10 Questions for Eric Sundquist

Many people saw Obama’s election as a vindication of King’s dream. But equally important for me is that Obama has styled himself as the heir of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln with a twist — a different Lincoln?

 

Obama sees himself coming into office at a moment of extraordinary crisis, when, in his case, both the nation and the nation’s position in the world are in need of healing and reconciliation. He comes to Lincoln through the spirit of King and through both of them traces his own origins to the founding fathers.

And King himself was inspired by Lincoln, whose 200th birth anniversary is this year.

 

He certainly was. His ‘dream’ speech was made in the centennial year of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. And King saw Lincoln, for the seeming ambivalence of his views on race, as someone deeply devoted to racial equality, a fact recognized by his friend, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

To what extent do you think Obama’s election signifies the fruition of King’s dream? 

 

Obama is a symbol of what King dreamed would be possible one day. But just as important, Obama will become a lens through which we reinvestigate and re-imagine the story of America from a more complex multiracial perspective. That might be the greatest realization of King’s dream.

Give us an overview of American literature as it pertains to whites and blacks.

 

In 19th- and 20th-century literature, black writing by African Americans and writing by Euro-Americans often flowed together and interacted. That might be one way of understanding Obama’s election and the nation’s way of understanding itself: as much more complex and less segregated than it was two generations ago.

What are some of the important racial themes in American literature?

 

One of the persistent issues is the recognition by the majority community that it is a product of, or influenced by, many minority voices, with black writers in turn striving to write not simply from a single racial perspective but rather within a more cosmopolitan tradition.

 

You write about Bayard Rustin, the gay, black, Quaker, communist, pacifist who trained King in the nonviolent ways of Mahatma Gandhi and orchestrated King’s march to Washington. Do you think historians have given Rustin enough credit?

 

I think he’s received more credit in recent years. He was a complex individual through whom one can see many different movements converging in American history. He saw early on that the simple fact of equal opportunity was not sufficient to bring about justice. He saw, as King did, that the key problem was economic disadvantage.

 

Did you think you’d live to see an African American president?

 

I didn’t find it that hard to imagine. One thing I note in my book is Robert Kennedy’s remark that since his brother, the Irish Catholic, had been elected president, surely within 30 years a black man could be elected president. He wasn’t far off the mark.

 

 

That’s a reasonable apprehension. The fact of one man’s election doesn’t change the nature of the reality for many African Americans who live in conditions of disadvantage, even hopelessness. There may also be a temptation to think that Obama’s election will bring an end to affirmative action. That won’t happen either, but it might focus more attention, as King himself preferred, on the economic dimensions of affirmative action.

 

How do you think Americans can best give meaning to King’s dream?

 

First, by not making the assumption that the election of Barack Obama has solved the nation’s problems of economic and racial inequality. Second, I hope people return to King’s speeches and to his life to see that his vision was more complex than his most famous phrase. But I wouldn’t want to dismiss that phrase either because King typically spoke of his dream as an embodiment of the American dream. What King saw as the great promise of America is implicit in every expression of hope that Obama spoke to during his candidacy — and I assume will continue to speak to as president.