The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

In this radical biographic interpretive departure, Dyson suggests that in “the last three
years of the Dreamer King”, “every dimension of his Civil Rights agenda” was
reformulated. Indeed, King had plans for a Poor People’s Campaign, a “militant non‐
violent” march on Washington directed at “disrupting and shutting down”
government functions until the poor received jobs or guarantees of an income. Dyson’s
King is one who “argued for monetary compensation for black suffering”, and who
“called for a non‐violent revolution of social and economic structures”. This new King
is “a useful hero, a working icon, a meaningful metaphor”, a King relevant to the
positions articulated on race and power from within black radical politics in the
United States. Dyson’s King is also one “relevant to the lives of young people starving
for inspiration”, and even “a genealogical predecessor of today’s rap artists”. 112
Different narrations of King’s life and different understandings of his meaning
resonated with different political positions and responses to conditions of racism in the
United States. “Race protectors” engaged in acts of biographical protection of King,
promoting “the belief that black heroes [had] to be perfect in order to be useful”, while
also suggesting that to “air dirty laundry” is “[to do] the white man’s job for him”. For
intellectuals such as Dyson, however, the effect of this defensiveness was to “paint
black life [as] stock and cramped, its colours drab and predictable”, unable to grasp
“the breadth and complexity of black identity”. Instead what was needed was a “self‐
critical instinct” that should shape “the politics of portraiture in black culture”. It was
indeed possible to “love black folk and tell the truth … at the same time”. For Dyson
then, biographic retrieval was an exercise in truth assertion “which can never
harm….” 113 While the video documentary Martin Luther King, Jr: the Man and his
Dreams, made by John Akomfrah for radical film company Black Audio tries to
uncover King’s hidden flaws, it also begins to raise more critical methodological
Michael Eric Dyson, ‘Inventing and Interpreting Malcolm X’, p 45; Dyson first began to challenge
the conventional King‐Malcolm X contrast in Malcolm X: The Man and his Times.
112 Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You; see also Dwight N Hopkins, ‘I May Not Get
There With You (Book Review)’, African American Review, Spring 2002 and Juan Williams, ‘I May Not
Get There With You’, Black Issues Book Review, 1/7/2000.
113 Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, pp ix‐xiv.
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