Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

This chapter reconstructs an anti-imperial popular sovereignty. Via Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay “Beyond Vietnam,” I theorize how peoples are lured to partake in imperial projects that benefit global oligarchies. In response, King proposes a geopolitics of popular sovereignty that calls peoples to position themselves historically vis-à-vis other peoples who are the targets of aggression. This requires the people to differentiate their own popular will from oligarchic projects of outward domination and to withdraw demands for well-being that depend on the exploitation of others and the crushing of revolutionary movements. This tradition of popular sovereignty urges worldliness and historical awareness among western peoples and extends anti-oligarchic discourses of peoplehood to criticize unholy western alliances with elites in the developing world. I juxtapose this account with Frantz Fanon’s writings on postcolonial democracy, national consciousness, and transnationalism, which criticize postcolonial oligarchies that remain wedded to empire and demand a parallel recognition. This reading yields a renewed language of popular sovereignty that identifies potential radical affinities between differently located collectives struggling against global capitalist accumulation violently enabled by dominant states.

The modern civil rights movement in America was directed and sustained by ministers and churches fervently proclaiming Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. Its leaders were mostly black ministers, who preached religious sermons inside and outside churches, insisting on promised rights. Its organizations were primarily black churches, along with an association of ministers; and the demonstrators were mostly their congregations. Though the movement’s base of support grew to include many who acted on other impulses, and its approach adopted tactics from Gandhi and others, the civil rights movement remained primarily a product of Judeo-Christian faith and its religious speech. Its religious speech was evident in the leadership by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was "first and foremost ’a clergyman, a Baptist preacher,’ a Christian," and he led by the religious speech of sermons, addresses, books, interviews, and demonstrations. That can be seen in each of King’s major campaigns in the modern civil rights movement. Other leaders also advocated Judeo-Christian principles and nonviolence, through speeches and pamphlets, marches, and church rallies. The triumph of the modern civil rights movement came mostly from the religious speech of the larger religious wing of ministers and congregations, not of the much smaller secular wing.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is the armature supporting James Baldwin’s 1972 book, No Name in the Street. Just a few pages into the book, Baldwin observes: “Since Martin’s death, something has altered in me, something has gone away.” A spate of assassinations, and particularly King’s, prompts a profound crisis in Baldwin, forcing him to reexamine the ultimate power of love that had governed his life and work. Indeed, a decade earlier in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin had identified love as the key existential and political instrument to guide America out of its “racial nightmare,” in the same way that King had drawn on the Christian notion of agape love to imagine and enact nonviolent direct action to transform Jim Crow America. For Baldwin, King’s murder begins to actualize the apocalypse against which he had forewarned in the early 1960s, and moreover forces him to reckon with his own worldview of human life: “Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make.” At the end of the 1960s, gone is the tempered optimism of Fire, the hope of achieving America, and instead we find in No Name a markedly new form of disenchantment that even love couldn’t temper. This essay traces how Baldwin’s perspective on love, loss, and life is altered by a decade rife with transformation and devastation, illuminating not only a pivotal period of Baldwin’s life and writing, but also of American life and letters.

Chaney investigates the "changing same" of visual self-presentation in African American autobiography, history, biography, and fiction, paying attention to two forms: frontispieces and illustrations of the nineteenth-century ex-fugitive and comics from twenty-first-century African American artists and writers. The bridge between these two zones of history is not to be erected or traversed in the name of a naïve comparison, nor is it to be drawn from the coincidence of similarity arising from the fact that all the texts involved are partly visual. Rather, the gulf separating Frederick Douglass and Matt Johnson, for example, and their time periods is itself an assumption that the graphic works discussed in this chapter all seek to dismantle. Insofar as the traumatic Black subject is nearly always also a historical one in contemporary entertainments, African American graphic novels reclaim the past in the name of the present: through a style, voice, or look that is unavoidably "presentist" in its approach — since even a comic designed to resemble antebellum illustrations always does so in a manner that contrarily flaunts what is more contemporary than historical about the text.

The discourse against Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and racism in the 20th century also had important legal successes, such as the work of Thurgood Marshall in the famous Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954. After the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights Movement in many ways resisted segregation, e.g. as led by Martin Luther King. Radical writers and speakers criticized black integration in dominant white society, as was the case in the discourses of Malcolm X and Stokeley Carmichael.

In After the End, John Berger notes that “since the Second World War, a variety of ‘unspeakables’ have seldom been silent, although their utterances have often been disguised or symptomatic.” Berger refers to the traumatizing catastrophes of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, while Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden adds “the cold war…, the draft, and Vietnam” to the list of crises that signaled end times. This chapter discusses destruction and regeneration as envisioned in literary and popular writing across the political spectrum in the post-World War II decades: during the era of Cold War consensus, Nobel Laureate William Faulkner enjoyed his literary brethren to “forget” the bomb, and leading white male authors indeed wrote narratives of “personal apocalypse” that bracketed world concerns. African American canonical writers of the period were rarely so sanguine; their anti-apocalyptic writings directly targeted the nuclear threat as intensifying racial oppression at home and/or as urgently pointing white America toward national and international brotherhood.By the late 1960s, as fears of the bomb subsided, establishment writers wrote in the apocalyptic shadow of Charles Manson and the generation of frustrated, radicalized youth thought to follow in his wake.

This essay was first published in the online magazine Quillette, in which I addressed the growing problem of identity politics, intersectionality theory, and the tribal divisiveness that has polarized politics today, particularly down racial lines, which is a perverse inversion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, or their gender, or religion, or whom they are sexually attracted to, or any of the other intersectional categories, such as ethnicity, language, dialect, education, generation, occupation, political party, disability, marital status, veteran status, and more.