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On January 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States. On that day, perfectly planned to coincide with the national celebration of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, more people gathered in Washington, D.C., than for any other event or protest in the nation’s history, eclipsing even the original March on Washington, which Dr. King made as the highpoint of American political theater. As hundreds of thousands of people gathered , tens of millions more watched on television to witness the inauguration of the first admittedly Black president in the nation’s history. Also present that day were other forces that were visible but unseen, felt but not heard. For the ghosts of America’s past and present hovered all over the nation. The ghosts of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, of lynching and of slavery. There were also the ghosts of the silent wars of mass incarceration and the living dead in poverty, the ghosts of the nameless war dead in Iraq, Af–Pak, and other unnamed places, as well as the looming specter and the phantom figure of the Muslim. For many, Obama’s election was a national exorcism, a purging of the past and a reckoning with the present, as the empire was reeling from massive discontent , economic anxieties, and the perpetual wars fought in its name. While the spirit of Dr. King was already present, the figure of Malcolm X was also conjured, if only to try to exorcize him from the national past and the nation’s future. A key and telling moment occurred when Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, gave the introductory remarks at the inauguration, saying, “Those who doubt the supremacy of the ballot over the bullet can never diminish the power engendered by nonviolent struggles for justice and equality—like the one that made this day possible.” Feinstein continued, saying that future generations ix Introduction an empire state of mind would “look back and remember that this was the moment that the dream that once echoed across history from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial finally reached the walls of the White House.”1 Feinstein’s roughly two-and-a-half-minute speech was emblematic of the larger frame through which the country and the world were now to view Obama and, by extension, the United States. With the ghost of King hovering, Feinstein celebrated King by mentioning the “nonviolent struggles” that had made the day possible and declared that the “dream” King had expressed in his 1963 March on Washington speech had now come true and reached the walls of the White House through the election of Obama. But as the nation sought to commemorate and frame the election of a Black president through Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, Feinstein also conjured Malcolm X in her reference to “the ballot or the bullet.” Using the phrase that is the title of one of his most iconic speeches, Malcolm argued in it that Black electoral participation was futile, that the United States posed “itself as the leader of the free world,” and that this contradiction led him to conclude that Black freedom would come only by using what he called “new methods,” one of which was internationalizing the problems of Black peoples in the United States by moving from a civil rights framework to a human rights one and getting out of “the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam” and into the Third World, “where our African brothers can throw their weight on our side, where our Asian brothers can throw their weight on our side, where our Latin American brothers can throw their weight on our side.”2 Not surprisingly, on the inauguration day of a Black president, both King and Malcolm X—the twin poles of Black redemptive possibility— were conjured and invoked. And the stark choices they purported to represent no longer seemed relevant with the election of Obama. For the choices between integration and separation, dream and nightmare, Civil Rights and Black Power, patriot and internationalist were now seemingly irrelevant, for as Feinstein suggested, King’s and Civil Rights’ emphasis on the ballot and nonviolence in contrast with what was assumed about Malcolm and the bullet was vindicated by history through the election of Obama to the White House. But in celebrating King and Civil Rights that day, Feinstein not surprisingly viewed King through a narrow interpretive lens, invoking a frozen and ossified memory of him—one...

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