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"I am an invisible man." Thus begins the most insightful book on American race relations of the twentieth century. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) recounts the struggle of an unnamed, black protagonist to make a name for himself in postwar America, a struggle exacerbated by a predominantly white society that refuses to "see" him as an individual: "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me." The tragic irony for the invisible man is that in a nation founded on "self-evident" truths—namely, that each person possesses the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—his rights are not self-evident or visible to others.
Ellison's affirmation of each person's visibility has a Christian analogue in the imago Dei, the idea that all human beings bear the image of God their Maker. As Acts 17:26 puts it, "God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." Alas, even St. Peter had his difficulties with the idea of an unbiased Creator. After stumbling over the world-historical "color line" of Jew/Gentile, he needed some heaven-sent dreams to conclude that "God is no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34). This, unfortunately, would not be the last struggle of the church with the issue of race and one's visibility as a child of God.
Take the American church, whose record on racial discrimination does not exactly reflect the Golden Rule. The escaped slave and abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass once observed, "There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it."1 Post-reconstruction black codes, Jim Crow laws, and segregation only reinforced this principle.2 Noting that it was a preacher, Thomas Dixon, who wrote the 1906 novel The Clansman (which inspired pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffiths's racist masterpiece, Birth of a Nation) and another preacher, Joseph Simmons, who rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan early in the twentieth century, Ellison sniffed, "What a role these malignant clergymen have played in our lives!"
When it came to exposing the sin of racial prejudice, most of America's white church simply kept their light under a bushel. It would take a 26-year-old black preacher to stir the black church into action where most white Christians left a void.
"When Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as an important American figure," Ralph Ellison observed, "it was an instance of the church making itself visible in the political and social life and fulfilling its role in the realm of morality." In discussions about race and rights, no man is quoted more frequently than Martin Luther King, Jr. And no line of King's is quoted more often than one from his August 1963 speech before the Lincoln Memorial: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." This speech towers as an expression of faith that white Americans would no longer reserve the protections of government for themselves but extend justice to their "citizens of color."
But what was once a clear rejection of racial discrimination has now become a subject of political debate. So much so that hip-hop preacher-teacher Michael Eric Dyson, in his revisionist biography of King, has called for a ten-year moratorium on reading or listening to King's "I Have a Dream" speech! How can University of California Regent Ward Connerly claim King as an opponent of affirmative action while Rainbow/PUSH Coalition President Jesse Jackson asserts the opposite? The answer lies in the ambivalent legacy of King himself.
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