As the Democratic primary campaign rolls into South Carolina -- a state in which African-Americans may constitute up to half of the voting bloc -- a bitter feud has erupted over some comments Hillary and Bill Clinton made, which some have interpreted as slighting the achievements of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Senator Clinton said in an interview on Fox News. “It took a president to get it done.”
That remark was coupled with Bill Clinton's charge in the days before the New Hampshire primary that Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy is "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of theology and African-American studies at Georgetown University, charged that former president Clinton's criticism of Obama carried an "implicit racial subtext."
As he has on numerous occasions throughout the campaign, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has mounted a defense of Senator Clinton.
Wilentz writes in The New Republic:
The historical record is crystal clear about this, and no responsible historian seriously contests it. Without Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists, black and white (not to mention restive slaves), there would have been no agitation to end slavery, even after the Civil War began. But without Douglass's ally in the White House, the sympathetic, deeply anti-slavery but highly pragmatic Abraham Lincoln, there could not have been an Emancipation Proclamation or a Thirteenth Amendment. Likewise, without King and his movement, there would have been no civil rights revolution. But without the Texas liberal and wheeler-dealer Lyndon Johnson, and his predecessor John F. Kennedy, there would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Voting Rights Act of 1965.
...Martin Luther King led the movement; Lyndon B. Johnson supported that movement, played the politics, guided the legislation, and signed it into law. Both were indispensable to the civil rights successes of the 1960s. To acknowledge both denigrates neither man.
In the cover story of The Chronicle Review this week Chris Phelps explores how the iconographic manner in which Dr. King's life is remembered has come at a price.
"The nonviolent revolutionary who upended conventional society and sought to induce tension has become an anodyne symbol of progress," writes Phelps, an associate professor of American history at Ohio State University at Mansfield. "The disappointed prophet who spoke toward the end of his life of America as a nightmare is remembered only for his 1963 dream."
