ETHOS

Editors Note: This is a review I did over the summer that was withheld due to a conflict of interests relating to the employment situation of one of our bloggers. I am publishing it now because it has been several months, and I doubt Dyson would give a shit about a scathing review of one of his books on a blog as irrelevant as this one. But, if you are reading this Dr. Rev. Mr. MC Dyson PhD (or whatever it is you call your bespectacled self), if you don’t like the harsh reviews, start writing better books. Translation: If you can’t stand the heat, get out the kitchen.

April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr’s Death and How it Changed America

Michael Eric Dyson

Basic Civitas Books, 2008

270 pages, $25

Review by Eric Augenbraun

I intended to write this review sooner, but my principles interfered; in a word, I refuse to pay for books that I expect to be worth far less than the cover price. So, given the fact that professor, ordained minister, and self-proclaimed activist/public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson’s latest waste of paper book, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr’s Death and How it Changed America, was checked out of the University of Pennsylvania’s library until about a week ago, I couldn’t get around to reading and commenting on it until now. Despite not paying a cent for this cute little mess—aside from Penn’s $50,000 tuition which includes library privileges (imagine that!)—after reading it, I still felt compelled to go back to the library and demand a refund of the time I had just wasted. But alas, the library has yet to invest in a time travel device—I can only urge them to look into it.

Many will recognize the date April 4th, 1968 as the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while standing on the balcony outside of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The year 2008 thus marks the 40th year since King’s tragic death. On this somber anniversary, Dyson’s deceptively short 270-page volume is an “effort to grapple with King’s death—in [Dyson’s] own mind, and in the life of the nation.” With ten chapters sandwiched between a short prologue and a lengthy afterword, this book is divided into three parts, each with a somewhat distinct area of inquiry. Part one explores how King understood his own mortality and dealt with the looming threat of his death as he rose to prominence in lockstep with the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Part two is an examination of the state of black America in the post-King, post-Civil Rights, post-Voting Rights Amendment years. Finally, part three is a look at black leadership since King’s death—namely, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Dyson’s book delivers very little that could be considered new or particularly insightful, and where it strays from the beaten path it arrives at several conceptual and methodological cul-de-sacs.

According to Dyson, from a very young age King was preoccupied with death. As the Civil Rights movement gained steam and King was thrust into the public eye, threats on his life became commonplace. While the reality of the likelihood of a premature death weighed heavily on King’s mind—driving him into depression—he also harnessed it as a motivational tool for the movement. This should not be particularly controversial, but Dyson’s sparse research and use of psychoanalysis to fill the gaps leaves much to be desired. Direct citations are absent from this text and the reader is left with a few short bibliographical notes with no indication of where specific sources are used in the text (as a history major, I am a big fan of Chicago style). But not to fear, the wikipedia page for Martin Luther King could just as easily have been the source of almost all of Dyson’s “research” for the first part of this book. Where archival research is not enough, Dyson simply puts King on the couch and probes his psyche, which is fine, but might not do the trick for people who recognize that, as a very dead man, King is unable to speak back. Thus, instead of serious and careful scholarship we get what boils down to a winding hodgepodge of sentimentalist fluff.

“And how does that make you feel Dr. King?”

While Dyson pays lip service to the fact that the primary strength of the Civil Rights movement lied on the ground, with the ordinary people who gave their time and energy to march and forge connections at the grassroots level, his discussion of King as a near superhuman deity presents a distorted picture of the movement. Dyson makes it appear as if King and his circle of aids were themselves the Civil Rights movement, while little attention is paid to the enormous mobilization of the nameless forces on the ground that ultimately were responsible for toppling Jim Crow. Finally, in the ultimate case of accidental irony, in his discussion of King’s oratorical genius, Dyson references King’s striking ability to be both substantive and eloquent:

King showed that there didn’t have to be strife between lexis (style, such as metaphor) and pisteis (argumentation and proof) as there is in Aristotle’s view of rhetoric. In the best black oratory, style is not juxtaposed to argument; in fact, style becomes a vehicle of substance. Paying attention to how you say what you say doesn’t mean you have nothing to say.

Sadly, these standards cannot be applied to Dyson’s book—a clear lack of substance is compensated for by an abundance of schmaltz and bombast.

Part two shifts the focus to the present day status of blacks in America and how, in many regards, King’s vision has yet to be realized. The first chapter of this section, entitled “Report Card on Black America,” is the book’s strongest, which is not really saying much. Dyson uses an assortment of interesting statistics to make the case that, though the gains of the Civil Rights movement cannot be understated, blacks continue to be the victims of racism and poverty. Still I find it hard to believe that people who would pay $25 to read this book were not already aware of the facts that Dyson highlights in this chapter. Moreover, if one were interested in gathering the same statistics he uses, it is nothing that a simple Internet search couldn’t handle. While Dyson is effective at exposing the objective reality of the persistence of inequality and poverty, he stops short of implicating capitalism and class society as central to the perpetuation of inequality.

The final part of the book takes a look at black leadership since King’s death. Dyson focuses primarily on three of the country’s most visible “black leaders”—Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barack Obama—devoting a chapter to each. It is here that Dyson’s own ideological framework prevents him from careful and critical analysis of the broader issues that underlie the notion of a “national black leader.” He appears far more interested in exploring the personal histories and leadership styles of each respective leader than in interrogating the social, political, and economic contexts from which each emerged and the bases of their authority. For instance, the differences between King and Jackson’s leadership are presented as largely personal—rooted in their upbringings and educational backgrounds. Not considered is the fact that the historical context in which King led the charge against Jim Crow differed fundamentally from the context of Reaganism in which Jackson attempted to position himself as “national black leader.” Dyson only goes so far as to mention a handful of the strategic mistakes and errors in judgment that each has made over the years while embracing uncritically their positions as race leaders. This and Dyson’s repeated castigation of members of the black middle- and upper-classes who have “turned their backs on the black poor” reflect the belief in an undifferentiated black “community” that permeates Dyson’s thought.

“Leaders” like Sharpton and Jackson (and academics like Dyson for that matter) who desire to situate themselves as “black voices”—a politics which has its roots in the race relations brokerage that emerged in the context of Jim Crow at the turn of the century—rely on a reified “black community” wherein those elements of the black population that do not conform to an imagined normative blackness are painted as inauthentic. Further, by lumping the black population into a homogenous monolith, black leaders have no need to appeal politically to any specific constituency and are thus not accountable to any constituency at all. In reality, black people exhibit the same diversity of interests and political opinions as any racial or ethnic group—the goal, then, for black and white progressives alike, should be towards the embrace of a politics that acknowledges this diversity within the black population. I also think it is worth mentioning that Dyson’s chapter on Obama is nothing more than an extended piece of campaign propaganda that does not even come close to engaging Obama on a political level.

Dyson closes his book with a 25-page afterword that is just an exercise in self-validation. To be frank, after his last “book” (and I use the term loosely) in which he enlisted rappers Jay-Z and Nas to sing his praises in the “intro” and “outro” respectively, I am used to such shameless acts of self-promotion from Dyson. His most recent effort is a composed interview with Martin Luther King on his 80^th birthday based on what Dyson believes he might have said. However, the 80-year old King that he imagines is little more than a mouthpiece through which to trumpet his own beliefs and opinions and have them corroborated by one of American history’s most revered figures—albeit a figure that has been dead for 40 years. Of course, this all amounts to a 25-page act of intellectual autofellatio considering that there is no way of knowing what Martin Luther King would believe if he were alive today. While it is possible that he may have respected the “incredible lyrical genius” of today’s hip hop artists, abhorred the prosperity gospel movement, and fawned over Obama, it is just as likely that his thought might have developed in an alternate fashion. Just look at the political trajectories of people like Du Bois, Malcolm X, or even Eldridge Cleaver.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend you waste your time (at least until they develop time travel technology) or money on this book. Keep your $25 and check out Jack Bloom’s Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement for an excellent account of the political economy that underlay the brave activity of Southern blacks and the valiant leadership of Dr. King in the fight against Jim Crow.

Footnote: The views contained in this review are solely those of the reviewer and do not necessarily reflect the perspectives of the rest of the ETHOS team.