Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., HEROISM, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., HEROISM, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

TRUDIER HARRIS

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2014 by Trudier Harris

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion and News Gothic

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Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harris, Trudier. Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature / Trudier Harris.

       pages cm

   Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8173-1844-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8776-1 (ebook) 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929–1968—Influence. 3. Heroism in literature. I. Title.

    PS153.N5H286 2014

    810.9′896073—dc23

2014015553

In memory of Terrell Harris Sr. and Unareed Burton Moore Harris, both of whom believed in the sacred and the secular

Contents

Genesis

1. Introduction: The Ambiguous Nature of African American Heroism

2. Portrayals of King in 1960s’ Dramas

3. A Pantheon of Poetic Portrayals of King

4. Fictionalizing King: The Case of Charles Johnson

5. A Contemporary Dramatic Portrait of King: Katori Hall, The Mountaintop

6. Conclusion: Weather, Literary Creation, and Heroic Legacy

Notes

Works Consulted

Index

Genesis

This is a book that grew directly out of a teaching experience. During the fall semester of 2000, I taught a First-Year Seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Designed to give first-year students the opportunity to engage with a tenured faculty member in a small group setting, the seminars were limited to twenty participants and had to approach a topic from more than one disciplinary perspective. My class focused on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s influence on African American literature. In addition to reading literary texts in which authors incorporated references to or fictionalized the life of King, as Nikki Giovanni and Charles Johnson—among many others—do, we explored the history of the Civil Rights Movement, listened to music of the era, read King’s speeches and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–1963, explored news items in the archives at the Chapel Hill Historical Society that focused on civil rights activity in that area, and invited persons who were active in the movement to lecture to our class (such as well-known pastor of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church Dr. Robert Seymour and now-deceased associate minister at First Baptist Church Reverend Marie Mann). Students enrolled in the course completed projects on significant women of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Daisy Bates and Fannie Lou Hamer, created websites about the movement, conducted interviews with local activists, and made a film in which they put their own spin on the events of the Civil Rights Movement and King’s relationship to them.

Students in the course worked together so well that we frequently had out-of-class sessions, including dinners at my house. Once the course was over, we formed a core group called the Dreamers who stayed together during the four years the students were enrolled at UNC (one transferred to another university; one’s athletic commitments prevented her from being a full participant; and two others, due to financial and academic issues, were not on schedule with the majority of the group). On Saturday evening, May 8, 2004, I hosted a graduation dinner, at which as many parents and relatives as the students wished to invite could attend. Nearly a hundred people gathered in the Fellowship Hall at Amity United Methodist Church, where I was a member at the time, and we had an impressive soul food dinner that Robert Quick of Durham, North Carolina, prepared for us. After meeting, eating, greeting, and taking photographs, we listened to Reverend Marie Mann offer advice to the graduates. We departed late in the evening so that the seniors could get ready to participate in UNC’s commencement exercises on Sunday morning.

Dreamers who graduated that year now include physicians, attorneys, public school teachers, therapists, counselors, and fashion consultants, among other professionals. I remain in touch with several of them directly and hear from others through the ones who are in touch. I like to believe that this healthy, productive, intelligent, and highly successful group of young people was partly inspired by their First-Year Seminar experience. And I like to believe that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remained in their minds as a light on a hill whose heroic example of successes in a hostile world could guide their paths as well. I thank them all for selecting my class, for being the bright and inquisitive young people they are (even though a few tried to shirk on reading all of Parting the Waters), and for continuing to be a part of my life and the completion of this project.

I thank the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC for giving me the opportunity to get started on this project by granting me a semester’s residency at the institute during the fall semester of 2002. Although it has taken a while for the project to reach fruition, that time of contemplation was instrumental in its being completed.

I thank the members of the St. George Tucker Society, who read the first chapter of this work and commented on it at the July 2012 annual meeting in Augusta, Georgia.

I thank the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective for listening to an excerpt from the manuscript at our May 2011 meeting and for offering comments, suggestions, and sources for my continuing work on the project. Among the group gathered for that occasion were Daryl Cumber Dance, Joanne V. Gabbin, Sandra Y. Govan, Kendra Hamilton, Opal Moore, Hermine Pinson, Paula Senior, and Rochelle Spencer. As this group enters its 27th year of supporting and encouraging each other, I thank them all for being the brilliant and creative women they are.

Lovalerie King, of Pennsylvania State University, was there from the inception of this project and provided invaluable resources and comments throughout my work on it. I thank her especially for reading a section of the manuscript in the final stages of its completion. I also thank Kameelah Martin for giving generously of her time in reading and commenting on a portion of the manuscript, as well as for providing crucial resources.

I am grateful, as always, to my sister Anna Harris McCarthy and to my good friend Wanda Macon, now of Nassau, Bahamas, for reading portions of the manuscript and offering critical, insightful, and encouraging responses.

I offer thanks to an anonymous and strikingly meticulous reader of the manuscript, whose comments, suggestions, corrections, and revisions proved invaluable.

Thanks as well to Daniel Waterman and everyone inside and outside the University of Alabama Press who helped in shepherding this project through the publication process. Thanks, finally, to Cynthia Darling Landeen of Eugene, Oregon, who is an indexer extraordinaire and who has ensured that I do indeed love the way [my] book ends.

1

Introduction

The Ambiguous Nature of African American Heroism

Between the late 1950s and 2013, nearly fifty African American writers of varying ages and political persuasions featured Martin Luther King Jr. in their literary creations, whether works of poetry, drama, fiction, essay, documentary, or autobiography. Poetic works range from the poems the young militant writers of the sixties created that rejected King’s philosophy of nonviolence as well as those composed in response to King’s assassination in 1968. Such creations sprang from the pens of youngsters in the Black Arts Movement, such as Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez, as well as from those of older, respected states-persons of the writing community in the sixties, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden. Quincy Troupe, Sterling D. Plumpp, and a host of other poets less directly connected to the Black Arts Movement expressed either their affection for King or their disillusionment with his philosophy, or they simply observed—without striking emotional register—the work that King was doing; later, they expressed outrage at his assassination. Lesser-known playwrights in the sixties, such as Joseph White, joined superproductive Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in depicting characters in their dramas who were drawn upon King. Novelist John A. Williams turned his attention to autobiographical/documentary focus in The King God Didn’t Save (1970), while novelist John McCluskey produced a narrative, titled Look What They Done to My Song (1974), in which King is peripherally present. Alice Walker noted her response to King in an essay (1983) that marks the moment she became aware of the national impact King had. Poets Audre Lorde and June Jordan also focused on King in their works during this time. In the 1980s as well, Pulitzer Prize–winning poets Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa continued to perpetuate the King legacy in African American literature, although their works are dramatically different in creative and political intent (if there is any such intent at all). Toward the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Johnson focused on King in the novel Dreamer (1998) as well as in short stories about King. In the twenty-first century, poets—including George Elliott Clarke, Elizabeth Alexander, N. J. Loftis, and Elouise Loftin—have made less politicized references to King in their poetry. Perhaps the most striking King literary creation in the twenty-first century is Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (2011), a drama that questions the received notions of a mythologized King; the play was produced on Broadway in 2011 with Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson as the two-person cast.

And the creativity goes on—far beyond the writers mentioned here. This pattern of literary inclusion makes clear that there is a legacy of creation surrounding King in African American literary texts, just as there is a legacy surrounding King the historical figure. How and why these writers, across a variety of genres, incorporate King into their works is the focus of this book. That how and why involves three things: First, each of these writers recognizes King as a heroic figure, whether they applaud that heroism or deride it. Second, the heroic traits that ensure King’s transcendence of the ordinary to extraordinary inclusion in literary works is based, in part, on African American folk traditions; thus, several of these works showcase occasions in which the folk imagination and cultural patterns drawn from folklore help to shape African American literature. Third, the inherent ambiguity of African American heroic folk traits makes for political as well as literary entanglements that call into question the life of King as incorporated into the literature as well as the intentions of the writers in preserving, tainting, reclaiming, or elevating King’s historical legacy.

The Ambiguous Nature of African American Heroism

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of America’s most revered heroes. Americans of all races, cultures, and backgrounds have expressed admiration for him, joined in celebrations of his legacy, and generally applauded what he did to bring about civil rights for African Americans, which meant that many non–African Americans also experienced an increased belief in American democratic possibilities. The role King played at a crucial moment in American civil and political history—the mid-twentieth century—cannot be gainsaid. His use of nonviolence to transform the attitudes of countless Americans toward racial injustice and the immorality of racial prejudice has not been matched in American history. The extent to which he is revered is manifested in many ways, but especially in the facts that he won the Nobel Peace Prize (1964), was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year (1963), and is the only African American to have a federal holiday named in his honor, which makes him a national hero. That same tribute was not made to Frederick Douglass, the first internationally known African American orator and advocate for abolishing slavery, or for Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute and power broker universally recognized as the most influential black man in the early decades of the twentieth century (even extending to breaking the color code by being invited to dine at the White House). It also was not conveyed upon W. E. B. Du Bois, whose legacy is perhaps more known among intellectuals than the masses, although his achievements in scholarship and political influence were widespread. Nor did it happen for George Washington Carver, whose scientific experiments at Tuskegee Institute under Washington’s leadership were legendary. All five, among many others, are remembered each February in celebration of Black History Month, but, among African Americans, King stands above them all. Douglass and Washington might come close to King in having widespread recognition and appreciation among the masses of black people; the other two are known primarily for their intellectual and scientific achievements, with most probably responding to Du Bois and Carver at the superficial level of name recognition in the rituals of celebrating black people of accomplishment. From the perspective of African Americans and their notions of what it means to be heroic, therefore, King’s elevation offers a unique site on which to explore heroism as well as the complexities and ambiguities attendant upon such a designation.

Although an intellectual, King was embraced and revered by those African Americans often at the bottom rungs of the economic/social ladder. These folks, in the strong traditions of orality, claim and tell stories about a King who is at times dramatically different from what intellectual, historical, and biographical treatments of him reveal. Along with King, their heroes include such tricksters as Brer Rabbit and such badmen as Stackolee and John Henry. The Martin Luther King Jr. of history and the Martin Luther King Jr. of folk tradition, as I will demonstrate, may seem oppositional, but they are ultimately mirror images of a complex of heroic traits that define African American folk tradition. In the following discussion, I will illustrate how King fits into African American folk heroic tradition even as he captured the imaginations of a variety of writers, many of whom were trained in the highest intellectual traditions. Together, these seemingly contradictory conditions indicate that African American heroes are embraced, shaped, defined, and re-defined to coincide with cultural needs, to highlight long-standing cultural patterns, and to emphasize that ambiguity in heroic construction—or, indeed, suspicious or questionable actions in heroic construction—provide opportunities for continuing celebration, instead of rejection, of cultural heroes. Consequently, the very act of writing about such figures is evidence of celebration, even if the portraits depicted are less than complimentary.

The history of peoples of African descent on United States soil makes it almost impossible to discuss heroism without qualification, which means that African American heroes generally do not fit easily into categories that author Joseph Campbell might identify as crucial to heroic acts.¹ Given the circumstances of enslavement and servitude, personalities that emerged as heroic frequently operated against the accepted norms of the predominantly white society under which African Americans were enslaved. A woman who cooked in the Big House for her masters, therefore, might have been considered heroic if she managed to get a few extra pieces of bread for her family in the quarters by appropriating those morsels. Her actions, as Booker T. Washington asserts of his plantation cook mother’s appropriating a chicken to feed her family in Up from Slavery (1901), might have been viewed as stealing by slaveholders, but he would never assign such a negative value to that act.² Neither would the persons who benefited from that anonymous mother’s appropriation of food for her relatives and friends in the quarters. In both instances, issues of absolute morality, of uninflected good and bad, of right and wrong, are nullified by the circumstances under which each woman had to operate. The greater good, in this scenario, is the one that allows more people to be fed under a system that demanded excessive work for little nurturing compensation. Comparatively, seemingly deviant strategies that King used against many southern white authorities would be applauded instead of derided.

While it is easy, in the absence of violence, servitude, and inequality, to apply universal standards of morality to heroism and to ignore any consideration of extenuating circumstances, that is clearly not the case in African American culture. Throughout their history on American soil, people of African descent have expressed admiration and shown respect for persons, both historical and folkloristic, who have defied traditional European notions of morality and achieved heroic deeds for their communities.³ Indeed, the first recognized heroic transplant from Africa to America in the black folk tradition was a character that used his wits (innate intelligence) to get the best of his enemies and sometimes his friends. That character, Brer Rabbit (descendant of the African trickster Anansi the Spider) put the folkloristic tradition in conversation with the historical tradition of anonymous enslaved cooks who took food from their masters; both illustrate that heroic traditions in African American culture are a combination of characters who capture the imagination and exist exclusively in the oral tradition and historical personages who grow to exist in a realm outside that which is purely associated with their empirical deeds. Indeed, the historical personalities can take on some of the traits of the purely imaginary figures.⁴

This is the backdrop against which I wish to view the impact of Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy in African American literature. In order to understand King’s positioning in the cultural pantheon of heroic figures, it is necessary to understand how that heroic tradition has developed and manifested in the daily lives and imaginations of African Americans. Some heroic figures earn a desire for emulation, while others do not—and still others retain an aura of ambiguity. King, at a glance, would seem to be one of the untainted heroes, one who could easily be emulated. However, the traditionally received impressions of how heroes operate in African American culture make him a mixture of acceptance as well as possible avoidance—if not downright rejection. Presumably, anyone who fought valiantly to right the wrongs of discrimination against African Americans would be unqualifiedly heroic. Even more so would that person be considered heroic if he were assassinated in the process of attempting to achieve those objectives. I will illustrate, however, that King’s heroic actions in the face of racism nonetheless led some to question his tactics and others to reject them altogether. In addition, many of the writers who wrote about King after his assassination perhaps viewed their efforts more as opportunities to indict a racist white America rather than as opportunities to express undying love for, appreciation of, and devotion to King and his philosophy of nonviolence.

The first and longest-lasting African American heroic figure—one with whom King shares some traits if not exact tactics—was that of the trickster, and Brer Rabbit was the quintessential trickster. Tricksters operated in a world of inequality: the powerful versus the seemingly powerless. On American soil, they also operated from a position of race: a powerful race (white) versus an ostensibly powerless one (black). As African American folk raconteurs depict the tradition, the trickster also had a size disadvantage. Brer Rabbit is just that—a rabbit—who pits himself against lions, foxes, wolves, and other much larger animals. Given this disadvantage, Brer Rabbit must resort to tactics that supersede physical strength. He cannot defeat a lion at arm wrestling or beat him to a pulp to get what he wants, so he resorts to mind work, to trickery.⁵ Trickster tales are thus, by nature, a platform on which the seemingly weaker personality puts his folk wits to work against a larger, stronger personality. An equally important trait is that the trickster is amoral, which provides a contrast—at least at a glance—with King. After all, King’s religious upbringing presumably placed him squarely in the morality of Christianity. Or perhaps rather than associating amorality with Brer Rabbit, flexible morality might better describe the character’s actions. Such a designation would align him more closely with King. Whatever the approach, what is important is that both Brer Rabbit and King are admired, perhaps equally, for their achievements. Brer Rabbit steals, gets others to take his place to receive beatings, lies, and generally bests all his opponents. He does so with questionable tactics and with no feelings of guilt, for he judges the outcomes of his actions (stealing the chicken for the greater good, thus, demonstrating flexible morality) to be much more important than the tactics he uses (degradation of and/or violence against other animals), and he is, as historian Lawrence W. Levine points out, as merciless as his stronger opponent (Levine 107). If he is hungry, he will get food no matter what it takes—and he is not inclined to work for it. If he feels that he has been wronged, he will take vengeance, no matter the consequences. If he feels that unwelcoming behavior has been directed toward him, he will respond with equally unwelcoming actions. As Levine further notes, the characteristic of these tales was one not of moral judgment but of vicarious triumph (Levine 107).

Thus, Brer Rabbit reaps admiration by the tellers of the tales that showcase his often-questionable exploits. African Americans, recognizing the restrictions under which Brer Rabbit operates, applaud his tactics as well as the tangible rewards they yield. Rather than passing judgment on his shenanigans, African American storytellers celebrate Brer Rabbit’s victories and his gains. That response is possible because storytellers and listeners generally assume an allegorical component in the Brer Rabbit stories. Brer Rabbit’s opponents are thought to be the white masters during slavery and other whites after slavery who acquiesced in keeping black people in lesser positions of power, influence, and value in the so-called democratic American society.⁶ Brer Rabbit, in turn, represents the African American hero who says no—sometimes quietly and sometimes in thunder—to the status quo. On these battlefields of inequality, therefore, the trickster’s actions, which may be questionable under an absolute system of morality, become acceptable in a flawed system. After all, were it not for the fact that white people stole people of African descent from their countries and brought them to America, there would have been no slavery; whites who professed Christian values, therefore, were really modeling immorality. To have a group representative, such as Brer Rabbit, combat that original immorality operates in the realm of acceptable ambiguity.

Consider the iconic Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.⁷ During a dry spell, all the animals get together to dig a well for water, but Brer Rabbit declines to participate, arrogantly asserting that he can drink dew. Later that evening, however, after the well has been dug, he steals water. Determined to capture the culprit, the other animals fashion the tar baby that has become the defining characteristic of this folktale. An unrepentant Brer Rabbit confronts the tar baby when he next comes to steal water and, judging the tar baby to be impolite when it fails to respond to Brer Rabbit’s greeting, Brer Rabbit proceeds to hit the tar baby again and again until he is stuck fast.⁸ When the animals gather to collect the stuck Brer Rabbit and determine how best to punish him, he wittily controls the conversation until they throw him into the briar patch, where he was bred and born. By using his wits, he gets exactly the punishment that is appropriate for his continued survival, just as he has gotten the water that was similarly necessary to his survival; he is, after all, a supreme manipulator whose tales reflect amoral manipulation (Levine 108). Tellers and listeners of the tale admire Brer Rabbit for escaping an almost impossible situation, one in which the odds are arrayed impressively against him—as the odds would have been against an enslaved person trying to deal with an intractable master or against a black man in the 1930s trying to save himself from a lynching. The narrow escape is what evokes laughter and appreciation for Brer Rabbit’s trickery. In a world in which black people had so little and lost so much, knowledge of a character’s acquiring something for nothing and getting away with it would have been especially engaging. Another factor is also relevant: Brer Rabbit refuses to have his labor co-opted for presumed communal good. Compare this with how the plantation system co-opted the labor of African Americans and, later, how many African Americans during the Jim Crow era found themselves working for very little—or no—compensation.

Scholars usually agree that animal trickster tales reflected in important ways the concerns of those who were enslaved, as well as those who suffered economic and physical lacks under segregation. Such tales were readily available for collection in the nineteenth century because of the guise