On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Americans remember the civil rights icon whose words inspired a nation. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he said in his most celebrated speech, delivered from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. While he dreamed of a future where people are not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” Dr. King also had in mind a more just and loving world. A few lines later, he alludes to Isaiah 40:4: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
For decades, scholar and award-winning author Charles Johnson has worked to bring attention to King’s spiritual and philosophical concerns, which often have been overshadowed by the impact of his nonviolent civil disobedience and political organizing. In 1998, some eight years after his novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award for Fiction, Johnson published Dreamer, a fictional account of the last two years of Martin Luther King’s life. (He was named a MacArthur fellow that same year.) Already having earned a doctorate in philosophy and a longtime student of Buddhism, Johnson recognized the rigor of King’s thinking and has sought—through Dreamer and other writings and talks—to restore this philosophical dimension of King’s work to his public image.
Here, Tricycle speaks with Johnson about his writings on Martin Luther King Jr. and what Buddhist practitioners, or any spiritual seeker, can learn from King’s message and vision.
At what point in your life did you realize that your interest in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. might be more intense than the average person’s? How did that interest lead you to write a novel about the last two years of his life? Even though I grew up in the 1960s, and even though I remember the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized how little I knew about this man at the center of a civil rights movement that changed America, despite the fact that I invoked his name often. I felt the private man we call Martin Luther King Jr. had over time become a cultural object difficult to grasp in his individuality, in his humanness, and in the minutiae of his daily life, and this troubled me because those are the very foundations from which a public life arises. As a storyteller, the best way for me to correct these gaps in my knowledge was to make King the subject of my fourth novel, Dreamer, but I also co-authored with civil rights photographer Bob Adelman The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., delivered many speeches across America on his eponymous holiday, and composed a short story and essays about his vision after seven years of research. By the time I was done, I’d devoted a fifth of my life to King’s memory and achievements, and I felt I could discuss his philosophy—he was a theologian and philosopher—as well as I can the positions of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Marx, or Heidegger.
You have noted many times throughout the years that most Americans have an incomplete picture of Dr. King. What do you think is the most detrimental misconception that people have about him? I feel any life in its totality is impossible to know. But what Malcolm X’s daughter once said of her father is also true for King: We selectively take pieces of him. So far too many Americans just see King as a civil rights leader for just black people. His vision was, of course, greater and more expansive than one with only political concerns.