Creative Non-Conformist

(An edited version of my MLK speech)

One cannot help but note the irony of today’s celebration. We gather to acknowledge the significance of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His sacrifice, along with so many others, helped usher in a new phase in American life — an attempt to live up to the broken promises of Reconstruction; to imagine a truly multiracial society, where justice for all stood as the overriding value. But we do so in full acknowledgement of the current malaise that has gripped the country.

Donald Trump has been (will soon be) inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. And he rode a wave of white resentment and grievance to the White House. But not only that. Greed and selfishness aided his return. A consequence of nearly 50 years of a certain political view that has disfigured our politics, transformed us from citizens in community with one another into self-interested persons in pursuit of our own aims and ends — a view that led to the evisceration of any robust sense of the public good, any sense of responsibility for our fellows. Only for those we claim as our own. A toxic combination of greed, selfishness and hatred now threaten the very foundations of American democracy itself.

Donald Trump will be (was) sworn in on the day that we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King and the movement that made him possible. A striking irony. That we gather to acknowledge how far we have come in a moment of profound betrayal and backlash.

I can only imagine what Dr. King felt between his ascendancy as a young man fresh from seminary in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott and as a wizened veteran of the moment on the eve of his assassination. Scholars have written about his depression and the difficulties he faced as the country, and many black people, turned their backs on him and his philosophy of non-violence. We can read his words as he invoked the power of love and forgiveness as organizing values and then struggled with whether he was asking Black folk to integrate into a burning house. He knew of the violence of brutal Southern sheriffs and the hypocrisy of Northern liberals who decried southern racism and turned a blind eye to the horrors of police brutality and segregated ghettos in the North.

How did Dr. King muster the courage to continue to fight despite it all — despite what can be described as a continuous loop, where Americans claim to address the fundamental contradiction that has haunted this nation since its founding and then turn their backs on it all? The contradiction that left hundreds of thousands of dead on the battlefield during the civil war, the contradiction that left bodies dangling from popular trees, cities burning, marches demanding freedom only to bear witness to the nation turning its back on the promise of American ideals and doubling down on the idea that white people matter more than others. A kind of freedom snatching, as the novelist Jamila Minnicks put it.

What went through Dr. King’s mind as he witnessed grown men and women attack elementary school children with fists and tree limbs in Grenada, Mississippi in September of 1966 simply because they wanted to go to an integrated school? Dr. King would retreat to his bed, because of what he saw that day. Andrew Young said he had never seen him in such a state. And only when Joan Baez sang “A Pilgrim’s Sorrow” to him while he lay in bed that he began to stir. Dr. King eventually returned to lead the protests later that day, but what crossed his mind? What did he feel in his heart to witness such cruelty and barbarity directed at children in defense of evil. A kind of marrow weariness. I can imagine he uttered the words that Stamp Paid in Toni Morrison’s magisterial novel, Beloved, said, “What are these people? Tell me, Jesus, what are they?”

The continuous loop, this “freedom snatching,” is rooted in a tragic choice that attempts to reconcile American democracy with the vile belief that the color of one’s skin determines one’s value. It is always looking towards the present, with an image of the past communicated in image and language, rooted in myth and illusion, from which to look away from the mirror that reveals who we actually are. We find ourselves experiencing powerful moments when the nation seeks to uproot the contradiction only to tire of the task, to declare that it has done enough, and return to the idea that ours must remain a white nation in the vein of old Europe. At one point, we recognize the struggle for freedom and justice as central to the country’s self-conception only to reject it with startling brutality.

We find ourselves today celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., remembering his sacrifice and the movement that sought to save American democracy from its darker angels against the backdrop of an ugliness that is, at once, familiar and frightening. An assault on immigration, an attack on DEI and Affirmative Action, a rejection of the full history of the country — and a radical insistence, by some, that the true victims of our time are white men. Freedom snatching, an inheritance found in the fugitive slave clause in the constitution.

In an April 1966 editorial for the New York Amsterdam News entitled, “The Last Steep Ascent,” Dr. King addressed directly the tragic implications of the country’s betrayal. He talked about the successes of the movement and the claim by some that, because of those successes, the movement had lost its way. That it was “uncertain and confused”. King said this was nothing but political projection. White America had simply lost its will. As he put it, “the white community now inclines towards a detente, hoping to rest on its laurels.” King insisted that the fundamentals of true racial justice had not yet been achieved. The country, again, was left content to tinker around the edges, and would grow angry and impatient with persistent demands to be otherwise. Asking the question that James Baldwin loathed, “what else does the negro want.” (A question he loathed, because it revealed that white Americans didn’t see us as human beings like themselves, because, if they did, they would know what we want. Exactly what they want).

In the editorial King harkened to the historical period after the civil war. He wrote that

Chattel slavery was abolished, but a program to transform slaves into citizens was omitted. Negroes left the plantations in hundreds of thousands expecting that the government that freed them would pursue the logic of its own act and create a structure into which they couldn’t. When this was not done, Negroes themselves improvised, sacrificed, and struggled to gain a foothold on secure shores…The era of hope ended with the return of Negroes to a more sophisticated form of slavery that was to last merely a century.

Here Dr. King acknowledges, with the support of historical example, the workings of the tragic choice and the continuous loop that it enables. The refusal to follow through on the promise—to extend democratic principles to Black people not as an act of charity or an affirmation of virtue but as an expression of justice — gets lost and makes possible a reimagining of forms of oppression. King likened the moment in 1966 to this period at the end of Reconstruction. But his was not a simple analogy.

History will not repeat itself in a simple cycle, King noted. New and more efficient forms of racist oppression will emerge. Reproducing the underlying logic that informed slavery itself, but not reproducing its form. The nation can declare that it has done enough and leave in place the structural realities that disfigure American democracy itself.

Dr. King’s words take on added significance today as we find ourselves on the precipice of what can be called a “woke scare,” where right wing forces demand that we put aside any attempt to remedy racial harms. In short, we find ourselves in a moment when the fever dream has spiked again and forces are gathered to snatch freedom dreams.

Despite the early successes of the movement, near the end of his life, Dr. King had to face the reality that dashed hopes, and white rage shadowed his words. King wrote:

negroes expect their freedom,” he said, “not as subjects of benevolence but as Americans who were at Bunker Hill, who toiled to clear the forests, drain the swamps, build the road — who fought the wars and dreamed the dream of the founders of the nation considered to be an American birthright.

Our freedom and standing in this country ought not to be contingent upon the mood of the majority of white America. King insisted in 1966 that this country is ours by birth not because of the charity of others. Racial justice is NOT a philanthropic enterprise. It is our demand that the country make good on its founding promise without exception.

But what do we do when the winds shift — when the philanthropic impulse wanes and America retreats into the comforts of an insidious idea of white supremacy? What do we do when the storms intensify? And the pressures to bow and bend are enormous. How do we orient ourselves to struggle in the midst of betrayal and backlash?

King wrote in March 1966 about what he called the “creative non-conformist.” He recalled a young theological student at Duke University who approached after his talk. The young student said, “I agree with everything you said. I believe in it even more since I’ve come into theological school and studied the meaning of the Gospel.” He went on to say, “I just wish I could do something about it. But you know I’m the pastor of a white church about 80 miles away from here and if I said anything like this, if I even talked about brotherhood from my pulpit, they would kick me out.” King said that here was someone who forced himself “to take abuse because the majority opinion is against him. He is afraid to be a creative non-conformist.”

Here King draws on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the words of the Apostle Paul, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” For King, Paul (and, to a degree, Emerson) urged us not to fear dissent, but to understand the power of refusal — of refusing to adjust oneself to an unjust world, of being swept up by the crowd or mob who insists that you concede to its passion. As King put it, “when the pressure of the crowd is always unconsciously upon us, conditioning our minds and our feet to march to the rhythmic drum-beat of the status quo.” They want you to consent, either actively or by way of your silence.

But King insists that we resist such a demand for conformity. That we stand on our convictions amid the storms. The creative non-conformist must imaginatively resist the darkness of the times. We must say with Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not to.” That refusal becomes the basis to risk it all.

All too often in these moments when the country turns its back on the possibility of racial justice, too many of us conform to the times. We move with the current. We bow to the crowd. But Dr. King, even as he struggled with the temptations of doubt and despair, called us to a posture of refusal, of nonconformity.

As we stand on the eve of the 250^th anniversary of the nation, we must say no to those who clamor for the days of old, when people like me supposedly knew our place. We must say no to those who want to shudder the doors of institutions of higher learning to a diverse student body. We must say no to those who long for the days of the 19th century and explicit empire. We must say no to a kind of nostalgia that arrests our imaginations and, instead, fight for the America we want, for the world we desire where every human being has standing and dignity.

Despite the howling winds, despite the depression that threatens to overwhelm, we must be creative non-conformists and hold off our elegant despair.

What does it mean to have Dr. King and the movement that made him shadow Donald Trump’s inauguration. It is a startling representation of two Americas, and the choice that confronts each of us. Which America will you choose? Whose legacy will you claim?

We are tasked, on this day and in the days that follow, to break free from the continuous loop — the freedom snatching — and uproot the tragic compromises that have shadowed our days. Let us begin this work right where we are. Let’s choose the America that Dr. King gave his life for. He did not live to see it in reality. We may not either. But let’s go to our graves fighting for it!