Yes We Did?: From King's Dream to Obama's Promise

3. After King, Where Do We Go from Here?

 3. After King, Where Do We Go from Here? By the end of the 1960s, new black leadership models had emerged, accompanied by broader options and soaring expectations. Of course, the African American leader whose life and work was the most potent symbol of this new black leadership era was murdered just as the new era was beginning. That awful event traumatized the nation in general and African Americans in particular. In the decades that have passed since then, Americans from all walks of life—scholars and journalists, teachers and preachers, politicians and activists—have tried to make sense of the remarkable black activism of the sixties, the new black leadership that emerged from it, and the man whose life and death became its most potent public symbol. The result of all that public scrutiny is a variety of competing analyses, all professing to reveal the truth. Consequently, there remains considerable confusion in the popular consciousness about the development of the civil rights movement that produced a new cadre of black leaders and about the progression of martin Luther King Jr.’s ideas as he neared the end of his life. One of the most outrageous and provocative of those analyses is contained in a book by michele Wallace. Published ten years after Dr. King’s assassination, Wallace’s book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman , contains a pessimistic and sexualized analysis of the black freedom struggle. According to Wallace, the civil rights movement was a colossal failure: “The Civil Rights movement was the great test of the theory that whites could be persuaded of the equality of blacks. The theory that self-improvement was the cure-all turned out to be only one step away from self-contempt.”1 Furthermore, according to Wallace, as the struggle unfolded, the sexual conquest of white women by black men became a prerequisite of black male freedom. 0 Yes We Did? Under pressure the white man enacted meaningless legislation. He continued to debate the inferiority of the black race. He gave blacks the right to vote and nothing to vote for, the right to buy but no money to buy with, the right to go wherever they wanted, but no transportation to get there. And lastly he told the black man to keep his penis tucked between his legs or there would be nothing at all. With good reason, the black man grew blind with rage. He decided he would do exactly what the white man wanted him to do the least. He would debase and defile the white woman.2 Wallace’s views generated a great deal of interest among her contemporaries ; she held many book signings, she made the talk-show circuit, and she lectured on many college campuses. But her provocative interpretation of the movement is only one of many that have cropped up in the years since King’s death; and anyone seeking a fair and balanced portrayal of the progression of the movement and the evolution of King’s ideas during this critical time must sort through a morass of information, misinformation , and conflicting interpretations. A logical place to start is with King’s last book, Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community. One of the issues King addressed in that book was his concern about the development of black leadership in the wake of the major civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. His leadership vision can be seen in his statement, “Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. . . . I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity.”3 By the time King’s words appeared in print in 1967, a critical discussion of black leadership was already under way. The bold and audacious actions of young leaders like Bernard Lafayette were helping to fuel the discussion. At the same time, however, the discussion was motivated by what many saw as a breakdown in the black unity that had assured the civil rights movement’s success in the early sixties. The black journalist Louis Lomax was one of many social critics during that period who contributed to the black leadership dialogue. In his critical examination of what he called the Negro Revolt, Lomax observed, “The crisis in Negro leadership is largely a matter of public confusion After King, Where Do We Go from Here?  brought on by overlapping programs and...