MLK lecturer urges Sage audience to honor King's full living legacy

By Franklin Crawford

How far have African Americans come since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. more than 40 years ago?

"Jim Crow ... was legal until I was 14," said Manning Marable, fielding one of several questions following his address as the 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative speaker at Cornell, Feb. 23, in Sage Chapel. "I'm not that old. So for me there's been a huge change. But on bad days, I feel there's been no change at all. And both views are right."

Manning Marable delivers the 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. lecture, Feb. 23 in Sage Chapel. Robert Barker/University Photography

In his talk titled "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dream Deferred," Marable had just implored an audience of about 80 people to honor the "living legacy of Dr. King" as racism continues to undermine American society today.

"Do not freeze Dr. King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial," where he delivered his legendary "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, Marable said. "The man lived five more years."

And in those five years, Marable reminded his listeners, King's commitment to human rights continued to evolve. He moved from his role as a civil rights leader to that of anti-Vietnam War spokesperson and peace movement leader and, finally, to co-organizer and leader of a comprehensive multicultural human rights movement that sought economic and social equality for all impoverished and disenfranchised people, regardless of their race.

Marable is a professor of history and political science at Columbia University and founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia. He is considered one of the most influential interpreters of the black experience in America, and on Monday, he focused his talk, in part, on restoring the full dimensions of King's universal vision for a multicultural democracy.

Marable was introduced by Janet Shortall, Cornell United Religious Work associate director, who thanked members of Cornell's King Commemorative Committee and CURW Director Kenneth Clarke.

Prior to Marable's talk, the Sage Chapel Choir performed "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?" and Marable was presented with a hand-drawn lithograph of King created by Ray Dalton, a former student of Marable's at Purdue University, and Gregory Page. Dalton, Cornell executive director of minority educational affairs, drew the portrait and Page, associate professor of art, printed the lithogaph.

Marable then ascended the Sage pulpit and, borrowing the famous line from Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem," asked audience members to ponder "what happens to a dream deferred?"

Marable then reviewed the black freedom movement, describing in detail the all-pervasive oppression of Jim Crow laws, which he witnessed as a child growing up in Tuskegee, Ala. And for those under the false impression that King alone spearheaded the black civil rights movement, Marable set the record straight.

To many historians, he said, "Martin Luther King seems indispensable" to the civil rights movement, and many believe it would have faltered without him.

"[But] the movement created him as its spokesperson and probably would have created another had he been killed in 1956," when a bomb exploded outside his house, Marable said. "The Rev. Ralph Abernathy was fully equipped ... to carry on the campaign." Other black leaders would have filled the void and there still would have been freedom rides and sit-ins and jail protests, he said.

King's influence then, Marable said, "Must be explained by factors other than his indispensability ... first and foremost was his unique power as a black preacher. Among his contemporaries in the African-American church, Martin had no equal as an orator or interpreter of the gospel according to black faith."

But it was not only King's inspirational call to black congregations. Marable recited King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which he said was the "ultimate instrument that ... finally convinced the majority of white citizens to end their longstanding support for legal racial segregation."

Marable also discussed King's rise to his ultimate realization -- that the true "dream deferred was America's ... failure to address structural racism and poverty," from the ghetto "to Appalachia, and from the Indian reservation to the barrio."

King began to speak of nationalizing industry, began working with unions and assembling a constituency of the disenfranchised, Marable pointed out. King also outlined a plan, he said, for making reparations to black Americans for the crimes committed against them during slavery -- not a blank check, but a federally subsidized program that would help to bring blacks to social parity with whites.

And if King were alive today, Marable argued, he would support "lesbian and gay rights, environmental justice and fight against the prison industrial complex and the draconian Rockefeller drugs laws." He would have joined the "protest against the Bush administration's war in Iraq" and would have fought for a "single payer health-care insurance system," Marable continued.

"Let us carry on the living legacy of his ideals: that the dream deferred cannot be deferred in our time," Marable said. We can live that dream, he told the audience, "by living up to the standards that he set for us."

Following his talk, Marable spent over half an hour speaking with about 10 students who gathered to ask him questions.