As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and delivered the keynote address for the March on Washington, D.C., he couldn’t have realized that a single sentence from his speech would come to encapsulate his entire career in the collective consciousness of white America:

“I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
We’re all familiar with this quote. We were taught these words in high school. A mural with these words greets us in the foyer of the EMU. The majority of Americans know nothing about Dr. King except for his “I Have a Dream” speech. It is quite possibly the most beloved speech of all time.
As a young, black man I have learned to hate Dr. King’s dream.
Or rather, white America has made it near impossible for younger generations of blacks to love the dream in the same way as the older generations. Because, for us, Dr. King’s dream of America has been twisted into America’s dream of Dr. King, a dream that has nothing to do with the reality of the man or the substance of his message.
Conservatives for years have ripped the words “content of their character” away from its context in order to suggest that Dr. King would be against affirmative action programs.
Last year in our University’s own conservative journal of opinion, the Oregon Commentator, Colin Elliott wrote, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a patriotic, rational American activist, put it best when he hoped for a world where his children ‘will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Dr. King knew that character, not race, was more important.”
Let us forgive Elliott for describing the greatest civil rights leader in American history as “rational,” which could be interpreted as a tad condescending. What bothers me is that Elliott knows nothing about Dr. King’s life or else he realized that he could exploit his audience’s ignorance and advance this blatant lie.
I’ll let Dr. King defend himself: “If a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs.”
And: “It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American society if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis?”
White America doesn’t want to remember the Dr. King who advocated quotas and special privileges for blacks. White America doesn’t want to remember Dr. King the anti-war activist who said, “We have committed more war crimes than any other nation, and I will continue to say it.”
That is not the hero white America feels comfortable appropriating. They need the patient, long-suffering Dr. King who was a champion of conservative values like color-blindness and personal responsibility as defined by the religious right. That is the Dr. King they want to remember and celebrate in January: The Dr. King of their dreams; the Dr. King who never existed.
The same year as the “I Have a Dream” mural went up in the EMU, Jesse Jackson wrote an essay about protecting the history of Dr. King.
“We must resist this the media’s weak and anemic memory of a great man,” he wrote. “To think of Dr. King only as a dreamer is to do injustice to his memory and to the dream itself. Why is it that so many politicians today want to emphasize that King was a dreamer? Is it because they want us to believe that his dreams have become reality, and that therefore, we should celebrate rather than continue to fight? There is a struggle today to preserve the substance and the integrity of Dr. King’s legacy.”
The first thing we at the University can do to preserve the substance of Dr. King’s legacy is to paint over the mural in the EMU that repeats the oft-repeated words so beloved by the enemies of the man.
I call on the Black Student Union to demand that the mural be replaced with a quote from Dr. King that is more characteristic of his message and more relevant to the realities of present-day America.
I have a suggestion, from Dr. King’s Letter from the Birmingham City Jail:
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; … who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advised the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”