I MAY NOT GET THERE WITH YOU

A bracing attack on sanitized and tendentious misperceptions of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dyson (Race Rules, 1996, etc.), who contends that Dr. King is arguably “the greatest American who ever lived,” seeks to “rescue King from his admirers and deliver him from his foes.” Both black and white progressives and forces on the right, he contends, have tried to hijack the figure of King for their own purposes. Ralph Reed has used King as an example of racial reconciliation and of religion fused with politics in order to woo minorities to the religious right. Although whites have embraced King’s “I have a dream— speech for its safely universal appeal, King was anything but the “poster boy for Safe Negro Leadership.— In fact, Dyson points out, King embraced democratic socialism rather than capitalism, favored income redistribution, called the US a racist country, and believed American society needed fundamental transformation. Dyson details King’s views on war—particularly his attitude to the Vietnam War, which he opposed not only because of his beliefs in non-violence, but also because it was racist as black soldiers were sent to fight in “extraordinary proportion to the rest of the population.” Elsewhere Dyson describes King’s move from fighting racism to opposing class oppression. Dismissing the claims by militant blacks that King was an “Uncle Tom,— Dyson maintains that he was a black nationalist who supported some degree of separation, even in the schools, in order to help blacks advance. Dyson rounds off his portrait by dealing with the charges of plagiarism against King, his relations with women, his family’s highhanded control of his legacy, and parallels between Hip Hop lyrics and King’s message. Despite often prolix prose, Dyson succeeds in recasting King’s message from a comfortingly unexamined myth to an enduring challenge by a great American provocateur. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)