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THE PERFECTIONIST TRADITION  
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William P. Jones
February 8, 2024
Dissent
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_ The African American perfectionists offered “faith” instead of
“hope”—emphasizing the struggle to realize a vision of justice
rather than passive assurance that it would prevail. _

Billie Holiday, Universal History Archive/Getty Images

 

_The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African
American Political Thought_
by Melvin L. Rogers
Princeton University Press, 2023, 400 pp.

_King: A Life_
by Jonathan Eig
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, 688 pp.

In recent years, the United States has seen the entrenchment of an
insurgent and overtly racist hard right, a retreat from fleeting but
once seemingly sincere commitments to addressing the injustices of
police brutality and mass incarceration, and a growing backlash
against voting rights, affirmative action, and other gains of the
civil rights movement. How should we relate to history in a time like
ours? Journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and
Afropessimists Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, have exhorted us to
face the facts that the United States was founded by slaveholders who
defined democracy in opposition to Black people, and that hoping to
change that reality is at best naïve and at worst a distraction from
the more urgent project of learning to live and thrive in a white
supremacist nation. Meanwhile, many conservatives and progressives
remind us that, from the founding, Black and white Americans have
challenged the racial limits of democracy. For liberals, this means we
should retain hope, as Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “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.” For the right, that day has already come.

Two important new books suggest that a more effective approach lies
somewhere between these opposing views. In _The Darkened Light of
Faith_, political theorist Melvin L. Rogers finds a middle path in
what he calls the “perfectionist” tradition of African-American
politics. This tradition links nineteenth-century abolitionists David
Walker, Maria Stewart, and Frederick Douglass with twentieth-century
writers, artists, and activists including Ida B. Wells, Billie
Holiday, and James Baldwin, all of whom viewed an honest confrontation
with the history of American racism as necessary for any progress
toward racial equality. In his biography _King: A Life_, journalist
Jonathan Eig complicates the optimistic approach by reminding us that
King himself placed little faith in national traditions and, instead,
pushed for radical changes that won him the ire of liberals and
conservatives who would later claim his legacy.

Rogers, who criticized Coates’s “despair” at length in this
magazine in 2015, expresses sympathy for the pessimistic view of
American democracy. Indeed, he is far more critical of conservatives
and liberals who view American democracy as essentially egalitarian.
Referring to Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study _An
American Dilemma_, Rogers writes that this approach “treats the
history of racial domination as an aberration within American life and
thus sets about the task of recovering and educating the citizenry
about their true commitments.”

Yet even as he agrees that nothing in American history guarantees a
racially just future, Rogers insists that the history of racist
violence does not preclude that possibility. Otherwise, he writes,
“Human agency dissolves altogether, and we fail to acknowledge that
our institutions are what they are and our culture is what it is
because we have made them so.”

In contrast, Rogers highlights the ideas of the “African American
perfectionists,” who “asked their audience to see something as
profoundly wrong with who white Americans take themselves to be in
their relationship to and treatment of black people.” They offer
“faith” instead of “hope”—emphasizing the struggle to
realize a vision of justice rather than a passive assurance that it
will prevail. It is the conviction, as Baldwin put it in 1963, “that
we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they
really are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”
Key to that faith is the belief that white Americans can be convinced
to hold their Black fellow citizens in “equal regard.” This
outcome is far from guaranteed.

Abolitionists like Walker, Stewart, and Douglass argued that the
brutality of slavery was dissonant with the founding principles of the
United States. But rather than expecting white Americans to rediscover
the American creed, they sought to highlight the contradictions and
assert a new definition of American democracy that was incompatible
with racism. A striking example is Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to
the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Douglass began with disavowal.
“This Fourth of July is _yours_, not _mine_. You may rejoice, I
must mourn,” he told a mostly white audience. Yet he closed with
optimism drawn from the ideals and institutions of American democracy
and the rising power of abolitionist and democratic movements around
the globe.

Oddly, Rogers largely skips over Reconstruction, the period in
American history where that faith may have been most closely realized.
Both Stewart and Douglass outlived slavery, and it would be useful to
know how they assessed what historian Eric Foner calls the
“constitutional revolution” contained in the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Yet, as Foner acknowledges, that
moment was short-lived, and Rogers rightly focuses on the backlash
that followed. It was in the face of racist retrenchment that the
perfectionist faith was most remarkable, and most needed.

Reconstruction established a legal framework that would be critical to
challenging racial discrimination over the long term, but the more
immediate problems were “unwritten laws,” as journalist Ida B.
Wells explained, that allowed white Americans to justify racist terror
against their fellow citizens. Her point was not to remind Americans
of their true creed, but to force them to confront the brutality of
their actions and aspire to a more just future. “Wells and others
harnessed horror to remind people of their agency rather than treating
it as something over which Americans exercise no control,” Rogers
writes.

In the early twentieth century, these figures focused their efforts on
stopping lynching. And they insisted that lynching was not an
undercurrent or an aberration in American culture but, as NAACP leader
Walter White wrote in 1929, “an almost integral part of our national
folkways.” In a context where racist violence was carried out openly
and celebrated in the press, it was not enough to simply document and
expose it; ending lynching required a shift in white people’s
perceptions of themselves and their relationships to their Black
neighbors.

That distinction was illustrated in Billie Holiday’s performance of
the anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” which teacher and
songwriter Abel Meeropol penned after viewing Lawrence Beitler’s
photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion,
Indiana, on August 7, 1930. The image showed white people smirking or
staring menacingly as Shipp and Smith’s brutalized bodies hung in
the background. Like many images of lynchings, the photo was printed
on postcards and in newspapers and sold by the thousands.

While Meeropol described his poem as a “cathartic release” from
lynching “and the people who perpetuate it,” Rogers characterizes
Holiday’s performance as a “personal protest” designed “to
convey—to call into existence—a new ethical sensibility” in
which racist violence was understood to violate the moral and
political ideals of American democracy. When she performed the song at
Café Society in New York City, management suspended table service and
cut the houselights, leaving a spotlight trained to reveal an
expression of disgust on her face. “Southern trees bear a strange
fruit,” Holiday wailed, while lifting her face to confront the
audience. With a grimace, she sang, “Blood on the leaves and blood
at the root,” and then contorted her face into a look of contempt to
describe “the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth . . . and the
sudden smell of burning flesh!” Rather than distancing herself or
her audience from the act of lynching, Rogers explains, “Holiday
hopes to retell the story of bearing witness to lynching and the
reactions it ought to stimulate. It attempts to make present what one
would think appropriate—a gasp, a cringe, a look of outrage.”

Rogers’s conclusion on James Baldwin’s writing in the late 1950s
and early 1960s centers on how Baldwin’s view of the past differed
from those of Myrdal, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other postwar
liberals who saw racism as a perversion of American ideals. Baldwin
sought a confrontation with history. Responding to anthropologist
Margaret Mead’s complaint that focusing on the past unfairly blamed
contemporary Americans for a crime they did not personally commit,
Baldwin exclaimed, “But I am responsible for it because I am a man
and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it too.”

It would be equally useful to know how Baldwin and other
perfectionists made sense of the opportunities for change—and their
limits—in the later 1960s. Rogers overlooks Baldwin’s 1972
book _No Name in the Street_, which responded to the assassinations
of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and the rising backlash
against the civil rights movement. Journalist Mel Watkins noted at the
time that Baldwin’s later essays contained the same mixture of harsh
judgment and possibility for “redemption” as his early work. But
given the events of the interceding decade, Watkins argued,
Baldwin’s ideas now seemed untimely, sustained by the “fleeting
illusion that nonblack Americans could actually empathize with blacks
and seriously confront the racial problem.” If Baldwin was
“anachronistic,” Watkins wrote, that “may very well be a more
serious indictment against ourselves, a palpable indication of our own
moral degeneration.”

For Rogers, indicting the United States for not achieving Baldwin and
King’s vision does not mean that racial equality is impossible.
Rather, it remains a future to be fought for, albeit by drawing on
elements of the past.

Given the excessive focus on King in studies of Black politics, it is
refreshing that Rogers mentions the civil rights leader only
occasionally and instead turns to less studied, and often more
surprising, thinkers. Yet because King looms so large, his legacy is
most in need of revision. If Americans know nothing else about the
long tradition of Black political thought, they know at least a few
lines of his address to the 1963 March on Washington. While King’s
“dream” of racial justice, or the promise of equality contained in
the nation’s founding documents, are now part of popular memory,
less remembered is his harsh indictment that “America has defaulted
on this promissory note” and “given the Negro people a bad
check.” Like the other figures that Rogers covers in _The Darkened
Light of Faith_, King had no illusion that white Americans were going
to wake up one day and realize the contradictions between their
founding documents and the reality of racial injustice. His speech was
instead a warning not to waste the sense of urgency created by the
protests that roiled the United States in the summer of 1963: “Those
who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be
content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business
as usual.”

This is the King that journalist Jonathan Eig seeks to recover with
his majestic new biography, _King: A Life_. Drawing on extensive
newly available archival records and over 200 interviews conducted by
Eig and hours of interviews recorded by others, the book provides a
tremendously detailed portrait of the civil rights leader. Eig shows
us a more aggressive King, who was seen as a threat not only by
conservatives but also many liberals, including presidents Kennedy and
Johnson.

Eig’s source base allows him to explore the most intimate details of
King’s life. Unpublished biographies of King’s father and several
close associates provide rich details on his upbringing and
development as a minister and civil rights leader, as well as his
insecurities and fears. Audiotapes recorded by Coretta Scott King soon
after her husband’s assassination shed light on their relationship,
her influence on the movement, and the toll that leadership inflicted
on their family. Newly released FBI records detail the government’s
efforts to monitor and disrupt King’s work, destroy his marriage,
and end his life. And a recently discovered transcript of an interview
conducted by journalist Alex Haley reveals how King’s comments about
Malcom X were dramatically altered when the interview was printed
in _Playboy_.

Given this wealth of information, it is notable when Eig overlooks
details, or even gets them wrong. He reinforces the King-centric
popular understanding of the March on Washington by telling us little
about the actual demands of the demonstration and referencing only one
of the other speeches made that day. And he tells us that left-wing
journalist Murray Kempton was describing King’s “I Have a Dream”
speech when writing that “No expression one-tenth so radical has
ever been heard by so many Americans.” In fact, Kempton was
referring to Bayard Rustin reciting the official demands of the
protest and leading the crowd in a “mass pledge” to keep pushing
until they had all been won.

In discussing the backlash to King’s criticism of the Vietnam War,
Eig tells us that “Black syndicated columnist Carl Rowan” obliged
President Johnson’s request for an article denouncing the civil
rights leader. He does not mention that Johnson had appointed Rowan,
the highest-ranked African American in the State Department, to direct
the U.S. Information Agency. This is certainly relevant to our
understanding of Johnson’s role in the backlash and the
government’s power to undermine King and the movement he led.

More disturbing is Eig’s reliance on FBI records that were created
unethically and were often obviously inaccurate. The FBI records are
valuable in illustrating how vehement federal authorities were in
their efforts to discredit King and other Black leaders, and how
quickly they dismissed requests for protection from racist violence.
Eig states repeatedly that agents created reports to malign King’s
character, and that they deliberately leaked information to undermine
his public image. When historian David Garrow first discovered a cache
of FBI memos in 2019, the _Atlanta Journal-Constitution_ declined to
print his account because it could not verify their accuracy. Yet Eig
relies on those same memos to detail King’s private life, even when
they contradict the views of his spouse and other more reliable
sources.

This problem is most glaring in a recently released summary of audio
recordings from microphones hidden in hotel rooms occupied by King and
other civil rights leaders in 1964. A court order has blocked the
release of transcripts of the recordings until 2027, but Eig recites
the summary in lurid detail. In one case, he quotes a hand-written
addition to an official report that claims King “looked on, laughed
and offered advice” while another minister raped a parishioner. Even
if we believe everything else in the account, which Eig admits we
should not, it seems obvious that an audio recording could not have
revealed that King “looked on.”

In contrast to his extensive reliance on FBI agents who were known to
be dishonest, Eig dismisses Coretta Scott King’s skepticism about
the tapes as a choice “to remain loyal” to her husband. It’s
true, as Eig states, that Coretta knew of his infidelities before they
were married. But she had many reasons to question the reliability of
an FBI report other than covering for Martin.

Ultimately, Eig’s focus on King’s personal life distracts him from
the effort to rediscover the complexity and radicalism of the civil
rights leader’s message. The biography opens with a powerful
rejection of the popular memory that has “defanged” King and
replaced “his complicated politics and philosophy with catchphrases
that suit one ideology or another.” Yet while Eig paints a detailed
portrait of King’s private life, we get only fragmented and often
contradictory tidbits about what he actually believed. He closes the
introduction by stating that King “saw a moral rot at the core of
American life and worried that racism had blinded many of us to it,”
but soon afterward Eig casts King as a Myrdalian originalist who
“built his movement around the idea that racism was both un-American
and ungodly.” Eig cites philosopher Tommie Shelby to claim that King
“was not a socialist” but reports later that he believed “a
system of democratic socialism” may be necessary to fully address
the nation’s inequalities.

These inconsistencies are not necessarily inaccurate; in fact, they
support Eig’s claim that King was far more complex than often
remembered. Yet Eig draws little from the vast scholarly literature,
by Shelby and many others, that examines the sources, evolution, and
dominant themes of King’s political thought. Given the challenges we
face today, it is unfortunate that Eig devoted more attention to the
speculations of FBI agents than the words and thoughts of the civil
rights leader himself.

_WILLIAM P. JONES is Professor of History at the University of
Minnesota, a member of Dissent's editorial board and author of The
March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil
Rights._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
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