by JAMES FREEMAN & PETER KOLOZI
Marginalized, called a sell-out, rendered irrelevant, an elder lost in the youthful spirit of the times, King faced one critic after another who, willing to admit it or not, harbored resentment toward the man who tried to confront W.E.B. DuBois’ classic dictum, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”6 One might think America, in the midst of an era of social tumult, would have welcomed this book’s analysis of what the project of a progressive social and civil rights movement should be. Instead, Where Do We Go from Here landed with a thud. King’s last and most radical book deserves better. With the benefit of history, we might consider how anniversaries can also mark a time when what was overlooked is revisited in order to provide us with a lens to view and understand the present.
Marking an anniversary of a book’s publication is, appropriately, reserved for books that were widely read when they first appeared many years ago. Books we commemorate with an anniversary are ones that ushered in a new way of thinking and influenced the way society tries to make sense of the world. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community did neither of these things.1
Published in the long, hot summer of 1967, it was politely reviewed but dismissed. Milton R. Konvitz of the Saturday Review respectfully wrote that King had moved from slogans to programs “moderate, judicious, constructive,” and of “pragmatic tone.”2 Eliot Fremont-Smith of the New York Times wrote that King was “calling for a miracle.”3 Martin Duberman of Book Week suggested that King had a “tendency to substitute rhetoric for specificity.”4 The well-known progressive Andrew Kopkind, in the New York Review of Books, went so far as to state that “there is something disingenuous about his public voice and about this book,” while castigating the civil rights leader a few months before his untimely death as “outstripped by his times, overtaken by the events. … He is not likely to regain command. Both his philosophy and these techniques of leadership … are no longer valid.”5
Marginalized, called a sell-out, rendered irrelevant, an elder lost in the youthful spirit of the times, King faced one critic after another who, willing to admit it or not, harbored resentment toward the man who tried to confront W.E.B. DuBois’ classic dictum, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”6 One might think America, in the midst of an era of social tumult, would have welcomed this book’s analysis of what the project of a progressive social and civil rights movement should be. Instead, Where Do We Go from Here landed with a thud. King’s last and most radical book deserves better. With the benefit of history, we might consider how anniversaries can also mark a time when what was overlooked is revisited in order to provide us with a lens to view and understand the present.
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