Martin Luther King, Jr., showed that leftists can make the best patriots
Since the early 20th century, left-wing activists and politicians have attacked the ways that racism, classism, nativism, sexism, Islamophobia and other forms of social injustice have been inscribed into the national culture and institutions. The left also has criticized the ways U.S. policymakers have exercised power overseas.
Few moments better captured the potential harmony between dissent from the left and patriotism than King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963.
The March on Washington — which drew approximately 250,000 people — aimed to advance racial and economic justice, while pressuring Congress into moving forward with the civil rights bill that President John F. Kennedy had finally sent to Capitol Hill after years of hesitation.
Although today the march is recalled as a proud moment, at the time, many Americans viewed King and the civil rights movement as a radical threat. As historian Glenda Gilmore explains, “Conservative and mainstream politicians smeared King as a communist throughout his career,” while condemning civil rights protests. According to one Gallup Poll conducted in 1963, a whopping 78 percent of White Americans admitted that they would leave their neighborhood if a Black family moved in, while 60 percent expressed a critical outlook about the march.
The buildup to the march was tense, with Kennedy administration officials working to avoid unrest or speeches that would be too provocative. At their behest, organizers pressured speakers such as John Lewis, the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to cut parts of their talks that called for radical economic changes.
Despite these changes, the protest and the speeches represented a radical critique of the nation’s political and legal institutions, one that horrified many on the right. Sen. Strom Thurmond (S.C.), who switched parties from Democratic to Republican in 1964 over opposition to civil rights, asserted that the march “distorted in the eyes of the whole world the view of freedom as it actually exists in America.”
Yet King refused to let conservatives like Thurmond claim patriotism as their own. He charged that the people promoting racism, not those crusading for equal rights, were the real threat to the nation.
During his speech, King underscored that the civil rights movement believed in the promise of the United States and embraced the fundamentals of the American experiment.
He rooted the movement in Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and explained that it was tragic that “100 years later the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
The movement had come to Washington, King said, to “cash a check” that the Founders themselves had written. This “promissory note” was for “the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all Americans, “Black men as well as White men.” Instead of living up to this “sacred obligation,” the United States had to that point “given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.”
But King refused to sell the United States short, “to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt” or that there were “insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”
When he reached the especially famous portion of the address, he explained that his dream was “deeply rooted in the American Dream.” He wanted the United States to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Far from wanting to malign or hurt the United States, King wanted to perfect it. The march left Sen. Hubert Humphrey (DMinn.), soon to be vice president, more encouraged “that democracy could work,” than any other day in his career. Eugene Patterson, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, also recognized the patriotism at the core of the march. The people gathered expressed their fundamental belief that the government could still be “a reliable instrument of, by and for the people.”
And in fact, the pressure from the civil rights movement helped ensure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Open Housing Act, now considered crucial achievements in American history.
King’s most famous speech reminds us that no inherent barrier separates patriotism from dissent that assails the United States for not living up to its values.
As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, “Progressives love our country so much that we know it’s strong enough to acknowledge how racism, nativism, religious prejudice, and other forms of injustice and intolerance are embedded in our nation’s story.”
King’s moving oration in August 1963 and its aftermath demonstrate how working to address these flaws has often led the United States closer to the most fundamental promises embedded in the Founders’ vision for the nation.