The Untold Story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Cyborg

This paper traces the inherited legacy of a distorted Black conception of masculinity rooted in the violence and dehumanization of chattel slavery. Several sources are used to explore the foundations of Black male violence leading to a constructive theo-ethical model of resistance. Nat Turner and his theological justification for violent revolution is the starting point for this exploration. In Turner's story we find the roots of biblically oriented Black agency in an uprising directly related to chattel slavery. Next, in the fictional story of Bigger Thomas, as presented in Richard Wright's Native Son, the violent masculinity manifested in the theological conception of slave revolt is imagined on the interpersonal level of intimate relationships and individualized, and gendered, freedom. Racial categorization and the unmanning of the Black male through being conceived of as property defines the legacy of slavery hidden in hegemonic ideas of what it is to be human. A consideration of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, using both biographical and poetical sources, will tie the ideas of masculinity and humanity found in the analysis of Nat Turner and Bigger Thomas together in the pure physicality of racialized violence. A new kind of incarnational justification theory, based on the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement in the history presented in Danielle McGuire's At the Dark End of the Street, is finally proposed as a solution to the continuing influence of hegemonic masculinity. Violence, of course, is not unique to America or even to the process of colonization. But this paper argues that to derive one's humanity through violence becomes transfigured in the uniquely American experiment of industrialized slavery.

University of Memphis Law Review, 2018

I. INTRODUCTION: THE "MASTER NARRATIVE" OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT * Charles W. McKinney, Jr. is the Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College. He earned his B.A. with honors from Morehouse College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in African American History from Duke University. His most recent work, co-edited with Aram Goudsouzian, is titled An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee. The author would like to thank The University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law School for inviting him to participate in the MLK50 Symposium.

African Studies Review

With ten essays and an editorial introduction, Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture, edited by Melvin G. Hill, offers an array of insightful perspectives on the intersections of science, technology, and Black subjectivity, particularly in works of African American literature and culture. Focused on American histories and experiences of race, these essays present compelling frameworks for examining Black identity and being in an effort to transcend and enhance the human-understood as "transhumanism"-through medical, algorithmic, digital, and other technologies. The collection's focus on transhumanism means that the essays also touch on the debates surrounding posthumanism and Afrofuturism. Several essays focus on the problems and possibilities that arise from miscegenation and reproduction, which the authors argue can be read as transhumanist technologies for modifying the human. In the case of the British colonies in the Caribbean, Md. Monirul Islam (Chapter One) shows how racial mixing was proposed as a new method of colonial subject formation and control, the thinking being that "miscegens" would embody both European intellect and African strength to improve production in the plantations. Miscegenation would also hinder any slave rebellions organized on the basis of skin color. In an instance of undermining the biological fixtures of race, Melvin G. Hill (Chapter Five) presents George S. Schuyler's Black No More (1931[reprint Dover 2011]) as an Afro-transhumanist novel in which its protagonist, Max Disher, who is Black, undergoes genetic transformation to become white. This subsequently upends the racial and racist binaries that define the United States, which later culminates in white nativist riots. These essays contend that the Black self, formed through histories of slavery and racism, is already a site for transhuman endeavors, imagination, and disruption.

A case analysis on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the lens of Alfred Adler's theory of personality.

College Literature, 2020

Can fiction genuinely and lastingly change the world? It is tempting to invoke the power of literature to increase empathy and promote universal brotherhood, yet before doing so we must face up to several problems. Although we may empathize with characters we encounter in fiction, including those who are differently situated from ourselves, it is difficult to know whether that empathy carries over into the non-fictional world. Then too, there is the question of whom we will empathize with: the history of literature and film shows that there’s nothing preventing readers and viewers from identifying deeply with oppressors, or those who resist civil rights. Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits all answer to the question of fiction’s social effects; we must interpret each text adeptly, with an eye for nuance and an awareness of the varied uses to which any fiction may be put. Two major philosophical approaches seem capable of informing such an analysis, that of the relatively optimistic Kantians, notably including John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, who assume that people can be persuaded to act in a more egalitarian fashion once their vision has been made clearer; and proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT), such as Derrick Bell, who assert that oppression stems not directly from a lack of enlightenment, but from perceived self-interest: people behave in a bigoted fashion because they believe it to be in their self-interest. Each of these approaches serves as a necessary corrective to the other, and between them we may achieve a productive balance that informs a nuanced, complicated analysis of fiction’s social effects.

Racial uplift in speculative fiction: technological empowerment and the enforcement of black identity in Colson Whitehead’s 'The Intuitionist' and 'John Henry Days', 2022

Following the steps of technological innovation in the US, one can easily notice how technology and its use has been inaccurately and stereotypically reduced to an exclusivism related to a white-Western ideal. However, black speculative fiction has often tried to overtake this concern. In light of this, the aim of this contribution is to examine the relationship between black identity and technology through the lens of speculative fiction, in Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and John Henry Days. The final goal is to demonstrate how Whitehead uses technology as a trope to reinforce or rather empower black identity in what will be eventually defined as a form of "racial uplift," an enforcement of blackness that elevates the African-American putting him in a position of competence and control toward the machine. Delving into the stereotype of technology as a form of racism toward the black community, by way of conclusion the essay considers Whitehead as an "uplift writer" for his illustration of technology as a narrative tool that lifts black identity by subverting the discriminative and racist encodement of African-Americans within technological development.

Journal of Communication and Religion, 2018

In this essay, we examine King's rhetoric during the last year of his life, (April 4, 1967-April 3, 1968)—focusing specifically on the issues of race. In examining several texts of King, we argue that King adopts a prophetic persona of a pessimistic prophet—especially when addressing issues of race and racism. In exploring King's rhetoric and noting King's directness and firmness when addressing the race issue, we argue that King's rhetoric found a home in the African American prophetic tradition in his attempt to dismantle hegemonic politics and institutional racism. Specifically, we argue that Martin Luther King was radically dismantling white hegemony; and becoming one of the most hated men in America.

Journal of African American Studies

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Honorable El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (aka Malcolm X) and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. strode across the landscape of this place called America, leading their Black followers in the monumental struggle for freedom, justice, equality, citizenship, and democracy. From America's founding as a colonial and slave society, Black people were excluded from participation in virtually every aspect of the social order. Indeed, the US Constitution defined the great multitude of Africandescended Americans as a class of sub-humanity. Therefore, the main objective of white Americans has been to stifle Black development-identity, social, economic, cultural, and political-at all costs. Of course, White people historically have denied this reality, producing this nation's culture of pretense. America lies to itself. This nation may have been theoretically conceived in liberty, but slavery and racism damned it as a democracy. No matter what theoretical approach to the study of democracy-normative, realist, empirical, behavioral, representative, deliberative, power, etc.-America is not, and never has been, a democracy. Hence, it could be argued that Malcolm X and King led struggles that were in vain. How could that be possible? What is necessary is a critical reevaluation of democratic politics, which this essay will undertake briefly near its end. Now comes The Sword and The Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. by historian Peniel E. Joseph, 29 years after Black liberation theology founder James H. Cone published Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Cone 1991), when Cone's book was published, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements had been crushed by the power of the brutal American political state. Cone sought to resurrect the memories, ideas, and activities of the two major leaders of the struggle for Black freedom during the mid-twentieth century. Cone informs that he gained his perspectives on Christian religion from liberal moralist King and his Black consciousness from Malcolm X's radical realism. While King embraced hope, the American dream, and

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice, 2010

This paper explores the intellectual relationship between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the classics, particularly the works of Plato, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. Recognizing Dr. King as a reader of the classics is significant for two reasons: the classics played a formative role in Dr. King’s development into a political activist and an intellectual of the first order; moreover, Dr. King shows us the way to read the classics. Dr. King did not read the classics in a pedantic or even academic manner, but for the purpose of liberation. Dr. King’s legacy, thus, is not merely his political accomplishments but also his example as a philologist of liberation. There are two limitations in this work. First, I did not emphasize enough that the classics are but one small strand of influence on Dr. King. A spiritual and political leader of Dr. King’s stature cannot be reduced to one source of wisdom or one complete interpretation. I never state that the classics are the key to understanding Dr. King, but I did not sufficiently express the limit of this influence. Second, I wrote this in the heady days after President Obama’s election. I like many was elated by what had happened. I naively thought a new day had come, and in some ways a new day had come, but we have discovered that we are still tied to many of our old views on race. In being so overly optimistic about American race relations, I revealed my own ties to old views on race. I should have known better that racism will not end simply because individuals have achieved a certain place in society. I think we should all continue to take joy in the election and presidency of Barack Obama, but we also need to roll up sleeves and continue the hard work of dismantling white supremacy in the United States.