ABSTRACT
In his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, Martin Luther King referred to the founding documents and principles of the United States that promised liberty and equality for all, and noted that the country had failed to fulfill these in practice, especially because blacks had suffered centuries of slavery and segregation. His main concern was to secure basic citizenship and voting rights for blacks, and his speaking style was far more like that of a preacher and prophet. A century after slavery was abolished, blacks still faced segregation, discrimination and lack of voting right in many parts of the United States, not only the South. All the ideals and principles that King expressed in this famous speech were based on natural law, human rights, and the founding documents of the United States, no matter that these were honored more in the breach than in reality. King agreed with St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas that an unjust law was no law at all, and that it should be disobeyed in the name of natural rights and higher morality. He utterly rejected the racism and paternalism of the Southern segregation system, as embodied by George Wallace in the 1960s. Wallace’s Inaugural Address in 1963 asserted that federal efforts to support civil rights were tyrannizing the white people of the South. In his view, the white Southerners were the real victims of racism and oppression, whose natural right were being trampled on by Washington and the federal courts. He also argued that both God and the Founders had intended for the races to remain separated, while liberals, progressives and communists were attempting to overturn this system.
Neither Martin Luther King nor George Wallace were philosophical anarchists who rejected all government and law as oppressive, although they had very different ideas about law, morality and justice, particularly on the issue of civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Like all Southern governors before him, Wallace was upholding the old order of white supremacy, ‘home rule’, segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks in that region that came about after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 (Woodward 1955/2002). Even the Supreme Court had upheld the validity of Southern laws that relegated blacks to second-class citizenship in decisions like Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) and Williams v. Mississippi (1897), at least until it reversed itself in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). On the national level, both Congress and the executive branch had generally avoided any ‘interference’ in matters of race and civil rights for many decades (Woodward 1966/2002). This was the system that Wallace wished to retain against renewed federal efforts to protect black civil and voting rights in the 1960s, while King denounced segregation and denial of political, social and economic rights for blacks as immoral, unjust and oppressive. At the time, there was no question at all that the law in the South favored whites, given that blacks in states like Alabama could usually not even vote or hold office.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 (americanrhetoric.com) was delivered at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington before a live audience of over 200,000 and a worldwide television and radio audience of tens of millions. His central theme was that the nation had to keep the promises made in its founding documents and that “there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights” (King 1963). He noted how one hundred years before, Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but even today, blacks were still not free. His words “five score years ago” reflected Lincoln’s “four score and seven years ago” in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (King 1963). King then spoke about the Constitution and how it promised equal rights and opportunities for all but at the same time allowed slavery to continue. He then affirmed that the freedom struggle would be long but successful and the country would live up to its founding creed, stating “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation” (King 1963). This may or may not have been true, since the country waited a century to abolish slavery and another to grant blacks even basic civil rights, but it is still an inspiring faith—no matter how naïve. In 1963, the situation was urgent and 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.” He cautioned his audience not to become violent and bitter, or turn on all white people in hatred since “many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny” (King 1963). Many whites were attending the March on Washington and participating in the civil rights movement so they should not all be considered on the same level as the Southern police, politicians and Ku Klux Klan members who were violently opposed to voting rights and civil rights for blacks. In 1963, though, the U.S. was more economically successful than it had ever been before in its history, at least for most whites, which is why King remarked that “the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” (King 1963). King’s style was that of a prophet or a preacher rather than a political candidate, especially in his famous “I have a dream” peroration. Blacks would never be satisfied, however, until they had achieved full equality.
In contrast to King’s many references to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Wallace reminded his audience that these were written by white Southern slaveholders—Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Certainly they had not intended to grant equal citizenship and voting rights to blacks, even though they had “played a most magnificent part in erecting this great divinely inspired system of freedom” (Wallace 1963). Wallace concluded that “together, can give courageous leadership to millions of people throughout this nation who look to the South for their hope in this fight to win and preserve our freedoms and liberties. So help me God” (Wallace 1963). He even argued that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted equal citizenship to all persons, was illegal and had been imposed on the South after the Civil War. After thanking his supporters in the recent election, Wallace praised Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, and reminded his listeners that the first Confederate president had taken the oath of office in the very same spot, in “this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland” (Wallace 1963). He went on to deliver the only line for which this speech is remembered today, proclaiming that “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever” (Wallace 1963). If King’s signature line will always be “I have a dream”, then Wallace’s will be this rousing defense of segregation laws. Wallace also denounced federal judges who ordered the integration of public schools for trampling on the rights of white citizens and reiterated that “what I have said about segregation goes double this day . . . and what I have said to or about some federal judges goes TRIPLE this day” (Wallace 1963).
For conservatives, especially those in the South, centralized government still appeared to be as much of a danger as it had been in the days of Jefferson, who feared that a strong federal government would abolish slavery. Like King, Wallace made continual references to God and the natural rights of (white) citizens, and warned that the federal government was ungodly. Only pseudo-intellectuals from Harvard believed in human rights anyway, since only “individual rights” existed (Wallace 1963). Liberals and progressives were making fun of God, the Ten Commandments and the Constitution, and like Nazis in the Third Reich they were also oppressing the Southern white minority at “the whim of the international colored majority . . . so that we are footballed about according to the favor of the Afro-Asian bloc” (Wallace 1963). He referred to the persecution that whites in the Belgian Congo, Angola and Castro’s Cuba had suffered at the hands of progressives, who Wallace always compared to Communists.
Liberals on the Supreme Court had been Communist-inspired when they outlaws school segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and when they banned prayer in the public schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962). All of this became standard rhetoric on the New Right in America for decades after this speech, both in its secular and evangelical Protestant versions. Wallace’s references to God and the Bible were always made in this context of liberal attacks on white Southerners, just as he insisted that any federal efforts to support civil and voting rights for blacks were really examples of reverse racism against whites. For this reason, he had “placed this sign, "In God We Trust," upon our State Capitol on this Inauguration Day as physical evidence of determination to renew the faith of our fathers and to practice the free heritage they bequeathed to us” (Wallace 1963). God also intended the races to live separate lives, as had the Founders of America, but now “communist philosophers” were attempting to destroy the ‘free’ society based on those sacred principles (Wallace 1963). Real liberty, fraternity and equality could only be found under a legal system that separated the races rather than requiring them to be integrated. Then he warned King and other blacks who “follow the false doctrine of communistic amalgamation” that the whites were willing to defend the status quo at all costs (Wallace 1963).
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was one of the greatest delivered by any 20th Century American, and the phrase came to sum up his entire life and career. It appealed to higher moral principles of natural law and human rights over the positive laws of the South that upheld discrimination and segregation. King regarded these as unjust and demanded that they be overturned in order to guarantee the black minority equal citizenship and voting rights. Because of the nonviolent protests in the South and the March on Washington, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, which finally ended the system of dual public schools in the Southern states and abolished Jim Crow segregation is hospitals, transportation and public facilities. Only the 1965 Voting Rights Act was of equal importance, and no legislation since that time has had as much of an effect on politics, economics and society in America. On the other hand, Wallace’s idea of Constitutional law, as well as natural rights and the natural order of things, was that blacks and whites should remain separate and segregated. The federal government was a godless tyranny, oppressing white Southerners and violating their natural rights and individual liberties. He warned all his opponents that the South intended to uphold its segregation of schools and public facilities no matter what, and like King continually appealed to God in defense of these views.
REFERENCES
King, M.L. (1963). “I Have a Dream”.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm
Murphy, M. (2006). Philosophy of Law: The Fundamentals. Wiley-Blackwell.
Wallace, G. (1963). “The 1963 Inaugural Address of Governor George C. Wallace” January 14, 1963
http://www.archives.alabama.gov/govs_list/inauguralspeech.html
Woodward, C. V. (1955/2002). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press
Woodward, C. (1966/2002). Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction. Oxford University Press.
