History Seminar - From Dreamer to Drum Major

This event was held on Friday 26 August 2016

The History@Newcastle Research Seminar Series presents Daniel Fleming, who will present "From Dreamer to Drum Major: a History of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday."

Abstract

After the inaugural Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday in 1986, scholars argued that King’s radical legacy had been sidelined during celebrations. They noted that conservatives had sought to downplay King’s criticism of economic inequality and militarism. Scholars were correct to identify this trend, yet since 1986 little has been added to the analysis, even as scholars heeded the call by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall to study the Long Civil Rights Movement. Most who write about King Day usually focus on the 1970s and early 1980s fight for the Holiday, but this paper analyses the Holiday from the mid-1980s to the 1990s.

In 1984, Congress established the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission in order to organise the Holiday. Led by Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, the Commission planned the Holiday from 1986 to 1996 and left a vast, but underutilised, archive for scholars. This paper is based on research in the US National Archives and presents a new understanding of how the Holiday was celebrated.

This paper analyses the Holiday and images of King promoted by the Commission. It argues that King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech symbolised celebrations in the 1980s as the Commission attempted to create a popular Holiday with a moderate, even conservative, tone. This was possible because many appointees to the Commission were conservatives. However, in the mid-1990s, during President Clinton’s administration, a new image of King was presented to the public: King the Drum Major. This image was based on King’s ‘Drum Major Instinct’ sermon of 1968 and it emphasised his criticism of economic inequality. The Commission transformed the Holiday into a day service, in an attempt to continue King’s unfinished agenda. Historians have largely ignored this change and how, and why, it occurred.

Daniel Fleming studied for his Bachelor of Arts at La Trobe University, Victoria, and for his Masters at the University of Melbourne. His Masters thesis was titled ‘Martin Luther King Jr. and the FBI’. Daniel wrote his PhD dissertation ‘Living the Dream: A History of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday’ at the University of Newcastle. He graduates in September.

Daniel has an entry published in the Encyclopaedia of Greater Philadelphia and has been published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. He has presented at the Organisation of American Historians, and at the Association for the Study of African American History and Life.

This is a free event - all welcome. The presentation will be followed by morning tea at 11am.