Fifty Years of Martin Luther King Jr’s "I Have A Dream"

by Krishnakumar S.

The March to Washington For Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, fifty years back, was an unprecedented assertion of the Afro-Americans who were discriminated against in their own country, despite the tall promises made on equality through the Emancipation Proclamation during Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency, after the American Civil War.

History was made with the celebrated speech of Martin Luther King Jr.—”I Have A Dream”—that drew the attention of the world to the poignant situation of the Afro-Americans in the United States. Ever since, it has been considered as one of the greatest speeches in history. Through his speech King wanted the larger American nation to judge them not on the basis of the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Notwithstanding the rise of the United States to prominence in the international scene in the post-World War II scenario, but for some employment opportunities received under the Public Works Administration of FDR’s Great Depression regime, the Afro-Americans were feeling the pinch of the grand disdainful neglect. The anger and angst, the agony and fear, and the expectations of a new future were all finding fruition through the Washington March For Jobs and Freedom. The authorities were forced to reconcile to the changing social relations compelling President Johnson to buy peace by passing the US Civil Rights Bill.

Despite the spectacular performance of the American economy during the Golden Age of Capitalism (1950-70), which was also known for the reduction in income inequalities due to a large stint of Keynesian demand management policies, the Afro-Americans were literally reduced to being mere spectators, who had to keep fighting for assuring entry into educational institutions as well as exercising their franchise. Paradoxically, it was at a time when India, then a newly-free colony, through the Constituent Assembly, had gifted to itself a Constitution assuring universal franchise as well as even positive discrimination with respect to the representation in legislatures for the historically disadvantaged sections, that the Afro-Americans in the United States were in the streets yearning for justice and equal treatment. The inability to exercise franchise without fear, inaccessibility to places of education and health had resulted in rising unemployment amidst the Afro-Americans. In fact “I Have A Dream” is an emotionally charged articulation of Martin Luther King in the backdrop of the consistent struggles which were waged in the previous decades. The seeds of the speech were sown far earlier in an address which he gave at Detroit. But the final speech was obviously the outcome of the osmosis of sorts which was there between the electrified audience and the enthusiastic leader at Lincoln Memorial.

No doubt as a Pastor of the Ebenezer Church, Atlanta Georgia, he took radical inspiration from the Holy Bible. Even “I Have A Dream” is inundated with quotes like ‘when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness prevails like a mighty stream’ straight from the Bible. In fact, King Jr. had a spectacular sense of trying to achieve secular goals like the attainment of equality and justice by relying on the words of sacred texts. Motivated of course he was also by the struggles waged by Gandhi against racial discrimination in South Africa and against colonialism in India through the path of non-violence. He underscored the importance of appealing to the conscience of the European settlers in the United States and garnering their support for the larger Afro-American cause. Therefore, too, he did not want any use of violence to save oneself out of the racial mess in which the Afro-Americans were engulfed in.

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In fact the Washington March was the pinnacle of the number of historic struggles waged in this regard by the civil rights activists in the United States. The bus boycott agitation in Montgomery in 1955 triggered by the arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to vacate the seat for the Whites, the racial riots which broke out in the University of Alabama following the court verdict directing admission to an Afro-American, Autherine Lucia, in 1956 as well as the “Give Us the Ballot” movement in 1957 against the Afro-Americans being refused the right to vote, are some in which King Jr. took the lead to provide direction. Even a day before his death at a motel in Memphis, Tennesse, which cut his life short at the young age of thirtynine, King was addressing the sanitation workers who were protesting against the discriminatory practices perpetrated against the working class by the municipal authorities. Even as he tirelessly strove throughout his life against the social exclusion, economic destitution as well as political isolation of the Afro-Americans, he knew so well that the people who were used to privileges would rarely be ready to give them up so easily.

If during the Golden Age of Capitalism, when income inequalities were falling thanks to the Keynesian polices, the lot of the Afro-Americans weren’t any better, less said the better of their condition in the period since the nineties. Though the educational attainments of the coloured have improved over the decades, the politics of the retreat of the state in the Washington Consensus period has taken a toll of the hapless Afro-American, who is increasingly being pushed from the ghetto to the prison. Recent reports from the United States speak about a larger than proportionate presence of Afro-Americans in prisons. Their last-ditch attempt to catch up with the soaring property prices in the mid-2000s have turned out to be sour. But, the bankers of Wall Street were able to generate innovative financial products so as to transform even people who had no jobs, income or assets to be issued loans. No wonder that the sub-prime crisis has taken a toll of the hard earned savings of the Afro-Americans. Incidentally, even after all the period of irrational exuberance, Alan Greenspan remarks that his term at the Federal Reserve was one in the history of the country where people below the poverty line could aspire in terms of a house of their own.

All said, thanks to the Great Recession, the lone Afro-American Senator in the 2007-09 Congress, Barack Obama, got elected as the President of the United States, only to make it better through a second term. But that apart, even in the 112th US Congress, out of the 435 members in the House of Representatives, only 43 are Afro-Americans. A Congressional Research Services Report states that the figure was always lower than 10 before the 1970s. Given the nature of American elections and the business interests which dominate the same, political representation in the legislatures is less likely to be any better, given that there are no designated seats for these historically disadvantaged sections.

As the world celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of “I Have a Dream”, it seems to be as relevant now as then. All said, it is to be explored as to why the Keynesian economic policy regime of the fifties and sixties was as neglectful of the Afro-Americans as the monetarist/Greenspan economics of the Washington Consensus period.

The author is an Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi.