I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.

Michael Eric Dyson. I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Free P, 2000. 400 pp. $25.00.

A pioneering investigation and persuasive interpretation, I May Not Get There With You is, up to this point, the most authoritative bio-critical approach to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life and its implications for contemporary America. Michael Eric Dyson resuscitates successfully the authentic King from the death grip of both King's friends and foes who have frozen him within the liminal realm of his 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech. In contrast, the true Martin Luther King, Jr., about whom we read surfaces as a prophet, a servant, and a martyr--a revolutionary witness for the poor people of America and indeed the world. Dyson's poetic prose concentrates primarily on the last three years of the Dreamer King who, under the sea change caused by his campaign in the North and the increased federal governmental focus on the Vietnam War, reformulates every dimension of his Civil Rights agenda. Hence, in a creative fashion, Dyson opens his important work not with a chronological birth-to-death narrative methodology. On t he contrary, at the book's very beginning, we encounter the intricate complexities of King's thought at the end of his career--1965 to 1968. In the process, Dyson, through King's thought, takes on today's liberals, leftists, neoliberals, and compassionate conservatives.

For instance, chapter one reveals King's plans for the Poor People's Campaign, a militant non-violent march on Washington aimed at disrupting and shutting down the normal functioning of the federal government until the poor received jobs or income guarantees. Relatedly Dyson reads correctly how the more mature King supported and actively advocated for reparations, especially for the black poor. Further substantiating the legacy of King's agreement with another contemporary fight, Dyson documents the Civil Rights leader's staunch support for Affirmative Action. In brief, King argued for monetary compensation for black suffering.

Similarly, in his last three years, King moved from exposing a minority of white supremacists to a trenchant declaration that the majority of white Americans are unconscious racists. Consequently King called for a non-violent revolution of social and economic structures--a shift from reformist integration to full integration into reconfigured systemic power in America. In the international arena, Dyson reveals additional interpretive insight when we discover that King's anti-Viet Nam war position resulted from his listening to similar voices coming from the black poor. A sober race perspective, a nuanced structural vision, and an anti-U.S. imperialism analysis develops, along with King's emerging, enlightened black-nationalist acceptance of parts of black power, including welcoming temporary, voluntary segregation for black people. Finally, the new humanity and the new society, for King, would manifest itself in a Christian-motivated democratic socialism.

In executing this powerfully revised King archaeology, Dyson does not sidestep King's difficult dimension of plagiarism and promiscuity, and Coretta Scott King's deployment of the King legacy for monetary gain. Moreover, in a refreshing and natural manner, Dyson occasionally refers to God as she and situates Martin Luther King within the tradition of the many black Christian women who led Civil Rights movements prior to the 1950s (e.g., Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune) and who assumed leadership during the Civil Rights movement (e.g., Rosa Parks and Ella Baker). In like fashion, Dyson positions King as a genealogical predecessor for today's rap artists (e.g., Tupac Shakur). Dyson's singing prose and coherent scholarship achieve their mark. This masterful text makes the true King human so that ordinary people can make the radical real.