JANUARY 18, 2021 – I’m a third of the way into The Contest – The 1968 Election and the War for American’s Soul by Michael Schumacher. As members of my family can attest, the book is so riveting, I had to “sneak read” during someone else’s protracted turn in a late-night card game.
The book’s subtitle implies that the struggle for our national soul occurred during the 1968 presidential election when all hell was breaking loose upon our fair land. But as any aware person knows, that struggle continues. Here we are well over a half-century later, still fighting for “America’s soul.”
So much of the story is circular: a central issue of the 1960s was racial justice. Fifty-three years after Martin Luther King’s untimely death, the reader is forced yet again to confront—and grieve—the ironic contrast between Dr. King’s strategy of strict non-violent demonstration and his own violent death. In this reflective process, it’s impossible not to avoid acknowledgment that this country is still mired in its heritage of racial injustice. The legacy of slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow continue to torment our national soul.
As I do on every MLK Day, I recall today the slain civil rights leader’s I Have a Dream speech—one of the greatest examples of grandiloquence in the Western canon. This year I also think about the White Nasties who occupied the Capitol—and the 75 million Americans who voted for the monster who incited the Nasties. How is it that so many hearts and minds today are closed to the timeless inspiration and imagination of Martin Luther King? I fear that however bad things were in 1968, we remain in a dark struggle between the angels of our better nature and the demons of our national character.
Black grievances in this country persist—voter suppression, police shootings, and economic disadvantage emanating from generations of discriminatory housing, education, and health care. If any segment of our society—other than descendants of the original inhabitants—has reason to revolt, it would be Black America.
Yet, as the world witnessed on January 6, it was angry white people who attacked the halls of Congress and threatened to hang the vice president. The worst of it was that their over-riding grievance was the the roundly refuted falsehood that somehow the presidential election had been “stolen.”
What would Dr. King make of today’s America? Would he still have a dream or would he say, “I have a Nightmare, and it’s a policeman’s knee and a Confederate flag paraded through the Capitol—156 years after Appomattox”? Would he yield to despair or would he give us heart, and call us to dream—and to act upon the dream—of a better American future, no matter how Sisyphean the effort?
I think we owe it to his memory to be “incited” by his dream. In the name of King’s sacrifice, we who admire his decency must continue the struggle for America’s soul. Otherwise, we live in danger of becoming soulless.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
