. In Eig’s telling, we see how the speech impressed leaders like President John F. Kennedy and inspired everyday people, including a white policeman and a black female protester who attended the march. We also see vitriolic reactions by his enemies or rivals on the left and right, including Malcolm X and J. Edgar Hoover.

For Eig, the speech is an iconic moment in King’s “revolution” based “on Christian love, on nonviolence, and on faith in humankind.” While Eig doesn’t address whether King was truly regenerate (decades of adultery arguably call that into question), he shows that King drew many significant ideas from Christian theology such as love for one’s enemies. As for why he should be considered radical rather than moderate, Eig says: “We’ve mistaken King’s nonviolence for passivity. We’ve forgotten that his approach was more aggressive than anything the country had seen—that he used peaceful protest as a lever to force those in power to give up many of the privileges they’d hoarded.” King appealed to men’s consciences but also played power politics.

In The End of Race Politics (Thesis 2024), Coleman Hughes challenges the perception of King as radical in today’s political terms. Hughes is a podcast host, political analyst for CNN, and contributing writer at The Free Press. He says too many today try to remake King in their own image, including so-called anti-racists like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo who promote a “neoracism” that is antithetical to King’s dream. He writes, “Neoracists agree that race matters deeply and inherently” and “that discrimination in favor of non-whites is justified on account of the hardships they endure—and the hardships their ancestors endured—at the hands of whites.”

According to Hughes, the solution to any kind of racism is colorblindness, or treating “people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives.” While he admits the concept can be applied in harmful ways, Hughes marshals surprising evidence, buttressed with logic, to support his claims that colorblindness works in most areas of civil life. He also gives a short history of the term, quoting abolitionists and civil rights lawyers who used colorblindness to win battles against racial injustice.

Hughes also argues that in some important ways King was not politically “radical.” It’s true King “favored policies like universal health care and guaranteed federal employment, and he strongly opposed the Vietnam War—positions that were considered radical in the 1960s.” But in contrast to neoracists today, King never wavered on “the importance of our common humanity and the goal of transcending race.” King also clearly preferred class-based policies rather than race-based ones. Hughes writes, “In his last book, King … suggests changing the slogan ‘Black Power’ to ‘Power for Poor People.’”

Hughes may want to modify some of his arguments based on Eig’s work. For instance, King did not always reject “reverse racism” in favor of colorblindness. Eig shows that he was drawn to some ideas of racial reparations for black Americans, and he wasn’t as ­critical of black power advocates like Malcolm X as some once believed. Still, Hughes makes a good case for taking the principle of colorblindness seriously.

In fact, Christians who desire to see our country live up to King’s call should take both these books seriously. Despite their differences, both authors can help today’s readers understand King’s dream (as Hughes puts it) as “rooted in the American dream—a dream about our common humanity and our common striving for the good of life.”