KING'S DREAM AND THE HOLIDAY

On 20 January 1986, Scott King and President Ronald Reagan – who had only reluctantly signed the King Holiday Act of 1983 – promoted the inaugural King holiday with the slogan, “Living the Dream.”Footnote ⁷ This seemed an obvious choice, for King's dream “had become omnipresent in American consciousness,” according to Drew D. Hansen.Footnote ⁸ Though no national consensus had been reached on how to eliminate education inequality, poverty, and militarism, most Americans ostensibly believed in the principle of racial integration. Thus uniting around the dream offered the best opportunity to commemorate King on a mass scale.Footnote ⁹

Civil rights activists and historians soon began to argue, however, that the holiday relied too heavily on the inspirational symbolism of King's dream to the detriment of his more radical efforts to combat forms of social and economic inequality. Jesse Jackson forcefully reminded the nation that King was assassinated not for dreaming but for “challenging the Government.”Footnote ¹⁰ Vincent Harding asserted that King had become a “convenient hero,” as the holiday encouraged historical amnesia by failing to recall his post-1965 activism.Footnote ¹¹ Michael Dyson argued that King's memorialization portrayed him as a “Safe Negro.”Footnote ¹² These critics agreed that King's legacy had the potential to inspire radical change but that politicians diminished this capacity by sanitizing his image.

Politicians, particularly conservatives, had become adept at misinterpreting King's words to their advantage. Days before the first holiday, Reagan, who had opposed the civil rights movement in 1964, expressed a newfound admiration for King.Footnote ¹³ He quoted the “I Have a Dream” speech to criticize affirmative action: “We want a color-blind society. A society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”Footnote ¹⁴ The quote was used thus, despite great evidence showing that King supported affirmative action. Throughout their presidencies, Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, emphasized King's so-called “color-blind dream” with an ahistorical ignorance of the fact that King demanded economic justice for all African Americans, even if that meant affirmative action and financial compensation for centuries of oppression.Footnote ¹⁵

Most scholars, and some commentators, maintain that the holiday and King memorialization more broadly still fail to recall his radicalism.Footnote ¹⁶ Cornel West has denounced the “Santa Clausification” of King;Footnote ¹⁷ G. Russell Seay Jr. argued that King has been domesticated and “fossilized”;Footnote ¹⁸ and in The Root, Danielle C. Belton described the day of service as “MLK-neutering.”Footnote ¹⁹ In essence, these criticisms articulate a concern that King memorialization typically portrays his agenda as having been completed. If King's work is viewed as complete, then according to Jana Weiss, “the call for further political activism is rendered obsolete.”Footnote ²⁰ Such an outcome is anathema to those who believe that much remains to be done to finish King's fight against militarism, economic inequality, and racism. Weiss suggests that “a way needs to be found to celebrate [King as] a symbol both of unity and of protest, an icon of progress but also reform and radicalism.”Footnote ²¹ Scott King and Clinton did, however, attempt to remember King in such a way, and as this article makes clear, their efforts have received insufficient academic attention.

Several scholars have pointed to the holiday's potential for activism. Matthew Dennis highlighted the role of community service in encouraging the public to “imitate” King's activism. The King holiday, he wrote, is “a day to engage in … community service” and “political activism.” Dennis asserted that King and the holiday “function as a patron and resource for those on the American political left.”Footnote ²² Likewise, David L. Chappell noted that the holiday ensured that King's message would “be in the national spotlight once a year,” and argued that this provided “recurring leverage … to advance” his “unfinished cause.”Footnote ²³ Bernard Von Bothmer argued that Clinton “enlisted King in support of an activist government,” and Ira Berlin asserted that King Day was an occasion to “reassert the need to do more.”Footnote ²⁴ Gary Daynes thought that King's legacy could inspire activism again, but only if he was remembered as a radical.Footnote ²⁵

Few scholars have advanced their early analysis of, or explained, how the “Drum Major” sermon influenced King Day. Most have focussed on the fight for the holiday, and the victory in that struggle is often depicted as the “final curtain call” of the King holiday movement.Footnote ²⁶ However, King Day has not been a static event. It is a dynamic and evolving form of history, and as liberals have pushed back against the conservative distortions of King's legacy, they have attempted to make the holiday more relevant to Americans by using it to complete his unfinished agenda – and to continue what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall dubbed the long civil rights movement.Footnote ²⁷

CORETTA SCOTT KING

Given the centrality of Coretta Scott King to the King Day narrative, it is necessary to understand what initially brought her to lobby for the holiday. The 1968 assassination of her husband rendered Scott King a single parent to four children. In the painful years that followed, she sought to both memorialize her husband and continue the activism that they had embarked upon. On 26 June 1968, Scott King “founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center,” and developing what would become the King Center, her “fifth child,” as she described it, became a major priority until its buildings were completed in 1982.Footnote ²⁸ Scott King, who had voted for Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party's 1948 presidential candidate, also became a recognized political activist in her own right. She publicly opposed the Vietnam War, launched the Poor People's Campaign, and attended the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana in 1972. Furthermore, Scott King endorsed Democratic Party presidential candidates, campaigned against apartheid in South Africa, and fought for human rights.Footnote ²⁹ In 1974 Scott King also founded the National Committee for Full Employment that dedicated itself to securing the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978. Campaigning for the Act enhanced Scott King's “understanding of the art of lobbying”; however, she noticed that whenever she mentioned the King holiday proposal, it generated more public excitement than the Humphrey-Hawkins Act.Footnote ³⁰

In the late 1970s, Scott King turned her attention to lobbying for the holiday.Footnote ³¹ She gave that campaign a gravitas and “emotional power,”Footnote ³² and after Congress approved King Day in 1983, Scott King called for a federal commission to oversee its implementation.Footnote ³³ The King Holiday Commission's genesis lay in the ultimate weakness of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which, though passed by Congress, was not effectively enforced. Too late, she had realized that the Act would not achieve its ultimate goal of full employment, as its supporters had failed to create “an apparatus to monitor its application.”Footnote ³⁴ Resolving not to repeat the mistake, Scott King used the King Holiday Commission to pressure every state into establishing a holiday, and although she abhorred “Reagan's damaging supply-side economics,” she worked with him to promote the holiday's emphasis on King's dream.Footnote ³⁵

Not until Clinton's election in 1992 did the opportunity to reform the holiday present itself. Scott King had cultivated a cordial relationship with Bush, enhanced no doubt when she assumed a nonpartisan political stance in 1988,Footnote ³⁶ yet she found Clinton far more simpatico. Though he “disappointed” her by signing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (the Crime Act), which she asserted sent many African American men to jail, she credited him with the creation of “22.7 million jobs, which dramatically decreased joblessness among people of color.”Footnote ³⁷ Scott King's preparedness to set aside her concerns about Clinton facilitated their collaboration.

CLINTON, THE ECONOMY, AND COMMUNITY SERVICE

When Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993, a level of inequality not seen since World War II was distorting the American economy. The top 10 percent of households owned 73 percent of the national wealth, while the poorest 10 percent owned a mere 1.5 percent.Footnote ³⁸ The end of the postwar economic boom saw the fortunes of millions of Americans decline over a thirty-year period, and by 1990, 33 million Americans (13 percent of the population) lived below the poverty line. Recession had also afflicted the economy from 1990 to 1991.Footnote ³⁹

Though the civil rights movement dismantled de jure racial segregation, de facto racial segregation remained a reality. According to William Goldsmith and Edward Blakely, a “growing group of racially distinct Americans” were “socially disconnected from the greater society.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Despite all that King and the movement had done to promote racial integration, by the 1990s a high proportion of “African Americans lived in overwhelmingly segregated neighborhoods.”Footnote ⁴¹ Inner-city minority populations were marginalized, and 71 percent of poor African Americans lived in poor central neighborhoods.Footnote ⁴² The 1992 Los Angeles riots brought this economic and racial inequality to the forefront of public debate during an election year.Footnote ⁴³ Clinton blamed Republicans for this “urban decay,” and he promised to address these issues.Footnote ⁴⁴

Clinton's “ideologically ambidextrous” style, to use William C. Berman's words, became integral to his electoral appeal and governing style.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a founder of the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC), whose members (New Democrats) shared a belief in free-market economics,Footnote ⁴⁶ Clinton embraced both liberal and conservative ideals. As an example of the latter, once elected, he quickly ratified the Bush-negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement. Furthermore, he inherited a massive fiscal deficit that restricted his capacity to enact liberal economic reform, so Clinton's principal economic goal became deficit reduction.Footnote ⁴⁷ Forced to eschew a Keynesian-style economic stimulus package because Presidents Reagan and Bush had, in his words, “built in a large structural deficit that persisted in good times and bad,”Footnote ⁴⁸ Clinton resorted to tax increases (not untypical of a Democrat), but also a reduction of the US bureaucracy by 100,000 and a cut to “administrative expenses” to rein in debt.Footnote ⁴⁹

Clinton considered national community service to be another part of his economic program. In 1995, he described the creation of AmeriCorps – his major community service program – as the achievement he “was most proud of,” and he later wrote that it was “one of my most important personal priorities.”Footnote ⁵⁰ However, AmeriCorps's foundation is usually overshadowed in Clinton historiography by the budget and health care debates of 1993.Footnote ⁵¹ For this reason, it is worth considering how community service complemented Clinton's agenda.

The new President promised financial aid to college students who participated in community service. In his mind, this benefited the economy by encouraging youth to go to college and to serve the poor.Footnote ⁵² Community service also appeared to be a middle path between conservatism and liberalism; volunteerism could provide services to America's poor without dramatically expanding government expenditure on welfare. Community service, therefore, offered Clinton the tantalizing prospect of an ostensibly bipartisan agreement on at least one antipoverty measure.

Leading figures on both sides of politics agreed that encouraging volunteerism was a worthy political pursuit. Clinton's predecessor, George H. W. Bush, had signed the National and Community Service Act of 1990, which provided financial grants to already existing charity groups. Bush likened these organizations to “stars, like a thousand points of light,” and asserted that funding them directly would alleviate poverty more than the Great Society had ever done.Footnote ⁵³ Bush's 1992 defeat did little to diminish conservative enthusiasm for community service. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), for example, considered volunteerism to be integral to his plan to dismantle the welfare state. He argued that “the greatest moral imperative we face is replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society.” Gingrich blamed welfare for the nation's ills, as he perceived them. For example, he claimed that a rise in teenage pregnancy rates could be traced back to welfare payments. Replacing the welfare state would require a renewed volunteer ethos, an ethos that he claimed had once existed in the nineteenth century, the “golden age of volunteerism.” He argued that “a country with ten million local volunteer leaders is stronger than one with a thousand brilliant national leaders.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Rather than devolve responsibility for America's poor completely to private charity, Clinton signed the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 on 22 September of that year. The Act established the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), a federal body designed to consolidate government service agencies into one organization, and empowered it to issue grants to existing public and private volunteer groups.Footnote ⁵⁵ AmeriCorps, inspired by John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, became the centerpiece of the initiative and the vanguard of domestic community service. In addition to providing college students funding in exchange for civilian service, it created an alternative avenue to serve the nation for those not wanting to join the military. Clinton had been in favor of such an initiative since the Vietnam War, and in this way AmeriCorps offered an opportunity to serve the nation in a manner consistent with King's antimilitarism. In a similar spirit, Clinton sought to redefine the King holiday into a day of volunteer service.Footnote ⁵⁶

Clinton's personal history also provided a catalyst for reform of the holiday. He came of age during the civil rights movement and, despite being raised amidst family poverty in Hope, Arkansas, in the segregated Deep South, his uneducated grandfather taught him the value of racial tolerance. Clinton was a politically aware youth in a Democrat-leaning family when nearby Little Rock became the epicenter of school integration in 1957. Six years later, King's eloquence at the March on Washington transfixed and inspired the teenaged Clinton.Footnote ⁵⁷

Fond memories of these events remained with Clinton and as a politician he sought to develop a good relationship with the African American community. When governor of Arkansas, he held a reception for the Little Rock Nine,Footnote ⁵⁸ and throughout his political career, Clinton aligned himself with Democrats who had known King. Clinton described a civil rights reunion in Selma in 1995 as a return “to the emotional core of my political life.”Footnote ⁵⁹ He praised attendees as people who had nourished his “emotional core,” and he had already joined with some, namely Scott King, Lewis, and Wofford, to change the holiday.Footnote ⁶⁰

Clinton's relationship with the African American community became increasingly complicated, however, during his presidency. Toni Morrison would one day describe him, with a flourish of poetic license, as the nation's “first black president.”Footnote ⁶¹ Yet according to Daryl Carter, Clinton and fellow New Democrats regarded “an overt commitment to minorities as troublesome” to the Democratic Party's fortunes.Footnote ⁶² In 1992 Clinton denounced rapper Sister Souljah, who had wondered in an interview why black gang members did not kill whites instead of each other.Footnote ⁶³ Not only did he distance himself from black radicals, whom Souljah came to represent, also Clinton's signatures on the Crime Act and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (the Welfare Act) are thought to have worsened the lives of many working-class African Americans.Footnote ⁶⁴ By expanding the “prison–industrial complex,”Footnote ⁶⁵ and abolishing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Clinton hurt the US's most vulnerable citizens while appealing to middle-class African Americans by promising economic prosperity and celebrating significant civil rights movement anniversaries.Footnote ⁶⁶

A SEGREGATED HOLIDAY

The King holiday reforms began during Clinton's first year as President. Scott King wrote to him in March 1993 requesting support for obtaining a permanent status and extra resources for the King Commission.Footnote ⁶⁷ The commission had led a precarious existence since 1986, but with the Democrats in control of Congress, Scott King hoped that the new majority would secure the commission's future. Leading the Congressional efforts were Lewis and Wofford, two Democrats deeply involved with the civil rights movement. Lewis had spoken at the March on Washington in 1963 as the chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Wofford, a civil rights adviser to President Kennedy, had once been close enough with King to encourage him to travel to India to learn about nonviolence. Both men had experience managing federal service agencies; Lewis had been an associate director of ACTION, the federal agency that oversaw Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), and Wofford an associate director of the Peace Corps. Scott King encouraged Lewis and Wofford to make the day an “active living tribute to King's legacy of service and direct action.”Footnote ⁶⁸

While Clinton was eager to demonstrate solidarity with the “classical” civil rights movement and to signal his concern for the poor,Footnote ⁶⁹ what motivated King's former colleagues to reform the holiday? Congress had, after all, responded to public pressure and approved the holiday within a relatively short fifteen years following King's death. By contrast, it took eighty years to make Washington's birthday an official holiday, and 176 years passed before Congress lodged Columbus Day on the federal calendar.Footnote ⁷⁰ Though King Day drew from a black holiday tradition,Footnote ⁷¹ it lacked the “patina of antiquity” of comparable holidays.Footnote ⁷² Despite a promising beginning, one trend alarmed the commission. The commission and its allies were united in a belief that the holiday was de facto segregated.

In the early to mid-1990s, however, a relatively low number of Americans observed King Day. The King Holiday Act of 1983 applied to federal employees only; state and local-government employees and private-sector workers had to secure their right to take the holiday from governors, state legislatures, and private employers. Holiday advocates knew, however, that it was “customary for private and state employers” to align their calendars with that of the federal government.Footnote ⁷³ The Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) found, however, that only 22 percent of businesses granted a paid holiday. Similarly, a Fortune 500 survey found that only 18 percent granted employees the day off. Among companies that did, King Day was often an optional holiday that could “be observed or taken at another time.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Though participation across the workforce increased to 31 percent – government employees included – in 1993, the number of employees who took the day off was dramatically less than those who took off the most popular holidays, such as Thanksgiving, which 99 percent of businesses also honored. King Day came second to last with regard to commemoration by private-sector workers, only Columbus Day was observed by fewer private-sector workers.Footnote ⁷⁵ The commission conducted its own participation surveys in 1991, 1992, and 1993 and found that though 94 percent of the 1,500 respondents knew about King Day, they were uncertain as to its date. Less than 30 percent were involved in King Day activities, and 25 percent of that number did not take the day off. Thus most employees worked as usual and did not commemorate the holiday with any organized activity.Footnote ⁷⁶

One impediment to majority observation was that many Americans considered the holiday to be a “black” holiday, and this attitude led to a de facto segregated celebration. Lloyd Davis, the commission's executive director, thought that the national parade in Atlanta, which was the signature annual event, was “too much of a black parade.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1987, Davis, an African American and Republican, suggested that the commission needed more funding to transport integrated musical groups to Atlanta, as local bands were less integrated than those from elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Atlanta Journal also reported that the 200,000 spectators of the 1988 national parade were predominantly black.Footnote ⁷⁹

That King Day struggled to gain traction with many white Americans was hardly surprising, considering the nation's history of racism. Furthermore, the holiday had to appeal to two sometimes conflicting constituencies. As Keith Mayes noted, though King Day began as a black “grassroots observance,” it “crossed over onto the [white] American calendar.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Theoretically, King's legacy was benefited, as holidays “have the greatest impact” when they “touch as many people as possible.”Footnote ⁸¹ Dennis argued, however, that King Day embodied “the dilemma and possibility” articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois when he “spoke of the ‘double consciousness’of African Americans.” Exhibiting a similar “double consciousness,” the holiday had “mainstream endorsement,” though such endorsement “undermined King's status as a champion of black resistance.”Footnote ⁸² Moreover, the crossover to the “American calendar” remained incomplete at best.

Locales where whites formed a majority were often reluctant to honor King. In Bradley, Illinois, a town fifty-three miles south of Chicago, the mayor stated that King “was a great man for black people,” but since Bradley had only “five or six blacks,” he asked, “Why should we close down services for the other 11,995?”Footnote ⁸³ The perception that the holiday pertained only to African Americans abounded and similar opposition occurred at the state level, most infamously in Arizona. At the behest of Republican governor Evan Mecham, Arizona became “the first state to revoke its King holiday” in 1987.Footnote ⁸⁴ Activists mobilized to organize protests and an economic boycott, but only after a protracted fight did Arizonans, a mere 3 percent of whom were black, vote to reinstate the holiday in a 1992 referendum.Footnote ⁸⁵

In the South, the memorialization of Confederate General Robert E. Lee also served to highlight the difficulty of institutionalizing an integrated holiday. Falling on 19 January, the general's birthday closely followed King's, and Alabama and Arkansas honored both on the same day. Virginia established a King-Lee-Jackson Day that also commemorated Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.Footnote ⁸⁶ Lee's legacy among southern whites had been as highly esteemed as King's was among blacks,Footnote ⁸⁷ and advocates from both sides of the color line regarded the coincidence of commemorations with trepidation. In Alabama, Frank Parson of the Sons of Confederate Veterans thought that King Day would overshadow Lee's birthday, while Abraham Woods, a Birmingham-based civil rights activist, stated that African Americans “did not want to share the day” and certainly not “with a man who did so much to keep the Confederacy alive.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The Sons of Confederate Veterans marked Lee's birthday with a dinner, but planned no integrated activities. Parson and Woods agreed that it would be best “for each group to go ahead and honor each man in its own way, independent of the other.”Footnote ⁸⁹ More extreme examples of racial tension were evident. In 1986, the White Patriots Party held a march in Raleigh, North Carolina to honor Lee and protest the King holiday. Their leader, Glenn Miller, asserted that his followers would “never accept a birthday honoring a black communist,” especially one imposed by the “Jew-ruled federal government.”Footnote ⁹⁰

News media organizations also noticed the racial imbalance of holiday observations. According to the New York Times, King Day struggled for “broad acceptance” and was “in danger of being viewed as a black holiday rather than a national one.”Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, employers in the South that had “the highest percentage of blacks in its population” were reported as the most likely to grant the day off.Footnote ⁹² The Times noted that the commission sought to change the holiday's emphasis from “civil rights to broader themes of nonviolence and public service” to prevent it from being “marginalized.”Footnote ⁹³ Scott King likewise warned that the surest way to eliminate the holiday or reduce its “national impact” was “to limit its importance” to just the “African American and minority communities.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Frustrated at having spent eight years observing the holiday being depicted “as an African American event,” Scott King became “determined to make the King Holiday a first class American holiday.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Given that much of US society remained de facto segregated, the holiday reflected this separation, and, unsurprisingly, Scott King stated, “It goes without saying that the struggle which Dr. King led is not over.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Scott King hoped that community service would foster integrated holiday activities. In a letter to Clinton, she argued that since Arizona had redeclared a King holiday, it was time to “bring integrity” and “substance … to the occasion.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Scott King warned the President that “many American holidays … experienced discontinuous histories because they did not embody the values” that spoke “directly to America's life as a nation.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Arizona notwithstanding, her fear that the federal holiday might be discontinued was not founded on an immediate threat, as the 1989 Commission Extension Act had reaffirmed Congressional support for King Day.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, Scott King's concern that many Americans viewed the holiday as insubstantial proved to be more justified. In 1993, a group of “scholars, civil rights leaders, and public officials,” formed the American Committee to Invigorate the King Holiday to express their dissatisfaction.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Scott King supported them and argued that King “would want the holiday to be a day of action, not apathy.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

CONSERVATIVE OPPOSITION

Scott King needed to protect King Day from its right-wing opponents. Although the holiday's place on the American calendar seemed secure, the commission had become a proxy for conservatives wanting to undermine the occasion. The Post Office and Civil Service Committee reviewed the commission on 16 March 1993, and its subsequent report revealed that a minority of Republicans argued that the King Holiday and Service Act epitomized why Congress could not exercise budget restraint. These dissenters believed the commission's work to be complete, as all fifty states observed the holiday; they concluded that the time had arrived to terminate its activities.Footnote ¹⁰²

The attack on the commission served as a prelude to the Republican Party's 1994 manifesto “Contract with America” that demanded a balanced federal budget be achieved by reduced government spending, among other measures.Footnote ¹⁰³ Newt Gingrich, the minority whip, had once supported the commission but now wanted to shut it down. Just before he reached the apex of his power as Speaker of the House, Gingrich wrote to Scott King and explained that he had promised to “return fiscal responsibility to the federal government by retiring commissions … that have served their original purpose.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Acknowledging no contradiction between his advocacy for volunteerism and his desire to abolish an organization that was taking up the cause of volunteerism, Gingrich advised that he could not “support a commission that has already addressed its objective” of establishing the holiday across the nation and which was still receiving $300,000 per year from the government.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Likewise, Representative John Linder, another Republican from Scott King's home state of Georgia, argued that due to “fiscal constraints, I believe that Federal funds should no longer be used to fund the Commission.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The commission also received condemnation from a usually favorable voice when the Atlanta Journal Constitution argued it ought to be terminated.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ An editorial portrayed the organization as a fiscal waste and denounced the legislation that sought to prolong its lifespan. Like the aforementioned Republicans, the newspaper argued that the commission was an obsolete bureaucracy, and since it had “done its job,” responsibility for King's legacy should be returned to the King Center.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Scott King defended the commission in an article published by the Journal Constitution. She argued that the commission's primary role was to institutionalize the holiday as a “day of community service and interracial cooperation.” She pointed to the LA riots to prove the holiday's, and therefore the commission's, necessary role in promoting better race relations. As “one of the most cost-effective investments” made “toward a more nonviolent America,” the commission also encouraged private-sector observance of the King holiday.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The organization had other powerful allies who used their influence to support the reform campaign. The New York Times argued in January 1993 that a “distorting revisionism” threatened to depict King as a “moderate alternative” and to deny “his vitality.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The paper described his nonviolence as “militant” and urged that King be remembered as “a nonviolent revolutionary.”Footnote ¹¹¹ While not going so far as seeking to recall King as a revolutionary, the commission attempted to expand the scope of what the holiday embodied.

A DAY OF ACTION

As seen, there were good reasons to change the holiday, yet why did the commission select the drum major theme to reinvigorate King Day? It had initially considered using the “Drum Major Instinct” sermon to promote the inaugural holiday but instead decided to use “Living the Dream” as the theme.Footnote ¹¹² The sermon's denunciation of private wealth accumulation, consumerism, and militarism was no doubt too radical for the Reagan era. A draft of the commission's goals created during the Bush administration for 1991–94 likewise reveals no plan to use the drum major image or create a day of service.Footnote ¹¹³ Wofford himself had also made no discernible mention of holiday reform during his 1991 Senate election campaign; rather, he had focussed on health care and won a surprising victory.Footnote ¹¹⁴

In contrast, it was entirely appropriate for Clinton to look to the “Drum Major” sermon, as King's emphasis on economic inequality, racial reconciliation, and peace dovetailed with the President's political persona and publicly stated priorities. A rethinking of the planning for the holiday after Clinton's election is visible in the commission's “Strategic Plan 1994–1999.” It noted that American citizens were concerned about “domestic problems” such as violence, drug abuse, race and class divisions, and the plight of the homeless.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Furthermore, the plan asserted that the end of the Cold War had provided a new opportunity to devote resources to such neglected problems and suggested that volunteerism could help “confront social needs and challenges.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Wofford had added an impetus to these ideas in early 1993 by encouraging the commission to engage Americans in community service. On 16 March 1993, the commission responded by unanimously supporting a resolution that called on Americans “to address the prevailing social problems within their own community” through voluntary service.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The commission met again on 3 May, and Marty Rogers, Wofford's representative, noted the bipartisan support for Clinton's “national service initiative,” which had an “accelerated pace” in Congress.Footnote ¹¹⁸ By this time, Scott King had met with Clinton and obtained his support, and a Democrat policy document made it clear that the commission had been included in budget projections.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Soon after Clinton signed the National and Community Service Trust Act, Lewis and Wofford sought to persuade Congress to enable the commission to join the momentum gathering around the ideal of community service. With the commission scheduled to expire on 20 April 1994, Lewis and Wofford introduced the King Holiday and Service Act, hoping to make the commission a permanent government body.Footnote ¹²⁰ The House passed the Act on 15 March 1994 by unanimous consent under suspension of the rules and brought the new mandate nearer to fruition.Footnote ¹²¹

Democrats asserted that their vision would result in a more authentic King image. Wofford wanted “to remember Martin the way he would have liked,” and argued that King Day ought to be “a day of action, not apathy.”Footnote ¹²² He highlighted Pennsylvania's effort to engage citizens in “public service and anti-violence efforts,” and the Washington Post editorialized that the proposal reflected “the true legacy” of King's life.Footnote ¹²³ Clinton agreed, writing to Wofford that community service was “an appropriate way to honor” King.Footnote ¹²⁴

The Senate had yet to decide, and during its hearings reformers highlighted the aspects of King's legacy that were often defined by academics as radical. When the Senate Judiciary Committee sat on 13 April 1994, it became a forum for invoking King the drum major. This King was one who lived in Chicago in 1966 to familiarize himself with northern segregation, organized the Poor People's Campaign, and fought for Memphis sanitation workers.Footnote ¹²⁵ Wofford recalled King's fight against racism and classism and warned that youth were being “denied hope and opportunity,” admonishing that King would have thought it a “scandal to let another generation of young Americans fall into a vicious cycle of poverty, drugs, crime, prison and death.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Wofford also invoked his own friendship with King as proof of the authenticity of the intended reforms: “nothing would have frustrated the Martin Luther King that I knew more than people supposedly honoring him by sitting at home watching TV or sleeping late.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Instead, Wofford quoted the “Drum Major” sermon and argued that King would have preferred a “day ‘on’ not a day off” to “tutor children, rebuild schools, feed the hungry,” and “build housing for the homeless.”Footnote ¹²⁸ With those words, Wofford implicitly acknowledged King's unfinished agenda, and this marked a rhetorical shift, as politicians, particularly Republicans, had been more likely to make grandiose and comforting claims that King's dream had completed the American Revolution or ended the Civil War.Footnote ¹²⁹ Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL), the first ever female African American Senator, likewise asserted that King would have been appalled at the state of the nation, especially the poverty of youth and their “inadequate education.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Not all the arguments made by reformers were liberal or radical, however. In an echo of the 1965 Moynihan Report, William S. Cohen (R-MA) asserted that volunteering would set an example to “a generation of young people who have grown up without significant moral purpose or parental guidance.”Footnote ¹³¹ Wofford likewise claimed that the holiday could change “a culture of violence and permissiveness.”Footnote ¹³² He asserted that community service provided a “commonsense response” to youth violence and that it gave “young people a different kind of ‘gang,’ one that … can instill the kind of discipline, work skills, personal responsibility and respect for law that are essential to becoming productive citizens.”Footnote ¹³³

As Francesca Polletta has argued, “piggybacking on the Clinton administration's volunteerism initiative made strategic sense.” However, doing so “meant playing to a belief that the black community's preeminent problem was teen violence.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The transcripts of commission meetings illustrate this emphasis on youth violence. One commissioner, FBI director William F. Sessions, vigorously promoted the Youth against Violence program as the linchpin of efforts to reform the holiday. The program developed nonviolence workshops in local communities, which Sessions thought gave structure to the service proposal; the commission enthusiastically supported this strategy of linking the holiday reform to the program.Footnote ¹³⁵

Scott King realized that her opponents portrayed the holiday as an expensive waste of time for anyone outside the African American community.Footnote ¹³⁶ Redefining King Day could dispel that perception, she hoped, and encourage Americans to serve “all year.”Footnote ¹³⁷ She argued that King Day was not “for recreation, shopping and relaxation,” and that it demanded America “examine its own shortcomings.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Scott King hoped that a reinvigorated holiday would enable Americans to fight to end “hunger, homelessness, illiteracy,” and environmental destruction, among other problems.Footnote ¹³⁹ Her ambitions, however, encountered trenchant opposition from an old foe: Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC).

Helms had long been a King holiday critic. In 1983, he opposed its creation by accusing King of having been under the influence of communists. He distributed a dossier of FBI documents about King to fellow Senators and called for the premature release of FBI files thought to contain information pertaining to King's private life. For these actions, he gained much publicity and the odium of fellow Senators.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Over a decade later, Helms renewed his assault by attacking the commission. He portrayed it as a beggar demanding Congress to “Gimme, gimme, gimme” money and condemned the commission's “outstretched hands demanding millions” from “Uncle Sugar.” Like several House Republicans, he claimed that the commission exacerbated the nation's debt, and he ridiculed the national service idea as “only a pretense to keep this badly managed program alive, because this Senate simply will not stop spending on any program once it starts.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ This, despite an estimate that the commission's funding represented a minuscule 0.0000002 percent of the federal budget.Footnote ¹⁴² Helms attempted to amend the legislation with two clauses: first, a ban on funding; and second, a limit on the time federal employees could work for the commission.Footnote ¹⁴³

Despite Helms's furious objections, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Act by ninety-four votes to four on 25 May 1994. The commission received a five-year extension and federal funding of $300,000 per annum, with scheduled rises by $50,000 per annum, culminating at $500,000. The CNCS could also award grants of up to 30 percent of the total cost of a service activity. To foster links between the two organizations, the CNCS's chief executive officer, Eli Segal, a Democrat and friend of Clinton, automatically became a member of the King Commission.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Though Helms's funding amendment failed, the Senate passed the staff amendment prohibiting federal employees from working for the commission for more than one year.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

IMPACT OF REFORM

The commission's original mandate had been to organize celebrations that “reflect on the principles of racial equality and nonviolent social change.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Americans were now expected to do more than reflect – they were expected to participate in activities that fostered “understanding among racial and ethnic groups, nonviolent conflict resolution, equal economic and educational opportunities, and social justice.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ On 6 October, the commission met and debated whether the 1995 holiday, only three months away, could promote community service on such an extensive scale. Richard Kimberly, chair of the commission's National Service Committee, made a realistic assessment about what could be organized in the time available, arguing that the commission ought to do something for the upcoming holiday but “not overextend” itself.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Kimberly planned to work with the CNCS and the United Way, a volunteer organization, to engage in modest outreach to communities.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ He viewed the upcoming holiday as the basis for future King holidays and suggested that a more concerted effort wait until 1996.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Daniel Goodwin, representing commission member Senator Ted Kennedy, urged a more immediate concerted effort. He argued it was “not enough to just simply say ‘Let's help someone,’” and he cautioned against a mere “band-aid” effort.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Following Kimberly's advice more than Goodwin's, the commission initiated a limited rollout of the day of service, wisely so in retrospect, as a setback soon became apparent. Although the CNCS could deploy 20,000 AmeriCorps volunteers, it would not receive grant money until 1996.Footnote ¹⁵²

The commission also confronted a second surprising setback. As it implemented the new agenda, Scott King suddenly resigned from the King Center. At sixty-seven years of age, she wanted to retreat from public life and had decided that Dexter, her second son, should succeed her. The leadership transition, as had happened in the past, did not run smoothly. In 1989, Dexter had led the center for four months before resigning, thinking that the center's board lacked confidence in him. However, he soon worked his way back to the business of managing his father's legacy, becoming executor of King's estate in 1991. The estate owned King's intellectual property, and Dexter planned to market and sell access to his father's creative output. In 1992, he joined the commission, and in January 1995, became the King Center's president once more. After the 1995 holiday, Dexter – enjoying full public support from his mother – insisted that the commission cease using King's name, image, and likeness until it reached a new copyright agreement with the estate. When Scott King stated her intention on 16 March 1995 to also resign from the commission, the organization's future became uncertain.Footnote ¹⁵³

Regardless of these setbacks, the commission successfully reframed the holiday, and the 1995 theme symbolized the new ethos: “On the King Holiday, Help Somebody! Every American Can Make a Difference.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Public-service announcements were produced for television and radio, and one featured Yoko Ono promoting the holiday with John Lennon's “Imagine” playing in the background. Others featured singer Tony Bennett and boxer George Foreman. The commission encouraged “schools, religious organizations, businesses, government and others” to promote King Day,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ and ABC TV's Good Morning America program highlighted service projects around the nation. The Los Angeles Times and Time magazine granted free advertising space to the commission,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ and an increase in references to the drum major and service could also be discerned in newspaper reports. The Atlanta Constitution referred to the drum major when providing advice on how to remember King, and Vice President Al Gore invoked the new image in Philadelphia.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The following year, the Philadelphia Inquirer enthusiastically claimed that King would have led the “volunteer effort to pick up where government has left off,” asserting that “there's no better way to commemorate the man and his mission than by voluntarily helping a useful cause.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Framing the holiday with the “Drum Major Instinct” sermon provided a response to liberal critics who had argued that previous celebrations promoted an illusion that the US had answered all of King's challenges. Rather, the prioritization of service recognized that his agenda remained unfinished. As Dennis has noted, Americans have since used the holiday to organize activities with “liberal political agendas,” such as gun buy-backs and food banks.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The charity Hands On Atlanta, for example, organized hundreds of volunteers to work at the Atlanta Community Food Bank for the homeless.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Other postreform activities included the hosting of a soup kitchen in Baltimore, voter registration drives, and the cleaning of a homeless shelter in Los Angeles. AmeriCorps members also renovated an exhibit on school integration in Topeka, Kansas.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In 1997, an Inquirer editorial praised the high number of volunteers as proof that “the King Day of Service is catching on.” Children of all religious denominations “passed up a chance to sleep in or hang out, and instead scrubbed and mopped and honored” King.Footnote ¹⁶² Volunteers also painted an old church that was “being transformed into a center for recovering addicts.”Footnote ¹⁶³ This activity is what Coretta Scott King had hoped to witness, and she declared King Day to be “a remarkable day of humanitarian service across the nation.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The reformers, however, encountered another major setback. Soon after Congress passed the King Holiday and Service Act, the political landscape changed, as the Republican Party won historic majorities in Congress in the November 1994 mid-term elections.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The victory of Republican Rick Santorum over Wofford symbolized this conservative turn, and Clinton felt compelled to use the subsequent King holiday to warn Republicans not to attack his national service program.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Those who wanted to terminate the commission belonged to the party that now controlled Congress, and as Republicans implemented their “Contract with America,” there seemed little chance they would help the commission by overturning the Helms staff amendment. From March to May 1995, the commission debated its future until deciding to close after the 1996 holiday, unwilling to continue in a hostile political landscape without Scott King's complete endorsement.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The King Center, in conjunction with the CNCS, became responsible for organizing the holiday in the future.

Clinton continued to promote service as a means to redress poverty and as a bridge to overcome the liberal and conservative ideological divide. He conducted a Summit on Service in Philadelphia from 27 to 28 April 1997 and told attendees that although “the era of big government may be over … the era of big challenges for our country is not.” Clinton encouraged youth to serve since they “have the time, the energy and the idealism.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ These sentiments were reflected in the 1998 holiday theme, “Remember! Celebrate! Act! A Day On, Not a Day Off.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The Atlanta Journal Constitution framed these sentiments another way: “King Holiday's Not for Slackers.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In that spirit, Al Gore visited Hands On Atlanta and Clinton joined four hundred volunteers in painting a District of Columbia high school. The President, who by this time had initiated One America – a national dialogue to promote racial integration – claimed that service could advance the cause of integration: “We will never be able to bridge the racial divide … unless we decide we're not only going to work together and learn together but we're going to serve together.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

Despite the commission's difficulties, the reforms gave Americans the opportunity to think about King in a new light and made a significant impact on the type of activities that they participated in during the holiday. By one important measure, the number of Americans registered for service activities leapt from thirty-five thousand to one million in 1996, which was the last holiday overseen by the commission. A combination of factors contributed to the increase, including the new emphasis on service, the formation of AmeriCorps, and the connection with pre-existing volunteer groups – the CNCS had asked affiliates in every state to support the day.Footnote ¹⁷² However, not everything that the commission hoped for came to fruition. Most American employees still worked on King Day; only 23 percent, 25 percent, and 26 percent of the companies surveyed granted a paid holiday in 1996, 1997, and 1998 respectively. Though these figures represent an increase from 14 percent in 1986, the rate of observance still fell well short of a majority of the workforce.Footnote ¹⁷³