Restoring King (original) (raw)
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A DREAM COME TRUE? REFLECTION ON DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Every third Monday of January of every year all across America (and the world), we remember the birth, life and times of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the impact and/or relevance of his vision, values and legacy on race relations in the United States. Although Martin Luther King Jr. was not the first black American to advocate vigorously for civil rights for African-Americans, his efforts were quite unique and compelling. Through his dream and involvement in the civil rights movement, Dr. King, Jr. gave hope and full meaning to the idea of equality, freedom, and justice. However, civil rights movements in America did not begin with Dr. King, Jr.; it dates back to the signing of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. The declaration contains a short but very powerful sentence, which states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." Ever since, this sentence has remained the basis for future struggles for the protection of civil rights and civil liberties, and subsequent laws that would prohibit many forms of racial and gender discrimination in the United States.
2008
This paper seeks to engage ongoing discussions and conceptualizations about the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project and its meanings, boundaries, and goals. It tells two different but overlapping stories of the civil rights era and argues that the dominant abbreviated story of the movement, focusing on the ten-year period centered on the King-led nonviolent movement in the South, should be rejected as a framework for the Project. This ten-year story truncates, decontextualizes, and tames the movement while rendering it legalistic, episodic, triumphant and nostalgic. The effect is that it obscures the movement's relevance to today's circumstances; it distorts the nature, objectives and activities of the masses of ordinary black people who fought its battles, including their broad egalitarian democratic agenda; and it allows forces hostile to the movement's objectives to easily appropriate and misappropriate its ideas. As such it undermines the goals of the Projec...