Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

By Daniel T. Fleming

Living the Dream tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King's legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first national holiday to honor an African American was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against conservative and segregationist opposition.

Congressional efforts to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be received. Though Coretta Scott King's mission to honor her husband's commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed, nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King's life and thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes, how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the arc of King's legacy toward something he never would have expected, and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469667829

Daniel T. Fleming

Daniel T. Fleming is lecturer at the University of New South Wales.

Book preview

Cover: Living the Dream, The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day by Daniel T. Fleming

Living the Dream

Living the Dream

The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

DANIEL T. FLEMING

The University of North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the John Hope Franklin Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2022 Daniel T. Fleming

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fleming, Daniel T. (Daniel Thomas), author.

Title: Living the dream : the contested history of Martin Luther King Jr. Day / Daniel T. Fleming.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054809 | ISBN 9781469667812 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469667829 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Martin Luther King, Jr., Day—History. | Holidays—United States—History.

Classification: LCC E185.97.K5 F583 2022 | DDC 394.261—dc23/eng/20211214

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054809

Jacket illustration: Left to right, Christine Farris, Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, and Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara in Atlanta on January 19, 1987, at a parade for the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. AP Photo/Charles Kelly.

To Frances and Amory

    Contents

Introduction

1   Fighting to Desegregate the American Calendar (1968–1983)

2   Living the Dream

A Color-Blind Holiday (1984–1986)

3   Let Freedom Ring

Celebrating in the Reagan Era (1986–1989)

4   The World House

King Day in the Age of Democratic Revolutions (1989–1992)

5   A Day On, Not a Day Off

Transforming the King Holiday (1993–1995)

6   The Coca-Cola Scenario

Privatizing King Day (1995–1996)

7   To Sleep, Shop, or Serve?

The Holiday in Transition (1997–2000)

8   In the Streets

Reclaiming the King Holiday (2001 to the Present)

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

King family mourning, 1968,  13

Coretta Scott King, 1975,  20

Character Assassination, 1983,  44

Ronald Reagan signs King Holiday Act, 1983,  48

Lloyd Davis,  53

Nonviolence pledge card,  70

King and the Liberty Bell, 1987,  87

Bill Clinton signs King Holiday Service Act, 1994,  140

Dexter and Coretta Scott King, 1996,  146

Better with Coke, 1968,  158

Barack Obama paints at Sasha Bruce House, 2009,  192

Introduction

On January 20, 1986, half a million people looked on as the inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade wended down Peachtree Street and turned into Auburn Avenue, in downtown Atlanta.¹ Thousands marched, singing civil rights movement anthems, in a scene that reminded the New York Times of the 1950s and 1960s.² On this day, however, police supported rather than menaced marchers. Coretta Scott King, widowed seventeen and a half years earlier, led bands, unionists, war veterans, 280 different groups, and some of the city’s homeless population through the city streets. Movement veteran and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young watched as crowds overflowed into the street and temporarily halted the procession, blurring the boundary between spectators and marchers.³ Begun in the early afternoon, after four hours the parade finished at King’s crypt on Sweet Auburn, as the avenue was affectionately known.⁴ The celebrations did not end there.

Promoted with the slogan Living the Dream, the holiday’s reach extended across the nation.⁵ That night, NBC televised a two-hour program of concert highlights from Atlanta, New York, and Washington, D.C. Musician Stevie Wonder organized the events and edited footage for the two-hour national television extravaganza.⁶ Before an audience of more than 4,000 at the Atlanta Civic Center, Patti LaBelle and Joan Baez, among others, sang Wonder’s Happy Birthday, the unofficial King holiday anthem.⁷ At Radio City Music Hall in New York, an audience of 6,000 heard Harry Belafonte sing The Ballad of Martin Luther King, and by evening’s end, the venue had been transformed into a sea of green candlelike lightsticks, swaying bodies and outstretched hands, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.⁸ Wonder personally oversaw the Washington, D.C., show, and producer Marty Pasetta explained that Wonder wanted a happy finish to the holiday weekend. Pasetta elaborated, There’s no politics involved in the show. It is a birthday celebration.⁹ These apolitical concerts were meant to uplift. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory observed that Americans could not avoid hearing King’s I Have a Dream speech on television or radio.¹⁰ Eight thousand radio stations across the nation played excerpts of the speech at midday, and the New York Times reported that church bells tolled, choirs sang and citizens paused to reflect.¹¹ Andrew Young aptly summarized the mood: The leader may have departed … but the dream continues.¹²

Martin Luther King Jr.’s legatees were, however, divided. Coretta Scott King and Andrew Young hoped that the holiday would keep King’s dream alive, inspiring Americans to complete his unfinished work. Thus, they worked to foster a mood of celebration and avoided overt politicking. Others, however, voiced concern over the commemorations’ tone. Disturbed by the festive atmosphere, Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond reminded Americans of King’s radical civil disobedience. Wyatt T. Walker warned against being oversentimental and romantic.¹³ They were concerned that the celebrations smoothed over King’s legacy, making him palatable for a nation unwilling to comprehend his critique, a nation unwilling to adopt his entire agenda as its own.

The holiday both canonized and deradicalized King. Since 1986, those seeking political and social reform in the United States have used it to advance their cause, despite its original apolitical tone. Those who have wanted to maintain the status quo have used it to argue that King’s dream has been fulfilled. In the process, King’s words have often been distorted beyond meaning, his virtues exaggerated and his deficiencies weaponized. Today, every effort to memorialize him is fraught with contradiction: to remember King risks forgetting his radicalism.¹⁴

Coretta Scott King stood at the crux of her late husband’s memorialization. Yet her example illustrates that the line between memorialization and activism is unclear.¹⁵ During the mid-to-late 1960s, while raising four children—Yolanda, Martin, Dexter, and Bernice—Coretta reemerged as an activist in her own right.¹⁶ She also became the prime guardian of her late husband’s legacy, particularly after initiating construction of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.¹⁷ As Coretta commissioned monuments, she continued her activism, vigorously opposing apartheid in South Africa and lobbying for full employment, among many causes.¹⁸ After establishing and completing the King Center, Coretta lobbied Congress for the King holiday.¹⁹ She demonstrated that fighting for a memorial is a form of activism.

The fight for the King holiday also constituted an act of resistance.²⁰ Activists and politicians forged the holiday from a long history of Black resistance, married it to an American holiday tradition, and elevated an African American man to the previously segregated pantheon of American heroes. King is the only American citizen, Black or white, personally identified by name on the U.S. calendar. And despite its early apolitical tone, the holiday developed into a day on which activism could flourish. In King’s name, protesters have denounced events ranging from the 1991 Gulf War to incidents of police brutality.²¹ On King Day, movement veterans and their heirs in Black Lives Matter have taken to the streets, while conservatives sometimes receive cool or hostile receptions from Black church congregations.²² Though impossible for the eponymous holiday to be all its promoters hoped, the national spotlight, as David Chappell described it, shines on King’s message every January.²³ The holiday affords an opportunity, albeit not always used, to further the cause of integration by forging a new relationship between Black and white Americans.²⁴

It is easy to find words of acclaim for King but difficult to find a similar praise for the King holiday. Scholars maintain that it fails to recall King’s radicalism.²⁵ Vincent Harding, a former speechwriter for King, Christian pacifist, and historian, argued that those who fought for the holiday allowed King to become a convenient hero, to try to tailor him to the shape and mood of mainstream, liberal/moderate America. Harding elaborated, The price … is the development of a massive case of national amnesia.²⁶ G. Russell Seay Jr. argues that King has been domesticated and fossilized.²⁷ Controversy over King’s legacy focuses on utility as well as historical accuracy; Michael Dyson argues that the holiday’s superficiality nullifies King’s ability as a symbol to inspire radical social change.²⁸

The concern about King memorialization, as exemplified by the holiday, is that it typically portrays his agenda as complete. Dianne Nash, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), feared that such exaltation of King would deter future generations from becoming activists—either because future injustices would not seem as dire as those in the past, or because youth would simply wait for the next great leader rather than start their own movement.²⁹ Either way, Nash viewed the idolatry of King as potentially demobilizing. Such an outcome is anathema to those who believe that King’s fight against racism, classism, and militarism is unfinished. Historical amnesia cuts both ways, however. Jermaine McDonald argues that King’s legacy is contested, not domesticated, because the nation’s collective memory is deeper than and not as fixed as critics claim. Those who invoke the radical King often ignore King’s own history of strategic compromise and downplay the instances when he moved with caution.³⁰ In this light, King is an inconvenient hero for liberals, radicals, and conservatives alike.³¹

This book is not so much about King the person; rather, it is a study of how Americans memorialize him. At a time of fierce debate over the role of public commemoration—witness the rise of Black Lives Matter and the fall of Confederate statues—this book examines one battle that presaged present debates about statues, flags, and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and one that also presaged the instatement of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. The King holiday is part of this historic trajectory. Living the Dream considers several closely related questions: Why was King memorialized with the holiday? How do Americans portray King on the holiday? How have politicians, civil rights activists, and the King family used the holiday? Why has he been so intensely memorialized? And does civil rights memorialization undermine present-day activists fighting to complete King’s agenda? I seek to understand what the holiday reveals about race, class, gender, and collective memory in the United States, especially since King’s assassination.

Living the Dream argues that the United States chose King to commemorate as it considered him the most appropriate representative of an African American community that demanded recognition in the nation’s memorial landscape. Pressured by both working-class and middle-class African Americans and white liberals, Congress declared that King best represented the integrationist cause. He was a contemporary hero, rather than a distant historical figure; some who voted for the holiday had known him personally. Moreover, liberals and moderates, and some conservatives, thought King had transcended political partisanship. He could be co-opted by all.

Throughout its history, two competing aims have defined King Day: to celebrate and to protest. This book analyses the tension between these two aims, using the long-ago disbanded Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission as a lens through which to examine the holiday. Congress established the commission in 1984 to coordinate the first King Day and to organize a celebration with appeal to a broad spectrum of American society. Coretta Scott King chaired the organization, which included representatives and senators from Congress, presidential appointees, and selected leaders from businesses, unions, religious organizations, civil rights groups, and the entertainment industry.³² For eleven years, the commission organized the holiday until it disbanded in 1996 after Dexter Scott King, Martin and Coretta’s second son, abruptly attacked it from within.³³

Congress tasked the commission with inventing new traditions.³⁴ The commission thus aimed to create a popular holiday in a majority white nation, while fulfilling a historic desire for a Black holiday.³⁵ The commission also sought to continue King’s work in the fields of integration and nonviolence. First, it attempted to integrate the U.S. calendar, furthering a process Congress initiated by declaring the first national holiday honoring an African American. To achieve this aim, the holiday had to be established in every state, and Americans from all ethnic backgrounds would have to participate in celebrations. Second, Coretta Scott King, the commission’s leader, insisted that the holiday propagate the philosophy of nonviolence.³⁶ Coretta hoped that a focus on both themes, integration and nonviolence, would set the template for a popular annual celebration. With President Reagan’s encouragement, the commission also sought to imbue the holiday with idealized American values—namely, respect for the Constitution, Christianity, and the rights of the individual.³⁷ Yet these concepts were promoted at the expense of King’s condemnation of classism and militarism. Further, King Day’s opponents threatened to undermine its universality by depicting it as a Black holiday, only relevant to African Americans.³⁸

Although King holiday supporters belonged to a tradition of African Americans who wanted a national holiday to commemorate Black history,³⁹ their success did not inure King’s legacy from co-option. As proponents fought for the holiday, U.S. politics took a conservative turn.⁴⁰ Ronald Reagan soon exerted influence on holiday planning and disempowered Black liberals by appointing Black conservatives, such as Clarence Pendleton, to the commission.⁴¹ King’s followers thus struggled against those who attempted to distort the meaning of King’s words. As Reagan eroded the federal government’s commitment to civil rights laws, white and Black conservatives manipulated King’s words in ways antithetical to the fallen leader’s philosophy.⁴²

King’s I Have a Dream speech provided early inspiration for the holiday, particularly during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Politicians of all persuasions used King’s dream, yet conservatives focused almost exclusively on this aspect of his legacy. Reagan used King in such a manner to promote individualism, capitalism, and conservative Christianity. Bush too prioritized a narrative that highlighted individual valor within the civil rights movement, as opposed to collective endeavor. When King’s former colleagues rejected the officially sanitized image of King the Dreamer—shorn of radicalism—their dissatisfaction laid the foundation for reform. Following his election in 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton legislated for a day of service that shifted the holiday’s emphasis from the dream to volunteer community service, tilting King Day a little more toward activism than mere commemoration.⁴³

Democrats fostered a new King image: King the Drum Major. In his February 4, 1968, Drum Major Instinct sermon, King vociferously denounced not only racism but economic inequality and militarism.⁴⁴ Situated in his post-1965 canon, the sermon’s critique typifies what historians consider to be King’s radical period. Although the holiday did not become radical per se, pointing to the Drum Major highlighted the fact that King’s agenda remained unfinished, particularly in relation to economic inequality. As King had encouraged his parishioners to devote themselves to humble acts of service, so the commission encouraged Americans to emulate his deeds by serving their local communities. All citizens, no matter how lowly, could work toward the completion of King’s unfinished agenda. Democrat Bill Clinton found meaning in the Drum Major Instinct sermon. Yet, as this book explains, these reforms complemented a suite of neoliberal economic policies, in vogue at the time, when U.S. leaders, Clinton included, wanted to cut taxes and welfare spending.

______

The holiday emerged as part of a move to memorialize the civil rights movement.⁴⁵ Those who conceived the new memorials typically hoped that remembrance of the past would relegate injustice to the past. They hoped that the memorials would serve as vigilant reminders of past oppression and unwavering guardians of rights won. Should those rights come under attack, or should new struggles arise, the memorials would connect the past to present-day battles. Such memorials could commemorate a person or an event and be in tangible or less tangible form. Stories, songs, and sermons can be memorials, as are monuments like statues and museums—seemingly permanent—which people can touch and feel.⁴⁶ Though monuments are not history, people often believe that they possess historical authority, authenticity, and accuracy; they believe that monuments impart the lessons of history, not that they are only one interpretation of the past.⁴⁷

The U.S. memorial landscape, where this supposedly objective history sits, exists in parks, courthouse lawns, and within the grounds of state capitols, among other locations of civic life. This official landscape has, the recent removal of some Confederate statues and flags notwithstanding, been slow to integrate.⁴⁸ Instead, formerly all-Black neighborhoods have hosted most civil rights monuments. This divide has sometimes reinforced a segregated memorial landscape. If courthouse and capitol lawns host Confederate monuments, as in the South, rather than civil rights monuments, little memorial integration can occur. If civil rights monuments are built mostly in once legally segregated African American neighborhoods—admittedly important sites of memory—white Americans can too easily ignore them.⁴⁹

Aware that whites’ desire for national reunification had eclipsed Black efforts to remember slavery as the principal cause of the Civil War, African Americans insisted that the United States honor and memorialize King on the national calendar. As Frederick Douglass had recognized after the Civil War, they knew that the movement must be commemorated to protect its gains.⁵⁰ Thus, on April 8, 1968—just four days after King’s murder—John Conyers (D-MI) introduced King Day legislation to the House of Representatives in an effort to commemorate not only the recently assassinated King but also the movement in which he had figured so prominently.⁵¹ Federalizing the commemoration of King’s birth became Conyers’s cause, and along with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), he negotiated with white liberals and skeptical white conservatives in Congress, whose votes were required to pass the legislation. When the Senate voted for the holiday in 1983, it not only created an important movement milestone but also sealed a long-sought victory not won during Reconstruction nor at any other time in the twentieth century.⁵² The holiday desegregated previously all-white southern calendars, asserting an African American presence on calendars cluttered with Confederate commemorations. The holiday campaign also earned the ire of white supremacists who later disrupted holiday events.⁵³

Whether memorialization is or is not a new phase of the civil rights movement is less important than the messages memorials convey. How memorials depict the movement influences the way we perceive activists and politics today. For example, many memorials commemorate charismatic leaders, especially King. An excessive focus on King, however, elevates the role of masculine leadership in fighting racism and downplays the role of grassroots activists, especially women and labor leaders.⁵⁴ That dynamic reinforces the Montgomery-to-Memphis chronology that uses King’s career to bookend movement history.⁵⁵ Within this periodization, the movement achieved great legislative victories that culminated, after King’s death, with the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. However, if Americans view the movement as successful and complete, it is assumed that inequality no longer exists in any serious way.⁵⁶ Alternately, if Americans view the movement as an unfinished revolution, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asserts, civil rights activism must be continued.⁵⁷ The message that the King holiday projects, therefore, can have a real world influence.

The 1970s campaign to create the King holiday spurred the memorialization of both King and the movement.⁵⁸ Though not of the classical movement, the struggle to nationalize King Day nonetheless reunited civil rights leaders and grassroots activists in a common cause to advance Black interests. While it is easy to take this development for granted, it is worth asking, why has there been such intense commemoration of the movement? One answer is that civil rights activists feared their advances would be forgotten and, even worse, reversed without the ideological defense that memorials provide.⁵⁹ Though memorials cannot enforce laws, they do define values and sustain ideologies. For example, Confederate memorials did not maintain white supremacy by themselves. Rather, they buttressed a hegemonic belief system and legal system dedicated to white supremacy.⁶⁰ African Americans sought the opposite, to inculcate the value of tolerance and racial inclusiveness via an interwoven network of statues, museums, street names, and holidays, among other memorials.⁶¹ African Americans seized the opportunity to reshape the memorial landscape, which subliminally influences daily life, with their newfound political power.⁶² Absent their pressure, the overwhelmingly white, male, and middle-class Congress would not have memorialized King so prominently. Though some white political leaders lobbied enthusiastically for civil rights memorials, many resisted, and others approved them only as cheap concessions to Black Americans, when other reform appeared too challenging.

Memorial entrepreneurs—a term coined by Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman to describe those who define the reputation of historical actors—often hope that memorials will consign injustice to the past, never to be repeated.⁶³ They also hope for an honest reckoning with the past—to avoid repeating the injustices of the past. Yet, completed memorials, usually the products of compromise, are often less frank about injustice than what their creators had hoped.⁶⁴ And civil rights memorials have not been immune from such compromise.⁶⁵ Civil rights memorial entrepreneurs needed allies, so they highlighted the movement’s standing within U.S. political traditions rather than its radicalism. They drew attention to the apotheosis of the movement, the passage of key national civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, and asserted that that fitted within the United States’ democratic and constitutional traditions. Thus, movement memorialization often supports the myth that the United States recognized an injustice and, without much prompting, righted that injustice. As Jeanne Theoharis argues, this is a fable, and the fight for the holiday is key to the fable.⁶⁶ It is true that King himself often invoked U.S. traditions, the legal system and its documents that conservatives publicly idealize, such as the Constitution. In conservative hands, King memorialization is used to propagate myths of respectability and peaceful (read, nonthreatening) protest. This facilitates the condemnation of Black Lives Matter (BLM), for not being as respectable or nonviolent as the classical civil rights movement.⁶⁷

Too much compromise can undercut the message of memorials and activists. National and state governments have typically attempted to please both Black and white Americans with what Dell Upton dubbed a dual heritage strategy.⁶⁸ This strategy had, until recently, forced new civil rights memorials to coexist with Confederate memorials, rather than replace them. One prominent example was Virginia’s King-Lee-Jackson Day, which celebrated King and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson.⁶⁹ Authorities make such compromises to placate whites, and the resulting commemorations are contradictory: they celebrate both the perpetrators of racism and those who fought racism. Thus, the edifice of white supremacy lingers over Black commemoration. Whites who favor the status quo have maintained a significant degree of power and see themselves as neutral arbiters, as Upton put it, in commemoration debates. Too often, these so-called neutral arbiters insist that new memorials not offend white sensibilities and that monuments to white supremacy remain firmly in place.⁷⁰

It is the tension between imagination and authorization that leads to contested memorials. Finished memorials often emerge in forms quite unlike what their proponents imagined. The King holiday shares this fate. Holiday proponents imagined that remembering King’s legacy would stimulate the movement. Congress ratified the holiday during the Reagan presidency, however, subjugating it to the dictates of people who had once denounced King when he lived. The holiday had to meet their approval, given only after King had been deradicalized. Conservatives then co-opted the holiday, using it to maintain the status quo.

As mentioned, memorial entrepreneurs wanted to use the holiday to keep the movement going. They realized that it had neither eliminated racism nor achieved economic equality for all. To win the holiday fight, however, activists downplayed these uncomfortable truths, instead arguing that King’s victorious crusade merited commemoration. They molded a positive consensus, emphasizing an uplifting and unifying King image, ripe for co-option by all. Thus, Congress and holiday proponents united around King’s dream. Coretta aided the process, avoiding contentious issues, and Reagan presented an unrelentingly positive picture of race in the United States. That Americans commemorated King’s birth, not his death, contributed to the positive feeling. Typically, Americans consider the memorialization of loss a private affair, and consistent with this tradition, King Day became a celebration, not a day of mourning.⁷¹ Its proponents sought to renew and inspire, so intentionally selected King’s birthday, not the anniversary of his assassination, for the holiday.⁷²

It is unsurprising that conservatives depict King as a great man of history when Coretta Scott King and Andrew Young also repeatedly emphasized their view that King was the leader of the movement. They portrayed King as a master tactician, brilliant orator, theologian, preacher, and radical activist, among other descriptions. However, as Clayborne Carson writes, the depiction of King as the initiator and sole indispensable element in the southern black struggles of the 1950s and 1960s is mythical. Carson argues that the myth overemphasizes the importance of King’s leadership qualities at the expense of other large-scale social factors that created that propelled movement.⁷³ As it is an oversimplification to say that Eugene Bull Connor, the 1963 commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, and Jim Clark, the sheriff who led the 1965 attack on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, were solely responsible for racism, it is an oversimplification to claim that King was solely responsible for fighting against racism.⁷⁴

All told, it is reasonable to wonder whether memorials support or undercut the struggle for racial and economic justice. Despite limitations, memorials do provide a forum to express dissent. For example, the holiday has provided an annual platform to acknowledge King’s challenging legacy. Although the holiday conforms to many U.S. traditions, activists and academics use it to highlight King’s lesser known works and words. The fact that activists use the holiday to denounce the misuse of King’s legacy proves, in one way, the holiday’s worth. Yet, the benefits are greater still.

Memorial politics and political reform are not mutually exclusive; a win in one area does not mean defeat in another. Civil rights memorials challenge the predominance of memorials honoring white supremacy and the desegregation of collective memory continues the movement’s integrationist goal.⁷⁵ The holiday represents an unprecedented Black intervention on the U.S. calendar that is used to highlight Black—but not only Black—concerns. Further, though it may appear at times as if memorialization is the end itself, larger goals usually motivate memorial entrepreneurs. For instance, their immediate aim might be to erect a statue honoring a hero. However, their long-term aim is more likely to end racism.⁷⁶ Although memorials cannot achieve such goals alone, they can help a society move closer to the attainment of those goals. Further, memorialization can advance activist goals by keeping alive networks and providing a rallying point.

It took fifteen years, from the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson to that of Reagan, to persuade Congress to vote yes to the holiday. Living the Dream begins by tracing the origins of the holiday legislation and charting the holiday movement’s progress from 1968 to 1983. It then demonstrates how, during the planning phase for the inaugural holiday from 1984 to 1985, the commission sought to forge national traditions and rituals by drawing upon previous Atlanta-based King birthday celebrations.⁷⁷ The book then analyzes the first King holiday and subsequent celebrations, examining the holiday’s evolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The King holiday has a history of its own, one rarely considered in full because most historians write as if the first King holiday was the final King holiday. Most write as if it is the same today as in 1986.⁷⁸ Yet King Day is an evolving and dynamic memorial that can effect and reflect the nation.⁷⁹ Though people cannot touch it like a statue, the holiday is unrestricted by a specific location so can be observed almost everywhere. Its message can transcend state and even national borders.

1     Fighting to Desegregate the American Calendar (1968–1983)

I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.

—King, The Drum Major Instinct sermon

The sanitization of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination began the night he died, on April 4, 1968. Earlier, King stood in the cool evening air in Memphis, freshly shaven, bantering with friends, and preparing to eat dinner at the home of Rev. Billy Kyles. At 6:01 P.M. James Earl Ray scoped King in his rifle sights and pulled the trigger. A single bullet felled him. The bullet severed King’s spinal cord. A wound extended from King’s jaw down his neck to his collarbone. Ralph Abernathy, King’s dearest friend and deputy, cradled him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, and then rode with him in the ambulance. Abernathy believed that King was aware of what had happened, even as life pulsed from his body.¹ One hour after the shot, at 7:05 P.M., King died on an operating table at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Overnight, morticians cleaned and concealed the wounds. They reset his shattered jaw, embalmed his body, and dressed him in a new suit.² Abernathy thought King appeared unblemished when he next saw him.³ The morticians presented King in an open casket, at rest: eternally composed. By morning, they had erased all signs of the violence wrought upon him, sparing America a gruesome open casket viewing like that which followed Emmett Till’s confronting murder some twelve years earlier. As hundreds visited the funeral home to pay their respects, before a plane transported the body to Atlanta, the contest over King’s legacy began.⁴

Four days later, on April 9, 1968, the King family buried a son, a brother, a father, an uncle, a husband. This was, however, no private funeral. Many of the most powerful leaders in the nation, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Governor Nelson Rockefeller (N.Y.), and former Vice President Richard M. Nixon—each a potential presidential nominee in 1968—joined mourners inside Ebenezer Baptist Church. Fifty members of the U.S. House of Representatives and thirty U.S. senators came, as did city mayors and religious leaders. New York Times journalist Homer Bigart reported that after the ceremony, both the lowly and the powerful witnessed one of the strangest corteges ever seen in the land.⁵ Two mules pulled a farm wagon that carried King along Atlanta’s streets to South-View Cemetery.⁶ In contrast to the gleaming African mahogany coffin, as Bigart described it, the dilapidated wagon symbolized King’s affinity with the poor.⁷

Coretta Scott King, third from right, with Yolanda, Bernice, Martin III, and Dexter King. Spellman College, Atlanta, April 8, 1968. Australian Associated Press/Jack Thornell.

King was far from universally popular, however. A 1966 Gallup poll revealed that two-thirds of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him.⁸ President Lyndon B. Johnson, once an ally, had fallen out with King over the direction of two failing wars, the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty.⁹ Johnson and former president Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed away from the funeral, as did the arch segregationist Lester Maddox, governor of King’s home state of Georgia. Of the 150,000 people who marched in or watched the funeral procession, a mere 10 percent were estimated to be white.¹⁰

Despite King’s waning popularity, his assassination prompted an immediate outpouring of grief and tribute in song, speech, and poetry. Robert F. Kennedy eloquently recited Aeschylus when news of King’s murder reached him at a campaign rally in Indianapolis. Kennedy appealed for Americans to replace bloodshed with understanding, reminding his predominantly Black audience that he, too, had lost a family member to a white male assassin.¹¹ Cultural figures also paid prominent tribute, and musicians led the way. On April 5, singer James Brown dedicated a concert to King that was telecast live in the hope that civil unrest in Boston would cease if people stayed home to watch.¹² Nina Simone performed the newly composed Why? (The King of Love Is Dead) on April 7 at the Westbury Music Festival on Long Island, New York.¹³

As the morticians sanitized King’s death, politicians sanitized his life. Johnson declared a national day of mourning for Palm Sunday, April 7, and four days after King’s assassination, Representative John Conyers introduced legislation to the U.S. House of Representatives to create a Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday.¹⁴ In doing so, Conyers became a memorial entrepreneur.¹⁵ And, in keeping with U.S. tradition, Conyers called for King’s birthday, not the more recent and emotionally charged date of the assassination, to host the holiday.

What did Conyers hope to achieve? An African American Democrat from Detroit, Conyers believed that a federal holiday in King’s name would be the greatest honor the nation could bestow. He telephoned Coretta Scott King and requested her approval (which she gave) before he presented the legislation.¹⁶ On the same day, Senator Edward Brooke, an African American Republican from Massachusetts, introduced a joint resolution to the Senate to designate King’s birthday a memorial day.¹⁷ Though he did not seek a federal holiday, Brooke proposed an annual occasion with ceremonies, prayers, and a presidential proclamation to honor King. He condemned the uprisings that followed King’s murder as misguided and reckless and instead suggested that churches … schools and homes were the appropriate places to pay tribute.¹⁸ These memorial gestures by Conyers and Brooke symbolized two divergent paths to honor King: one, an annual paid federal holiday; the other, an unpaid cultural/memorial tribute.¹⁹

Conyers did not merely admire King as a man. Conyers was a memorial entrepreneur who sought to infuse America’s collective memory with the history of Black life. And King’s birthday offered the most logical anniversary to promote that goal. Commemorating his death would have signaled that the realization of King’s dream remained distant.²⁰ African Americans (but not only they) exerted enormous pressure on Congress to designate King Day, and their ultimate success demonstrated a newfound political power. Affixing King’s name to the holiday ensured that it became indisputably connected to African American history. Yet to win the holiday, they had to persuade a skeptical, nearly all white, Congress to approve the memorial. To achieve a consensus, they downplayed controversial aspects of King’s legacy and emphasized national unity and reconciliation. This approval process contributed to the deradicalization of King’s legacy. Further, Congress proved receptive to King’s role as an individual, not necessarily the fact of his being part of a broader movement.

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types. Throughout the fight for the holiday, supporters and detractors alike fiercely debated King’s legacy. His memorialization prompts an important question: Why did Congress, and by extension the nation, choose King to honor with a holiday? Congress selected King because he represented African American life and history, symbolized unity, appealed to whites, was a contemporary hero, and liberals and moderates perceived him as having transcended political partisanship. Some in Congress portrayed the holiday as an act of atonement for centuries of Black oppression and intended that it commemorate the civil rights movement more broadly.

King possessed the qualities, appealing to Congress, that Alderman argues are required for memorialization: legitimacy, resonance, and hybridity. King’s legitimacy derived from his charismatic leadership and ability to galvanize a movement that reformed the nation. Liberals and conservatives, some of whom once denounced King, accepted him as a reformer apparently above party politics. His dream for the nation still resonated powerfully as did the fact he was a contemporary of many lawmakers. And King’s hybridity meant he appealed to a diverse array of Americans—from the working class to middle class, vernacular to elite, Democrat to Republican, Black and white. As the fight for the holiday progressed, massive public demonstrations emphasized the high esteem with which the community began to reconsider King. Though opponents argued he only appealed to African Americans, holiday advocates successfully connected him to timeless values like equality, freedom, and justice. They drew favorable comparisons between the civil rights movement and epic historic events like the American Revolution and the Civil War, so that honoring him became an act of strengthening the nation’s existing traditions and values. The holiday’s hybridity developed as it recognized both King and the civil rights movement. King Day represented an opportunity to bridge the nation’s racial divide and promote nonviolence, which Coretta feared was in danger of becoming a forgotten philosophy.

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The fight for the holiday became part of a larger struggle for racial equality in the 1970s. Workplace and school desegregation and the enforcement of voting rights were major civil rights goals.²¹ Affirmative action in workplaces, heralded by President Johnson in 1965, and the busing of children to school districts were controversial movement tactics to end segregation. Johnson and the movement had recognized that the legacies of slavery and racism were so great, the end of segregation alone would not achieve racial equality.²² But millions of whites resisted fiercely when integration threatened their wealth and privilege.²³ Absent from these battles? King and his ability to organize, cajole, persuade, and inspire both Black and white Americans. As the fight for desegregation continued, a parallel trend to memorialize King gathered pace, in part to revive his message for a divided nation.

Some impetus for the holiday came from the urban uprisings that occurred in Californian, midwestern, and northeastern cities in the mid-1960s. In response, Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission (after the chair, Governor Otto Kerner). The commission’s February 1968 report concluded that America was moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. This attention-grabbing statement implicitly overestimated how much progress the nation had made to that point. The United States was already separate and unequal. Though segregation was illegal and Black workers had gained limited economic improvements—Black families benefited from a $2,000 rise in median income—genuine economic equality remained elusive. Almost 28 percent of Black families remained in poverty at the end of the 1960s. Further, nonwhite youth unemployment remained 29.1 percent, and poor housing and education afflicted Black communities.²⁴ The commission’s statement did nonetheless capture a sense that the nation had begun to backslide. Prophetically, the commission warned that only a compassionate, massive and sustained commitment would avoid the polarization of America and the destruction of basic democratic values. It suggested that Americans needed new attitudes, new understanding, and … new will to achieve racial integration.²⁵ King’s assassination, which sparked Black uprisings in almost 130 cities, highlighted how far the nation had to go to achieve racial equality. Over time, King holiday advocates encouraged Americans to use commemorations to develop the new attitudes, understanding, and will suggested by Kerner.

King’s death, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, and domestic division exacerbated by Johnson’s catastrophic escalation of the Vietnam War became the backdrop for Richard Nixon’s ascension to the presidency in 1968. Ignoring Kerner’s advice, Nixon used a Southern Strategy to win the White House. Designed to appeal to white resentment of the civil rights movement, Republicans used coded language around issues like tax cuts, busing, welfare, and individual rights to dog whistle against the movement’s advances. As president, Nixon slowed the pace of desegregation, appointed conservative southern white judges to the Supreme Court, and, along with Vice President Spiro Agnew, attacked the so-called eastern elites. The