Accompanied by the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” President Ronald Reagan ratified the bill to establish a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. on 2 November 1983. For many commentators, this victory seemed to be the final act in what had become a proxy war for the “centuries-old fight for equal rights.”Footnote 1 Civil rights veteran Jesse Jackson declared that Reagan's actions had “institutionalized” the black freedom struggle and its place within American history. NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks echoed this sentiment, describing the bill as recognition of “the historic accomplishments of all black Americans.”Footnote 2 In Ebony, the nation's most popular black periodical, the holiday movement was seen as further evidence that black America constituted “a viable, powerful segment of the nation – a force that will have to be recognized by the nation's political leaders and power brokers.” In doing so, black leaders and publications reiterated the centrality of race to discussions of King's legacy, and the continuing significance of race for African Americans of all backgrounds.Footnote 3
Yet for Reagan, the holiday appeared to symbolize something quite different. Upon signing the bill, the President pointed to King's 1963 address at the March on Washington as a high point in the “single halcyon decade” where America had faced her crisis of racial discrimination.Footnote 4 While “traces of bigotry” remained, Reagan contended that these were relics of a bygone era, and that America had indeed overcome. In support of this claim, the President could have pointed to black cultural institutions such as Ebony, which documented the apparent “blackening and coloring of American culture” in the years following King's death.Footnote 5 Furthermore, by declaring that King had “awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind,” Reagan appropriated King's memory to deflect black power-inflected critiques of white supremacy.Footnote 6 Instead, he endorsed a “color-blind” approach to social equality that stressed hard work and individual merit, ignored racialized hierarchies of power and privilege, and advocated a dismantling of the civil rights laws and social programmes which King's activism had helped to create.Footnote 7
This article focusses on coverage of the King holiday in Ebony during the lead-up to its first formal celebration in January 1986. By the mid-1980s, Ebony had consolidated its position as the nation's most popular black publication, and its senior editor Lerone Bennett Jr. had emerged as one of the nation's most influential black public historians.Footnote 8 Bennett utilized his position at Ebony to situate King within an ethnocentric and socialist “living history,” providing an important counternarrative to his appropriation by Reagan and other conservatives.Footnote 9 However, the editor's attempts to promote a critical engagement with King's legacy were complicated by accompanying editorial and advertising interventions which celebrated the civil rights leader in nostalgic and transcendent terms. Such content became an important part of Ebony’s efforts to mediate growing fractures within black communities that spread across ideological, economic and generational lines, but also reinforced its inadvertent role as a “frame for colorblindness.”Footnote 10
Despite Ebony’s widespread influence, and the significance of Bennett's own contributions, the magazine's role in framing the King holiday for a popular audience has been largely neglected. By providing the first in-depth discussion of Ebony’s engagement with the King holiday, I stress its importance as a key staging ground for what Houston Baker has described as the competing discourses of nostalgia and critical memory in black cultural production and the black public sphere.Footnote 11 Even as contributors such as Bennett stressed King's impact as a proudly black and socially radical activist, the magazine's broader content and message helped to depoliticize King and homogenize black responses to his commemoration. A closer examination of Ebony’s coverage can thus offer a telling insight into the complexities of black cultural production and “black memory work” during the 1970s and 1980s, and the contested relationship between civil rights memory, corporate mediation and conservative rhetoric.Footnote 12
EBONY, KING AND BLACK HISTORY
From its inception in November 1945, Ebony sought to celebrate the “happier side of negro life” by promoting lifestyle and material accomplishments as a strategy for racial uplift.Footnote 13 At the same time, the magazine provided a window into black life and culture for white America; one which looked to detach “racialized icons – that is, the recognizable black face and body – from the familiar markers of degradation, spectacle, and victimization” by upholding familiar codes of journalistic objectivity.Footnote 14 The upbeat approach endorsed by its publisher, John H. Johnson, marked a contrast to the activist tradition of black periodicals such as The Crisis, and Ebony was criticized for promulgating the “world of make-believe” for the black bourgeoisie.Footnote 15 However, it was wildly successful, with Ebony becoming the first black periodical monitored by the audit bureau of circulation, and the first to attract substantial interest from white corporate advertisers.Footnote 16 In the process, Ebony helped to shape national discourses on race and black respectability, and to extend the black press's influence over the construction and mediation of an independent black public sphere.Footnote 17
As movement activism coalesced during the 1950s, Ebony’s deference to the “happier side of negro life” came under increasing pressure, and events such as the murder of Emmett Till helped to push Johnson Publishing toward a more substantive engagement with civil rights activism.Footnote 18 A prominent feature of this shift was increased coverage of activists such as King, with Ebony supporting the SCLC minister “financially as well as ideologically” following his rise to national prominence.Footnote 19 The magazine's coverage of King was frequently directed by Bennett, who had been a classmate of the civil rights leader at Morehouse College.Footnote 20 Bennett contributed major features such as “The King Plan for Freedom,” and helped to persuade King to pen a regular advice column for Ebony during the late 1950s which aimed to “help the Negro … find greater meaning and happiness in living.”Footnote 21
King also became an important part of Ebony’s expanding black history coverage, which helped to establish the publication as one of the most important “stimulants to and repositories of the modern black history revival,” which paralleled the development of the modern civil rights movement.Footnote 22 As the magazine's resident historian, Bennett penned a pioneering black history series during the early 1960s which formed the basis of his best-selling black history text Before the Mayflower.Footnote 23 He situated the emergence of King within a rich black activist tradition, praising the minister as an example of the increasing “militancy and effectiveness” of black protest, and applauding his ability to expand upon the efforts of figures such as W. E. B Du Bois to move the struggle for racial justice “from the courtroom to the streets.”Footnote 24 This sentiment would be expanded further through the publication of Bennett's What Manner of Man in 1964, which offered one of the first substantive biographies of King, and reaffirmed his position as the “spiritual descendant of Frederick Douglass.”Footnote 25
Yet even before the publication of What Manner of Man, Bennett had begun to document growing fractures within the movement, as support for black nationalism reflected “a vast and potentially explosive emotional upheaval in the ghettos of America.”Footnote 26 Writing for Freedomways in 1965, John Henrik Clarke situated Bennett on the front lines of a new generation of militant black intellectuals who were both astute interpreters of and active participants in the movement.Footnote 27 Alongside figures such as Hoyt Fuller and Phyl Garland, Bennett cultivated a cultural, intellectual and political left wing within Johnson Publishing that aimed to expand discussion of “civil rights, nationalism, the politics of African American history, anti-colonialism, Black Power and Black Arts.”Footnote 28 More broadly, Ebony documented King's changing role within the movement through its coverage of the “Black Power generation,” who increasingly looked to figures such as Stokely Carmichael for inspiration.Footnote 29 Although the magazine remained largely supportive of King, the minister would come under heavy fire from militant black periodicals such as the Liberator.Footnote 30
At the same time, Ebony offered glimpses into shifts within King's own philosophy. In October 1966, some six months before his first public antiwar speech in New York, King linked police oppression at home to American imperialism in Southeast Asia in an article for Ebony.Footnote 31 King declared that the United States had “evidently decided that it is willing to slaughter millions … to fight a war on Asian soil,” and suggested that the liberation of colonized peoples across the world was dependent on the ability of black Americans “to reform the structures of racist imperialism from within.”Footnote 32 One month prior to his assassination in April 1968, Ebony reported that King had joined black nationalist leader Ron Karenga and “scores of lesser-known militants” in supporting a potential boycott of the summer Olympics.Footnote 33 Such coverage reflected King's embrace of democratic socialism, and his emergence as what Cornel West describes as a “revolutionary witness” – a radical warrior against capitalism at home and imperialism abroad.Footnote 34
A HERO TO BE REMEMBERED
From the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, King's position within the pantheons of American heroes appears beyond reproach. Yet this status was far from assured at the time of his death.Footnote 35 King's shift to the left during the second half of the 1960s, and in particular his opposition to the war in Vietnam, led to him being attacked by prominent politicians and mainstream media outlets with “ferocious abandon.”Footnote 36 In the months prior to his assassination, opinion polls indicated that over half of blacks and nearly three-quarters of whites disapproved of his position on the conflict.Footnote 37 However, King's demise led to a strongly positive shift in public opinion – a change fostered by sympathy, but also by fears of a possible black backlash.Footnote 38 Media eulogizing of King helped to smooth over previous criticism of his activism, frame the riots which followed his death in a more negative light, and ensure that a man who had apparently “made common cause with radicals and militants” could once again take up the “mantle of moderation.”Footnote 39
Public mourning for King quickly expanded to discussion of how best to commemorate his death, with Gary Daynes arguing that two overlapping but competing approaches emerged. Many activists, including members of the SCLC, favored a “tributary style” which offered a solid mandate to continue King's work through continued mass protest. On the other hand, Coretta Scott King and the King family adopted a less activist-oriented “memorial style,” which was focussed on establishing monuments or events to remember him by.Footnote 40 These differing approaches can be mapped onto Houston Baker's discussion of black modernity, which he articulates through the “twin rhetorics of nostalgia and critical memory.”Footnote 41 A tributary response to King's death offered a critical engagement with his activism that sought to save his memory “from arrest in a golden allegory of the past.” A memorial style served to celebrate King's exceptionalism and to distance him from the black proletariat; to make him, as Baker argues, “the King of the public sphere.”Footnote 42
These responses were competing but not oppositional, and did not divide neatly across organizational or ideological lines, as demonstrated by Ebony’s own coverage of King's assassination. Bennett's contribution to the May 1968 issue of Ebony was fatalistic, arguing that King's death was an inevitable product of white supremacy. Tellingly, rather than focus on the aftermath of King's assassination, Bennett stressed the minister's changing ideological position over the final year of his life, positioning the Poor People's Campaign as a radical response to the “new breed of organizers and orators who stressed Black Power and militant-self defense.”Footnote 43 In another article, Bennett praised students in the vanguard of a “black cultural revolution” which had taken hold of college campuses across America, and which paralleled the rioting which followed King's death.Footnote 44 Yet through other features such as “The Prince of Peace is Dead,” Ebony offered a nostalgic reflection on King's life, and lectured readers that a turn toward violence would “invalidate everything King preached.”Footnote 45
From a different perspective, King's demise came to function as an important watershed for African American history. As Daniel Marcus has noted, the 1970s saw a wave of nostalgia for the 1950s play out across the pages of popular newsmagazines such as Newsweek, Time and Life, which juxtaposed the “relative innocence” of the decade with the riot and revolt of the 1960s. By contrast, Ebony’s coverage envisioned King's death as a critical rupture between the civil rights years of the 1950s and 1960s, and the movement's dissolution during the 1970s.Footnote 46 Scholars such as Stephen Tuck have aptly demonstrated that the black freedom struggle persisted and proliferated long into the 1970s, as activists built upon and “drew inspiration from the tactics used by the movements of the 1960s.”Footnote 47 Yet for Ebony, King's death appeared to mark “the end of an era.”Footnote 48 Other black periodicals such as The Crisis reinforced this division through surveys which named King as black America's “greatest deceased negro” alongside early twentieth-century leaders such as W. E. B Du Bois.Footnote 49
In a February 1976 article for Ebony titled “Where Are the Revolutionaries?”, Alex Poinsett contended that the “fiery black militants of the 1960s have all but disappeared … in prison these days, or exiled overseas, or in the hip pocket of an FBI agent.”Footnote 50 Yet if the black liberation movement had perished by the mid-1970s, another appeared ready to take its place, with the struggle for black heritage becoming a hotly contested issue within Ebony and the larger American public.Footnote 51 Calls for a national holiday in King's honor quickly became part of a broader hunger for black historical representation and commemoration which paralleled the black studies and black museum movements.Footnote 52 Even before King had been laid to rest, representative John Conyers had introduced a bill to the House calling for a holiday for the minister, and the bill quickly gained support from Coretta Scott King and other prominent figures. Less than two years after King's death, the Boston Globe reported that a “national campaign” to establish a holiday for King was under way, and in 1971 supporters of the bill deposited three million signed petitions on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.Footnote 53
Given his close connections to the magazine, it is unsurprising that King's demise appeared to haunt Ebony throughout the 1970s.Footnote 54 Its editors became increasingly fearful that King was being lost to memory, seeking to remind readers that the minister was “a hero to be remembered,” and warning that African Americans could not “forget their heroes and remain a great people.”Footnote 55 Yet what constituted an “appropriate” manner of commemoration remained unclear, and varied amongst the magazine's diverse editorial team. Bennett's contributions to Ebony continued to advocate for black liberation “by any means necessary,” and he worked alongside figures such as Vincent Harding to situate King's impact within a broader activist tradition.Footnote 56 By contrast, Ebony’s general content retreated into a more conservative position, with special issues on subjects such as “The Black Revolution” being replaced by exposés on “The Black Middle Class.” In turn, the magazine's discussion of King became more reflective and uncritical.Footnote 57
This shift was reflected through Ebony’s coverage of the King Center and its relationship with the Harding-led Institute of the Black World, which Bennett envisioned as a critical space for “defining, defending, and illustrating blackness.”Footnote 58 The editor had used his position as a trustee for the King Center to push for a more critical engagement with King's legacy, arguing that the Center should provide a “concrete manifestation of our duty to pick up Dr. King's torch and advance on the trenches of the four evils he identified in his last published article – the evils of racism, militarism, poverty, and materialism.”Footnote 59 However, ideological divisions over how best to engage with King's legacy fed into an acrimonious split between the two organizations, and Ebony’s content moved away from the critical engagement with King's legacy endorsed by the IBW to celebrate the center's development as a “monument to a martyr.”Footnote 60 This approach helped to promote a form of black conservative nostalgia, which served to downplay revolutionary intent and celebrate free-enterprise individualism.Footnote 61
Bennett's dissatisfaction at Ebony’s retreat from more incisive sociopolitical commentary was matched by editors such as Charles Sanders, who conspired to push for more progressive editorial content.Footnote 62 Despite a shift to the left during the years following King's death, Bennett maintained “a very close relationship” with Ebony and remained one of Johnson's most trusted lieutenants.Footnote 63 However, this relationship was put under pressure by expanding corporate engagement with black history during the 1970s. As white advertisers became attuned to the power of the “Negro Market” they turned to civil rights and African American history as a marketing strategy.Footnote 64 By the nation's Bicentennial celebrations – an event denounced by Bennett as “an affront to truth and freedom” – many of Ebony’s advertisers were fully committed to commemorating black America's “revolutionary spirit.”Footnote 65 Companies such as Amtrak and United Airlines used King's memory to promote a gendered and uncritical engagement with the past, while simultaneously showcasing corporate engagement with and celebration of black history.Footnote 66
King's assassination was also seized upon by a range of political actors in the days and years that followed his death. Detractors such as Reagan had used the tragedy as evidence of a national retreat from “law and order,” suggesting that activists were somehow responsible for the violence “the white power structure used to defend its privileges.”Footnote 67 By contrast, Democratic candidate George McGovern made sure to stress his support for the King holiday bill during the 1972 presidential campaign, while Richard Nixon courted activists such as Ralph Abernathy by discussing the holiday idea.Footnote 68 Following Nixon's acrimonious exit from the White House, Gerald Ford also sought goodwill among African Americans by publicly praising King and ratifying Black History Month as part of the nation's Bicentennial celebrations.Footnote 69 However, such actions contrasted with Ford's reticence over key civil rights issues such as busing.Footnote 70 In addition, his contention that the Bicentennial marked “the full integration of black people into every area of national life” reinforced the 1970s as a point of departure – the moment at which attention could finally shift from the struggle for civil rights to a triumphant retelling of its history.Footnote 71
Although an influential cadre of conservatives and Republicans continued to oppose the holiday due to a range of fiscal and ideological concerns, by the end of the 1970s the bill was gaining widespread traction.Footnote 72 Ted Kennedy was one of a number of high-profile Senators to come out in support of the bill, and on the fiftieth anniversary of King's birthday in January 1979, President Jimmy Carter also endorsed the holiday movement at Ebenezer Baptist Church.Footnote 73 The following year over 100,000 supporters gathered at the Washington Monument, where Stevie Wonder declared that the holiday would reify King as “a symbol of the tremendous contributions black people have made in this country's historical development.” Ebony’s enthusiastic coverage of the rally aligned it with the movement's golden years: “it seemed for a moment as if the images frozen in memory by the historic 1983 March on Washington had suddenly come unstuck.”Footnote 74
Yet while support for the holiday continued to grow, tensions persisted over how best to frame its significance. The most notable division amongst its supporters remained between more radical elements of the SCLC and the King Center, with figures such as Hosea Williams denouncing “black elitists” such as Coretta Scott King and Maynard Jackson for constructing a “cult of personality” which obscured King's true activist message.Footnote 75 The ousting of Williams and the SCLC's radical faction by Joseph Lowery in 1979 led to the SCLC supporting a more expansive framing of the holiday's significance, with Lowery testifying before Congress that the holiday would “transcend the issue of race and color.”Footnote 76 An embrace of a “memorial style” was necessary in order to render King more palatable for the white majority, but also served to strip the minister of his racial and regional identity. Furthermore, descriptions of King as a transcendent American hero sat uneasily alongside the rhetoric of color blindness which characterized the rise of the New Right.Footnote 77
THE KING HOLIDAY, COLOR-BLIND CONSERVATISM AND BLACK CRITICAL MEMORY
As Dennis Deslippe has noted, discourses of color blindness had been utilized by a mix of liberals and conservatives during the first half of the 1970s, in opposition to quota-based civil rights measures such as affirmative action. However, the wane of color-blind liberalism led to the rise of a new generation of color-blind conservatives, whose potent rhetoric and “disciplined focus on merit and competence” demonstrated that they were far less attentive to questions of racial and gender inequality.Footnote 78 In a connected move, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 fed into a notable shift in conservative engagement with the movement for a King holiday. Prior to Reagan's election, the majority of conservatives and Republicans had either ignored discussion of the King holiday, or opposed it on economic or ideological grounds. However, by the early 1980s conservatives had realized that the King holiday could provide a “useful forum for their civil rights policies.”Footnote 79
This shift was embodied by Reagan's highly public volte-face on the subject. The President had remained a consistent opponent to the holiday, and his words and actions had provided a powerful incentive for figures such as Jesse Helms to lobby aggressively against its ratification.Footnote 80 Although Reagan was forced to moderate this position as party opinion moved toward support of the bill as a way to repair its sullied reputation among black voters, he continued to cast aspersions over King's character and reputed communist affiliations.Footnote 81 However, the President also began to show an awareness of how King's memory could be framed in a politically productive way, pointing to their respective beliefs in “freedom and justice under God.”Footnote 82 Upon ratifying the holiday bill in November 1983, there was little sign of the resentment Reagan felt for a man who was in many ways his “bitter ideological enemy.”Footnote 83 The President praised King as “a man whose words and deeds … stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul,” and applauded him for awakening “something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be color-blind.”Footnote 84
By framing King's influence around his March on Washington address in 1963 and his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the President sought to dislocate King's memory from his move towards a more radical critique of race and class in the final years of his life. The King who dreamed of “brotherhood and the integration of buses, schools and lunch counters” would be memorialized, while the minister that “attacked capitalism, talked about the redistribution of the nation's resources, and challenged … the war in Vietnam” would be ignored.Footnote 85 Similarly, his eulogizing of King sought to bookend the movement's impact within a Montgomery-to-Memphis master narrative, thus preventing it from speaking effectively to the challenges of the 1980s.Footnote 86 More importantly, Reagan's words can be seen to have “brilliantly drafted King's sacrifice … into a broader story of American exceptionalism.”Footnote 87 In doing so, Reagan was able to position himself as the true heir to King's political legacy, and to connect King's rhetoric to the dream of a color-blind society which “exalted individualism, opposed race-conscious remedies such as affirmative action, and pursued integration as an end in itself.”Footnote 88
The President's position was strengthened by the unlikely support of former colleagues of King such as Ralph Abernathy and, perhaps most surprisingly, Hosea Williams, who based their support for Reagan around his alleged support for minority enterprise.Footnote 89 Despite their vilification by progressive black intellectuals, figures such as Williams were able to reconcile their call for a radical interpretation of King's legacy with Reagan's promise for new business opportunities to help inner-city black communities break free from dependency on the welfare state.Footnote 90 Reagan could also point to black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas, who reiterated the President's distrust for race-based social welfare, and argued for a greater degree of “personal responsibility” within black communities.Footnote 91 Although the black majority overwhelmingly rejected his candidacy, the bootstraps rhetoric of figures like Sowell confirmed the reemergence of black conservatism as “a small yet powerful current within the African American middle class,” and bolstered his efforts to appropriate King's legacy in support of his own political agenda.Footnote 92
Against this backdrop, Bennett sought to connect King's memory to the “deeper meanings of black history” in his writing.Footnote 93 By the early 1980s Bennett had cemented his position as one of the nation's most prominent black historians, and he used Ebony as a platform to warn that the emergence of the New Right during the 1970s paralleled the racist backlash to Reconstruction during the 1870s.Footnote 94 Whereas Reagan saw the civil rights years as a triumphant flood which signaled the full entry of black citizens into a color-blind society, Bennett envisioned the movement's “golden decade” as just one wave in a much longer struggle for racial justice “which started with the first revolt on the first slave ship and will not end until America deals with the revolutionary mandate of its birth.” Similarly, while Bennett recognized King's importance to post-world war black activism, he emphasized his place within a broader activist tradition that continued to rise and fall with the “ebbing and flowing of the energies of the people.”Footnote 95
Bennett's contributions to Ebony were complemented by endeavors outside Johnson Publishing Company. Through speaking engagements at black historical organizations and historically black colleges, Bennett repeatedly stressed that a new generation of activists must fight to keep the flame of King's activism alive, and that the realization of his dream was dependent on the total political mobilization of the black community.Footnote 96 While conservatives argued that liberal government programs were responsible for black poverty, Bennett contended that “the problem is not the poor. The problem is power. The problem is not the black ghetto. The problem is the system which created it.”Footnote 97 In doing so, Bennett reiterated the sentiments of activists such as Julian Bond, who warned that King's legacy had been imperiled by black leaders who “postured for attention, competed for loyalties and money, but could not inspire mass action or allegiance.”Footnote 98
Bennett would develop this position further through a trilogy of major articles published in Ebony between 1981 and 1985, which “creatively probed into the deeper meanings of black history.”Footnote 99 In a February 1981 article titled “Listen to the Blood,” the editor reinforced his understanding of black history as an organic and cyclical process to explicitly situate King's legacy within a broader living history of black America.Footnote 100 Bennett rejected a triumphalist interpretation of the modern civil rights movement to argue that “black history is a part of nature and revolves in cycles, endlessly, birth, growth and death, progression and retrogression.”Footnote 101 Critically, Bennett argued that it was not enough for black Americans to symbolically commemorate the dead, and that a full commitment to the ongoing struggle was the only way to honor past heroes: “we are responsible, totally responsible, not only for ourselves but for the whole of the black experience … it is only through us that Martin Luther King, Jr. can finally reach the peak of the mountaintop.”Footnote 102
This sentiment rejected the transcendent image of King endorsed by politicians such as Reagan, and reiterated Bennett's belief that an “honest” interpretation of black history relied on an understanding that black Americans lived in a “different reality” to whites.Footnote 103 Accordingly, while an appreciation of King's memory was vital to a true understanding of the American condition, it could not be divorced from his racial and regional identity.Footnote 104 Readers applauded Bennett for discarding the “myth of objectivity” which had “hamstrung our historians and journalists,” to recognize the unique implications of black history, and the King holiday, for black Americans.Footnote 105 The following year in an article titled “Why Black History Is Important to You,” Bennett reiterated the need for black history to be “functional, pragmatic, and this-worldly in orientation.”Footnote 106 The elevation of King should not obscure the fact that black history “is now and has always been the absolute ground of black resistance,” and black liberation would not be secured via the ivory tower, corporate boardroom or commemorative culture, but through “the struggles in the streets of America.”Footnote 107
BLACK CONSERVATIVE NOSTALGIA AND EBONY AS A FRAME FOR COLOR BLINDNESS
Bennett was far from the only figure to be calling for a more critical engagement with King's memory. The connection between King's activism and the “principle of race neutrality” made by the Reagan administration was harshly criticized by civil rights leaders across the country.Footnote 108 Similarly, black periodicals such as The Crisis and the Los Angeles Sentinel remained openly suspicious of efforts to appropriate King's legacy, and highlighted Reagan's continued attacks on civil rights.Footnote 109 Nevertheless, Bennett's position at Ebony provided him with a unique platform. By the mid-1980s, the magazine's paid monthly circulation had breached 1.7 million – more than double that of the next-largest black periodical, and over seven times the circulation of market competitors such as Black Enterprise and The Crisis. Footnote 110 Marketing research companies suggested that when accounting for Ebony’s significant pass-on readership, the magazine was read by more than forty percent of the adult black population.Footnote 111 This unprecedented reach meant that Bennett was able to exert a significant influence over King's public representation, and to disseminate socialist-infused critiques of black history to a mass audience.Footnote 112
This role was facilitated by Bennett's strong personal relationship with Johnson, who admired the historian as a man of “class and style,” and described their friendship as “one of the most rewarding experiences” of his publishing career.Footnote 113 For figures such as Negro Digest editor Hoyt Fuller, an ideological shift to the left during the 1960s and 1970s led to an increasingly strained relationship with publisher Johnson.Footnote 114 By contrast, Bennett's position within Johnson Publishing never appeared to be under threat – even when he was openly supporting calls for black power, or issuing veiled criticisms of Ebony’s editorial philosophy from within the magazine's own pages.Footnote 115 Like Charles Sanders, Johnson also recognized that Bennett's reputation “added legitimacy” to Ebony’s historical content, and was therefore happy to provide Bennett with a high level of autonomy in his writing. These factors afforded Bennett an “unusual independence” within the Johnson Publishing Company, and allowed him to develop a more critical engagement with black history and King's legacy.Footnote 116
However, these efforts were frequently mediated by Ebony’s broader coverage, which adopted a memorialist tone to frame King's legacy through the lens of black conservative nostalgia. This can be seen through the magazine's continued emphasis on Coretta Scott King and the King Center, with its multi-million-dollar shrines, visitor center and gift shop helping to “keep the dream alive.”Footnote 117 A focus on the cost of the center's large construction costs and impressive physical stature further shifted attention away from grassroots, local-level activism, and towards expensive public monuments as an “appropriate” way to commemorate King.Footnote 118 This stance was partially informed by the magazine's market position, with Johnson favoring the consensus opinion on subjects which affected the African American community as a whole. Yet it was also influenced by a nostalgic yearning for a unified black community, and a time when commentators could outline a “clear black agenda,” or speak confidently of the “state of black America.”Footnote 119
As David Chappell has argued, the black middle class emerged as the great beneficiary of the civil right years during the 1970s and 1980s, with significant gains in the cultural, economic and political spheres. Paralleling these gains was the continued neglect of black working-class communities, which remained “humiliated and deprived by poverty.”Footnote 120 The devastating impact of trickle-down economics, deindustrialization and urban decay on working-class black communities made it increasingly difficult for Ebony to offer its readers a unified image of black life and culture. Similarly, the gay liberation and women's rights movements led to marginalized elements of the black community becoming more outspoken.Footnote 121 By the beginning of the 1980s, it appeared that “symbolism, history, and old-fashioned racism” were just about the only things many African Americans still had in common – as evidenced by a series of controversial Ebony specials on divisive subjects such as “black on black crime,” economic inequality, and gender and sexuality within the black community.Footnote 122
From this perspective, the King holiday offered a historical panacea: an opportunity to revitalize the collective unity which was “frozen in memory” around the March on Washington.Footnote 123 By framing the holiday in this way, Ebony intimated that widening divisions within the black community were the result not only of continuing economic inequities, but also of the failure of individual black citizens to dedicate themselves “to the spirit of sacrifice and struggle that enabled our forefathers to survive.”Footnote 124 This tension was clear within Bennett's own conceptualizations of black history, with the editor repeatedly chastising younger generations for failing to develop “any community of interest with the past.”Footnote 125 While Bennett envisioned this argument as a rallying cry for grassroots action, it also suggested that an ignorance of history was linked to generational malaise, and echoed the sentiments of black conservatives such as Sowell, who pointed to “ignorance and inadequate training” as the root cause of black unemployment.Footnote 126
The image of King as a unifying symbol was also appealing to corporate advertisers, whose depoliticized and commemorative representation of King fed into a broader celebration of the “remarkable” gains made by black Americans in the years following his death.Footnote 127 Support for the King Center and the establishment of the King holiday were used by advertisers to show that they were helping to “keep the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. alive.”Footnote 128 From a different perspective, appeals to King's “dream” enabled advertisers to rearticulate King's call for radical economic redistribution into the promotion of corporate capitalism. In doing so, they reiterated Reagan's belief that a realization of King's “dream” was underpinned by a deregulation of the marketplace and that an expansion of minority entrepreneurship was a way for impoverished blacks to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.Footnote 129
More problematic still were the tensions created by Ebony’s deference to “mirroring the happier side of negro life.” Even as Bennett stressed King's position alongside militant black activists such as Malcom X and Frederick Douglass, the magazine's content can be argued to have functioned as a frame for color-blind ideologies, and as “evidence” of the move toward a color-blind society.Footnote 130 Ebony’s celebration of black triumphs in the economic, political and cultural spheres provided ammunition for conservative claims of “racial equality, the elimination of social and economic injustice, and the arrival of a time for racial invisibility.”Footnote 131 This function was further complicated by the magazine's coverage of crossover stars such as Diana Ross, who contended that “I don't think in terms of race.”Footnote 132 From this perspective, King's ability to “transcend” blackness was comparable to that od celebrities such as Bill Cosby, who was celebrated by television and advertising executives as a color-blind spokesman.Footnote 133
Successes on an individual and organizational level during the 1980s also helped to supplement this narrative, with Ebony’s circulation growing by hundreds of thousands during Reagan's administration, Johnson Publishing supplanting Motown as the largest black-owned company in America, and Johnson becoming the first black person named on the Forbes 400 list.Footnote 134 Ebony’s fortieth anniversary issue in November 1985 offered a salute to “four decades of black progress” which championed minority entrepreneurship as a route to racial equality.Footnote 135 Yet this narrative helped to disguise the decline of black newspapers, which went out of business “at an alarming rate” during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 136 Furthermore, while black magazines such as Black Enterprise and The Crisis became increasingly critical of Reagan's economic policies and investments in minority enterprise, Johnson's cautious approach meant that Ebony avoided direct criticism of the establishment.Footnote 137
EBONY AND THE “REAL MEANING” OF THE KING HOLIDAY
These intersections of critical memory, nostalgia, editorial philosophy, political rhetoric and corporate strategy became increasingly contested in the build-up to the first formal celebration of the King holiday in January 1986. Reagan offered further evidence of his opposition to hiring quotas, asserting that they were unconstitutional and denied jobs “to many who would have gotten them otherwise, but who weren't born a specific race or sex.” Seeking to justify his remarks, Reagan returned to the image of King, recalling the preacher's dream of a society where “people would be judged on the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.”Footnote 138 By appropriating King's words, the President was able to position regressive social and economic policies as the true fulfilment of civil rights legislation.Footnote 139 This sentiment was reiterated by figures such as Attorney General Edwin Meese, who argued that by proposing to eliminate minority hiring quotas for government contractors, the Reagan administration was “trying to carry out the original intent of the civil rights movement.”Footnote 140
On the other hand, Bennett reminded readers of King's unique place within black history, and warned that mere acts of remembrance were not enough. In the final article of his trilogy on the meaning of black history, Bennett declared that “before confronting us as a spectacle or celebration, black history is a challenge and a call.”Footnote 141 This was particularly relevant for the younger generations, who Bennett insisted must take on the baton of struggle in the “endless relay race which began with the first revolt on the first slave ships.”Footnote 142 The past was not a rose-tinted lens but a revolutionary mandate, and the legacy of King and other activists must be situated within a “perpetual conversation” which stretched across black generations and geographies to form a “mighty chorus.”Footnote 143 By contrast, advertisers continued to celebrate King in individualistic and commemorative terms, using quotations to emphasize his belief in color-blind “brotherhood,” and his role as a “drum major for peace.”Footnote 144 Furthermore, by honoring King through features in Ebony and other black magazines such as The Crisis, advertisers were able stress their role as important preservers of black cultural heritage.Footnote 145
The generational tensions which underpinned much of Bennett's writing were also taken up by contributors such as Patrice Gaines-Carter, who described her daughter's ambivalence towards the King holiday as evidence of the “post-integration blues” suffered by black youth during the 1980s.Footnote 146 Gaines-Carter bemoaned that she came from a “generation of marchers,” and could not understand the inaction of black youth. Her words resonated with older readers who expressed their disgust that younger African Americans “know more about Michael Jackson, Prince and Eddie Murphy than Dr. Martin Luther King.” Such sentiments tapped into a deeply rooted nostalgia among the magazine's editors and readers for a period in black history that was often “disgusting, sad and downright frightening,” but which had fostered unity toward a common goal.Footnote 147 In this regard, the King holiday movement provided an opportunity to show that “we still have the power – Black Power,” but in the process reduced black power to the commercially mediated commemoration of an individual figure.Footnote 148
Ebony’s coverage climaxed around a special issue in January 1986 titled “The Living King.” Its total focus on the holiday stood in contrast to prominent black magazines such as Black Enterprise, Essence and The Crisis, which largely ignored the occasion in their January issues. Ebony’s special was fronted by article from Bennett, who reiterated that the “real meaning” of the King holiday would be secured not by “legends and poems and wreaths of bronze,” but through a rededication to “the evils of racism, militarism, unemployment, and violence.”Footnote 149 In another section, the magazine printed quotations which “speak to contemporary problems and struggles,” offering a direct critique of Reagan's social and economic policies. Adapting a quote from King's Why We Can't Wait, the magazine posited that “no amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America … the payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures.”Footnote 150 Scholars such as Michael Eric Dyson have pointed to this quote as evidence of King's support for racial reparation, and it echoed the sentiments of Adam Fairclough and other historians who had stressed King's “deep political radicalism” in the lead-up to the holiday.Footnote 151
Yet many other segments of Ebony’s January 1986 issue reinforced a less critical memorialization of King that reflected pervasive currents of black conservative nostalgia and the “memorial” style of commemoration identified by Daynes.Footnote 152 Features on physical memorials to King – ranging from a forest in Israel to a church in Hungary – were held up as evidence that his memory “is as much alive as the Eternal Flame that burns in front of his crypt” at the King Center.Footnote 153 An article by Coretta Scott King stressed the importance of the King Center in helping to shape King's legacy for future generations.Footnote 154 In turn, a photo-editorial reflecting on “poignant moments” in King's life was striking in its individualistic portrayal of the minister, heavily populated by close-up shots of King elevated above his fellow activists or alone with his family. Images of King alongside more militant figures such as Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael were avoided, and much of the feature focussed on his funeral.Footnote 155
The special also underscored Ebony’s reluctance to address generational and class biases in its coverage of the holiday, as evidenced by features such as “What Martin Luther King, Jr. Means To Me,” which profiled ten prominent African Americans.Footnote 156 Olympic gold medalist Evelyn Ashford was the only contributor under the age of forty-five, and her earnest description of King as a “symbol of hope” was hardly representative of the ambivalence towards King exhibited by many of the “new generation.”Footnote 157 Rather than address why may younger and lower-class African Americans appeared ambivalent towards the holiday's commemoration, Ebony chose instead to celebrate those who were strong advocates of the holiday, such as Stevie Wonder and King's own children. Similarly, its coverage of the holiday movement ignored the frequently fractious debates over how best to frame King's legacy between agents such as the SCLC and the King estate, and celebrated Reagan's signing of the bill as a moment of national unity, rather than an appropriation of King's words.Footnote 158
Above these complex layers of editorial content sat the contributions of Ebony’s advertisers, who celebrated King's life in transcendent terms, and advocated for a commitment to color-blind “brotherhood.”Footnote 159 Many advertising features helped to divorce King from any broader discussion of black activism, simply calling for a “moment of silence” in celebration of his life and accomplishments.Footnote 160 Greyhound offered an impressionistic rendering of King's face in the clouds, casting beams of light down on the names of figures such as Coretta Scott King, Stevie Wonder and John Conyers, who had helped to make the holiday “a day in which we can all rejoice.”Footnote 161 For advertisers such as 7UP and McDonalds, the commemoration of King's birthday as a national holiday was understood as an extension of his quest for social and economic justice.Footnote 162 From this perspective, such tributes to King situated corporate patronage as an avenue to economic redistribution, and suggested that the mass activism of the movement years could be revived through a passive consumption of black history in the 1980s.
CONCLUSION
Ebony’s January 1986 special provides perhaps the most obvious example of its complex and frequently contested memorialization of King in the aftermath of his death. As this article has demonstrated, a closer examination of the magazine's engagement with the holiday movement, and its framing of King's legacy, provides us with a striking case study of the tensions between “black critical memory” and “black conservative nostalgia.”Footnote 163 The former approach was often embodied through the contributions of Lerone Bennett Jr., who used his influence within Ebony to advocate for an ethnocentric and activist-oriented discussion of King's legacy. As Pero Dagbovie has noted, Bennett's writing left a profound imprint on vast numbers of black Americans “hitherto unresponsive to the call of the past.”Footnote 164 By challenging Ebony’s readers to approach King's legacy through the lens of critical memory, Bennett helped to develop an important counternarrative to his appropriation by Reagan and other conservative spokesmen.
Yet at the same time, both Bennett's writing and Ebony’s broader coverage of King betrayed a deep-seated anxiety over fractures within black communities in the years following King's death. As a result, the magazine attempted to utilize the holiday movement as a way to revive the “unity” of the movement – something which underplayed the diversity of black resistance during the 1950s and 1960s. More problematically, it suggested that black heritage commemoration could function as a continuation of collective activism, even as enduring social and economic concerns severely impacted upon the ability of working-class black communities to sustain grassroots activism during the 1970s. This void came to be filled by corporate donors, whose interventions allowed for the development of institutions such as the King Center, but which also served to limit their impact.Footnote 165 In a similar vein, Bennett's continued forays into African American history in the pages of Ebony during the 1970s and 1980s became increasingly mediated by corporate advertisers, who frequently offered a markedly different representation of civil rights and African American history.
Despite Ebony’s emphasis on the continuing significance of race, its documentation of black successes during the 1970s and 1980s positioned it as an influential frame for “color-blind” ideologies. Such contradictions were symptomatic of the broader tensions between black cultural production, civil rights activism and conservatism, as black business and communities looked to establish their place within a political and corporate culture which was shifting rightwards. From a different perspective, broad appeals to civil rights memory and African American history became an important way for Ebony and other mass-market periodicals to bridge the generational, ideological and economic divides which had fractured black communities across the country.Footnote 166 However, as Ebony’s content makes clear, it was difficult to reconcile the memory of the movement years with the lived experiences of black communities in the present.Footnote 167 In turn, efforts to elevate King as a unifying hero for both black citizens and the broader American public led to him being celebrated as an advocate of color blindness, and diminished his radical embrace of anticolonialism and democratic socialism.
