The Paradoxical Implications of Blackness and the U.S. Constitution: The Intersectionality of King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech and Educational Inequalities

Abstract

Employing the rhetorical phraseology of a “promissory note,” dramatized in the public address of Martin Luther King Jr., during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, this article historically postulates Black Americans as constitutional beggars until Reconstruction. The white framers of our Republic legislated the dehumanization and constitutional disregard of Black Americans who continuously find themselves fighting for rights and privileges granted through American citizenship. Illuminating the paradoxical implications of blackness, substantiated in anti-black policies and practices that beset educational institutions, unravels the connectedness between King’s public address and educational inequalities. Brown v. Board of Education becomes a palpable case that congeals King’s ideological usage of the term “promissory note” with educational inequalities and solidifies the ideological connectedness between blackness and schooling.

“When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

“But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream.”

Introduction

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in the symbolic grandeur of Black Americans white hope (Abraham Lincoln), Martin Luther King Jr., elucidated the moral and constitutional hypocrisy of White Americans. To grapple with the complexity and intellectual sophistication of King’s address, what historians have passionately footnoted in the annals of history as “I Have a Dream,” forces readers to grapple with the ideological convergence of what may appear to be disparate ideas. The term white hope, grounded in the racial and political realities of white disdain towards blackness, alludes to the yearning and expectancy that Black Americans upheld toward White Americans to fight for racial justice and equality. The semblance of white hope becomes noticeable in the rhetorical reference of Abraham Lincoln as “a great American” (p. 1), mainly when held in comparison to Malcolm X’s contemptuous rhetoric and outlook toward White America. Several months prior, to coagulate this point, King emphasized the “interrelatedness of all communities and states” (p. 290), and clarifies what it means to be “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (p. 290). King’s optimistic outlook or white hope places him in a philosophical confrontation with black radicals and white conservatives who staunchly opposed integration. For King, the struggle for racial justice and equality in America had to encompass non-violent resistance, love, radical transformation, and white allies who morally aligned with racial justice and equality.1 Unlike moderates who clench to a historically biased and romanticized snapshot of King, particularly when it comes to “I Have a Dream,” this article seeks to congeal King’s ideological usage of the term “promissory note” with educational inequalities and radiates the intellectual depth of defiance that undergirds King’s message.

The term Black America, as referenced periodically, illuminates the collective consciousness of diasporic Africans living under the tyranny of American racism. By using a capital B, this article acknowledges the inherent worth of Africans in the diaspora and the impact of race and racialization in America. As Victor Anderson (1995) posits, “blackness is a covering term that connotes categorical, essentialist, and representational language depicting black and experience” (p. 11). For the sake of this article, blackness is posteriori, contextually confined to the United States or hereafter referred to as America, and ultimately gives voice to the myriad of ways blackness manifests itself amid marginalization and exploitation. As posteriori, blackness comes through the birthing canal of whiteness and whiteness derives from American racism. Blackness has paradoxical implications. There are empirical variations, cultural distinctions, and diverse interpretations of what it means to be black in America, and how to negotiate one’s blackness in white spaces. Thereby advancing the notion that whiteness has constitutional groundings and blackness is a constitutional omission, which in the end, creates the need for Black Americans to assert themselves in the Constitution or what this article recognizes as constitutional beggars. In this regard, Black Americans fight for rights and privileges that come through citizenship but habitually disregarded in white spaces.

Teresa J. Guess (2006) characterizes whiteness as an ideological, sociological, economic, and political stance that normalizes racial hierarchies in America.2 Whiteness is a systemic set of beliefs, behaviors, and habits, institutionalized and individualized, that repress cultural and political differences between European and African ancestry. Goodman, Moses, and Jones (2012) affirms, “definitions and boundaries of whiteness have changed throughout American history, expanding strategically from time to time usually as scientists, policymakers, and others attempted to balance nativist and anti-immigrant prejudices with the labor needs of a growing nation” (p. 44). Goodman et al. (2012) continue, “whiteness defined through European ancestry was a calculated racial solution developed by colonial leaders to the economic and physical threat of laboring-class solidarity” (p. 44). Blackness and whiteness are sociological constructs that yield legal, political, and economic benefits, or the lack thereof. Hence, to gain intellectual clarity and theoretical acuity on the connectedness between King’s public address and educational inequalities, readers must first understand the implications and contradictions of race relations in America.

bell hooks offer a poignant scene that unraveled at a predominately white dinner party, whereas the “other,” in a contentious dialogue with the “only other black person present” (hooks, 1990, para. 1), hooks found herself wrestling with the confluence between blackness and anti-intellectualism. hooks exposes how white normative discourse or what this article refers to as whiteness, precludes non-white from asserting autonomy. hooks declares, “racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory” (hooks, 1990, para. 1). When Black Americans muscle up the intellectual girt to disrupt the manifestations of whiteness in American democracy, those voices become “stifled by a powerful repressive postmodern state” (hooks, 1990, para. 5).

This is what makes King’s public address so powerful and radical. Whiteness equates blackness with criminality and anti-intellectualism, often “dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity” (hooks, 1990, para. 2). hooks expose how white normative discourse suppresses the voice of “others,” and thereby reinforces the normalization of whiteness. King, however, as the “other,” intellectually navigates blackness into a white space during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More importantly, King exposes the constitutional disregard of blackness in white spaces. King takes the white normative discourse, enshrined in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Emancipation Proclamation, and interjects black subjectivity to illuminate the multiple manifestations of whiteness. Simply put, King exposes the moral hypocrisy of White Americans and the paradoxical implication of blackness in America. The March on Washington provided the rhetorical window and philosophical space for King to scrutinize the legitimacy of constitutional and emancipatory promises, by citing the very documents that bolster whiteness.

An Ideological Jump from “I Have a Dream” to Educational Inequalities

While much attention focuses on the historical significance of King’s public address and his rhetorical cadence, scholars have said little on the intersectionality between critical race theory and educational inequalities. Intersectionality is a multidimensional framework that mitigates the theoretical and ideological collision between blackness and schooling. The term schooling references the socialization process that occurs in educational institutions where students become versed in the values, expectations, and behaviorism that sustains whiteness in public and private schools.3 Schools are social institutions that harbor anti-black policies and practices, as whiteness breathes on social institution’s ability to “school” students on acceptable social standards and practices. Such standards become synonymous with the prejudicial outlook needed to preserve the sanctity of whiteness and the exclusion of blackness in educational institutions. Educational inequalities channeled “through ideological and material manifestations of whiteness” (Goodman et al., 2012, p. 47), illustrate the suppression and exclusion of educational resources based on race. Critical race theory is a theoretical tool that meanders between race, law, and power.

The March on Washington gave voice to the social, political, and educational realities of Black America and provided the rhetorical, moral, and constitutional space for King to illuminate the moral collision between whiteness and blackness. Accentuating a sociological analysis of schooling, converging with the theory of intersectionality, promulgates the complexity of American apartheid and how this article conceptualizes King’s public address with educational inequalities. American apartheid, as identified by Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton (1998), posits that “institutional arrangements and contemporary individual actions” (p. 1) created residential segregation, economic disparities, and black ghettos. Subsequently giving way to power structures, “overtly or covertly, [that] prevent change, perpetuate, and exploit the status quo” (p. 154). American apartheid pre-determines the quality of education and educational resources that schools receive, thereby supporting the preservation of whiteness. Understandably, it is easy for listeners to find themselves mesmerized by the rhetorical mantra, “I Have a Dream.” However, it is King’s reference to the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Emancipation Proclamation that enthralls a discourse on intersectionality as a theoretical linchpin that illuminates King’s ideological usage of the term “promissory note” and the conceptual connectedness of such term to educational inequalities. King realized the promises, as put forth in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Emancipation Proclamation had not been actualized by the March on Washington.

Blackness and the Constitution

For Black Americans, evaluating the efficacy of constitutional promises is cyclical and ongoing. King dramatizes the dismal plight of blackness in America, by employing constitutional language to uncover the moral hypocrisy of American democracy. During times of constitutional contention and contradictions, Black Americans have focused their attention on the Constitution, as the supreme Law of the Land (Article VI), to mitigate the excruciating pain of blackness in white spaces. Paradoxically, the same document that negates blackness has also provided negotiating space for blackness amid whiteness. As Vincent G. Harding (1987) declares,

From the outset, they [Black Americas] caught the possibility that the area of contradiction and nonalignment between the best interpretation of the Preamble and the conservative, compromising thrust of the main document (especially where slavery was concerned) provided a crucial wedge by which they might engage the struggle for the transformation of the Constitution, the nation – and themselves. (p. 721).

Black Americans have always known that “we the people,” enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution, had nothing to do with Black Americans, as negated by the three-fifths compromise clause and supported by judicial rulings – Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson. In his essay The American Constitution: Its Troubling Religious and Ethical Paradox for Blacks, Riggins Earl Jr. (2012) posits the Constitution as “America’s social contract” (p. 63) and unveils the empowering and disempowering nature of the Constitution, particularly as it pertains to Black America. Earl (2012) declares, “except for the Bible, the Constitution is for blacks the paramount symbol of authority. The faith of blacks in the authority of the Constitution has prevailed despite the unwillingness of whites to ‘contract them into’ its sacred promises of equality and justice for all” (p. 64). To further syncretize his argument, Earl (2012) continues, “blacks have never lost hope in the promissory ideals of equality and justice expressed in such documents as the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation” (p. 64). While the white framers of our Republic never intended for Black Americans to experience the fullness of American democracy, nevertheless, Black Americans seized such opportunities to expose the contradictions and constitutional disregard for blackness. In every generation, from black soldiers during the Civil War to black freedom fighters during the Civil Rights Movement, the manifestations of whiteness in American democracy has forced Black Americans to question their constitutional standing. Essentially, Black Americans look for constitutional language to validate their existence. King, grounded in the rich tradition of black freedom struggle in America, stands in this historical trajectory.

Vincent G. Harding (1987) illuminates the contentious struggle between blackness and the Constitution, by invoking the biblical imagery of the pugnacious account of Jacob and an unidentified man. For Harding (1987),

The children of Africa, whose freedom the Constitution makers sacrificed on the altar of a tenuous and limited white unite, become the foremost proponents of freedom and justice in the nation, demanding of the Constitution more than its slave-holding creators dared to dream, wrestling it toward an integrity that the Fathers could not give it. And in the process, though they sustain significant wounds, they also provide opportunities for justice, equity, and hope for many persons other than themselves. Indeed, they encourage others to enter the arena with them to press the nation toward its highest possibilities. At their best they remind their fellow citizens that nights of wrestling and breakings of dawn are absolutely necessary, are never finished, in a society that aspires toward a more perfect union based on justice and liberty and committed to the empowerment of “we the people.” (p. 719).

Black Americans wrestle continuously with the Constitution in a way that exposes the foibles of the Constitution and helps to transform the Constitution into a meaningful document that aids in the black freedom struggle. The phrase “meaningful,” given the evidence of how white framers legislated the dehumanization and constitutional disregard of Black Americans, challenges the legitimacy of the Constitution. In his article Lincoln and the Constitution, George Kateb (2015) distinctively classifies and contends that our revered Constitution is both a document of slavery and freedom, but more importantly, “it was a constitution of freedom as racial privilege and hence only prima facie a constitution of freedom” (p. 105). According to Kateb (2015),

Lincoln (and any White American) would not have countenanced the chattel slavery of any white minority for any purpose, his revered Constitution was fundamentally a constitution of black slavery. He would not have revered for a moment a constitution that kept white people like him in any number as chattel slaves. Then we add but only secondly that it was a constitution of freedom. But even to say that much is to say too much because it was only apparently a constitution of freedom. (p. 106).

Kateb (2015) gives voice, as a White American scholar, to the quintessential strivings and struggles of Black Americans who wrestled with the contradictions and the promises of American democracy. Black Americans do not have the luxury of dismissing the Constitution, as the same document that bolstered whiteness and racial prejudice in America, also gave birth to black freedom. As Black Americans struggled with the paradoxical implications of the Constitution, Vincent G. Harding (1987) asserts,

Their demands to be citizens, their insistence on claiming the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and their actions as agitators, soldiers, and citizen-activists were part of the mounting force that led to the Fourteenth Amendment. It was a confirmation of their truth, a response to their wrestling with the Constitution, and with White America. (p. 724).

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King intellectually wrestles with the legitimacy of constitutional promises, even though the “Constitution had been changed, it had not sufficiently provided for some of the most fundamental needs of the black community” (Harding, 1987, p. 726). Not sufficiently attending to the economic, political, and educational needs of Black Americans, guaranteed in the Constitution as the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizenship, meant that America had defaulted on its “promissory note.”

Emancipation Proclamation: A Joyous Daybreak for Black Exiles

Lincoln believed, as many other White Americans believed and continue to believe, it was the providential hand of God that led the framers of our Republic to assert their freedom from the tyranny of Britain. Paradoxically, White Americans who subscribe to such a view often question the civil disobedience of Black Americans, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Lives Matter Movement, with some going as far as characterizing Black Americans as thugs, while simultaneously revering white framers as patriots. History shows White Americans, as was the case in 1776 and at other junctures throughout American history, lashing out against any attempts to impede their progress and subjugation over blackness. White Americans often reference emancipatory language in the Declaration of Independence. However, for Black Americans, the idea of freedom did not present itself until Abraham Lincoln signed an executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation, which slightly altered the status of blacks Americans in southern secessionist states. In 1861, eighty-five years after the birth of this nation and four years after the landmark case that negated black citizenship, Dred Scott v. Sandford, an internal way erupted between the Union and the Confederacy, over several contributing factors. James McPherson (2014) asserts,

While the Revolution of 1776–1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861–1865 determined what kind of nation it would be. The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world. (A Defining Time in Our Nation’s History, para. 1).

History shows what kind of a nation we had become. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that Abraham Lincoln used to preserve the Union, not to destroy and denounce the hideous institution of slavery. From a constitutional perspective, freedom did not come until the ratification of the 13^th Amendment. Even then, black codes and public lynching has restricted the economic, political, and educational mobility of Black Americans. Although limited in scope, the Emancipation Proclamation became for Black Americans, what the Declaration of Independence was to the white framers of our Republic. When Black Americans heard, “shall be then, henceforward, and forever free” (President Lincoln, Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, 1862), they heard freedom and altered the trajectory of the war. Black Americans made the war about emancipation. Unfortunately, this becomes problematic, as Black Americans found themselves emancipated without the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizenship. The Emancipation Proclamation was a military strategy at best, but from the perspective of Black Americans, when Lincoln signed the executive order, it was as if God had finally spoken to their painful plight. In Black American, there is nothing anomalous with the confluence between the secular and the sacred.4

As King declares, “the Emancipation Proclamation came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering justice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity” (p. 1). It came as a blissful affirmation to those staring in the face of constitutional disregard and judicial disempowerment. Black Americans would come to understand the stark differences between a civil understanding of God (Constitution and Declaration of Independence) and a biblical interpretation of God (Emancipation Proclamation), as the economic, political, and educational advancement of Black Americans came to an abrupt halt during the Johnsonian administration. Just like that, White Americans seized political power and enacted legislation to override the newly acquired rights of Black Americans, sometimes leading to violent demonstrations, often initiated by White Americans. It is from this historical context, exacerbated by a blatant discontentment for blackness, that King illuminated the depth of American hypocrisy. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence granted certain rights, privileges, and immunities to White Americans through natural law and white benevolence, as seen in the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, granted Black Americans the opportunity to interject black subjectivity and self-efficacy. White benevolence refers to acts of kindness or benevolent gestures extended to Black Americans by white allies who may or may not morally align with racial justice and equality. According to Lewis V. Baldwin (2002),

King had a very nuanced understanding of the complexities of American history and of her documents of freedom. He knew that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation are fraught with contradictions, but he valued the noble ideals they embodied, and they were among the sources he used to validate a movement for freedom. When it came to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, what mattered to King most was not the original intent of the founding fathers, but, rather, the ways in which the principles embodied in those documents could be universalized in the present and future. (p. 126).

White Americans fought to protect their independence during the Revolutionary War and sought to maintain their economic and political interests during Reconstruction. During the Revolutionary War, White Americans asserted their constitutional right to decide what worked for them, over against the economic interests of their colonizers, and Black Americans did the same during Reconstruction. Two irreconcilable forms of civilization, American freedom and American enslavement, came to a head during the Civil War, and Black Americans utilized this historical moment to assert their constitutional rights. The Emancipation Proclamation provided the legislative space for Black Americans to lay hold of the constitutional promises granted through citizenship. However, and more importantly, emancipation became a catalyst for public education in the south.

Reconstruction: Black Determination and Politics

Upon hearing about the emancipatory ramifications of the Lincolnian executive order, Black Americans fled plantations and navigated their way into Union territory, as the dawn of freedom arrived. The signing of the executive order did not guarantee emancipation for Black Americans in southern secessionist states and never had emancipatory implications for Black Americans in states already loyal to the Union. However, Black Americans redefined the Civil War and helped to ameliorate, momentarily, the cantankerous sore of racial prejudice, legislative disdain, and judicial disempowerment. The assertive actions of Black Americans helped to solidify the birth of a new nation or what Eric Foner (2019) references as a “seconding founding” (p. xx), supposedly no longer tearing at the seams of racial injustices and economic inequalities. Thomas J. Brown (2006) offers the cautious pronouncement, “the end of racial slavery hardly created a colorblind society, but the color line would be drawn in new ways, and to different purposes, in the post-emancipation South” (p. 11). With new opportunities for economic, political, and educational advancement, blacks Americans “found that they possessed the power, not only to shape their own destinies within the society in which they found themselves, but also to change that society, at least in a limited way” (Ransom and Sutch, 2001, p. 1). Emancipation gave way to Reconstruction, thereby allowing Ransom and Sutch (2001) to conclude,

For nearly two and one-half centuries, black slave labor had been an integral part of southern life. Emancipation had destroyed the foundations of the southern economy and southern society. Freedom meant that the new economy and the new society that we constructed on the site of the old could not be patterned on the old design. Although new institutions emerged, they were fashioned in haste and in a climate of racial animosity, and as a result they emerged deeply flawed. The black had gained his political freedom, but he was soon effectively disenfranchised. He had gained his social freedom, yet he remained an outcast in white society, discriminated against because of the color of his skin. He has gained his economic freedom, but the southern economy emerged poor and stagnant, and the black man was the poorest of southerners. Blacks gained much with emancipation, but that gain represented a single step from slavery to freedom. (p. 1–2).

Black Americans to transition from enslavement to sharecropping, from exploitation to economic independence, from indentured servants to autonomous beings. In his essay on Black Agency After Slavery, John C. Rodrigue (2006) defines “agency as the capacity to act on behalf of one’s own interests and values. In essence, it involves the ability to remain independent, to some degree, of another’s control and to exercise a measure of free will” (p. 41). He further asserts, “to maintain that former slaves in the postbellum South exercised agency is to insist not only upon their essential humanity but also upon their ability to identify their own interests and to pursue their own agenda” (p. 42). Reconstruction shifted the perennial narrative on anti-intellectualism and uncivility aimed at Black Americans, and for a pivotal moment in American history, Black Americans truncated the ideal of constitutional beggars and became constitutional enforcers of justice and equality. Eric Foner (1987) declares,

In seeking to invest emancipation with a broad definition of equal rights, blacks challenged the nation to live up to the full implications of its democratic creed and helped set in motion events that fundamentally altered the definition of citizenship for all Americans. (p. 863).

During Reconstruction, Black Americans “took actions that helped propel a reluctant White America down the road not simply to abolition but also to a constitutional recognition of the principle of civil and political equality regardless of race” (Foner, 1987, p. 864). Albeit, history records uprisings, revolts, and deliberate acts of resistance from ships traversing the Atlantic waters to the indignation of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. Reconstruction, however, became a pivotal era in the black freedom struggle in America, as Black Americans began to mobilize on a massive scale to demand their constitutional rights. Through constitutional amendments, Black Americans “gained a measure of political influence in southern states” (Tyack and Lowe, 1986, p. 236) and “created the world’s first biracial democracy” (Foner, 2019), p. xx). Reconstruction played an integral role in redefining American democracy and reevaluating the meaning of freedom. However, this presented many challenges. According to Ransom and Sutch (2001),

Slavery proved a poor preparation of freedom. The slave had never negotiated a contract, borrowed on credit, determined the crop mix, marketed a cotton crop, or read an agricultural journal. Slaves were universally illiterate and without the benefit of formal education. They typically possessed no skills beyond those of a field hand. Formal education for slaves was almost nonexistent. In most slave states it was actually illegal to educate a slave. Apparently such laws were passed in the 1820s and 1830s in the belief that an illiterate slave population would be more docile and less subject to revolt. The fear of black education had been intensified by the fact that the leaders of several famous insurrections and conspiracies were, in fact, literate. Denmark Vesey was a free Negro whose role in the 1822 plot in Charleston was apparently inspired by his reading of abolitionist literature. Nat Turner was also literate, and it was claimed, though never provided, that he was inspired by the writings of David Walker, another educated slave. (p. 15).

With newly acquired political power, along with the help from the Freedmen’s Bureau, Abolitionists, white philanthropy, and black contributions, Black Americans continuously wrestled with the constitutional promises of freedom, justice, and equality for all. Eric Foner (1987) states, “as Reconstruction progressed, the national Constitution took place alongside the Declaration of Independence as a central reference point in black political discourse” (p. 880). As their desire for autonomy increased, Black Americans “withdrew from religious and other institutions controlled by whites” (Foner, 1987, p. 871) and created institutions that served their economic, political, and educational needs. Public education became an essential component in helping Black Americans understand the meaning of freedom and citizenship. The federal government, through an array of constitutional amendments, resolved a series of questions “only to open a host of others” (Foner, 1987, p. 869). As Eric Foner (2019) declares, “even if we are unaware of it, Reconstruction remains part of our lives, or to put if another way, key issues confronting American society today are in some ways Reconstruction questions” (p. xi). The expansion of public education, the unconstitutionality of racially segregated schools, and the distinct view of whether public education in America constitutionally binds the federal government or becomes the responsibility of states, hinges upon Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment. Whereas White Americans looked to the state in their efforts to minimize the encroachment of the federal government on their rights and privileges, Black Americans “viewed the [federal] government as the guarantor of their rights (Foner, 1987, p. 880), particularly “when blacks had seen whites restored to local hegemony” (Foner, 987, p. 880) through racial violence.

American Education: The Emancipation and Education of Black Exiles

As the Constitution and Declaration of Independence took on new meaning during Reconstruction, the role and responsibility of education shifted as well, thereby illuminating the confluence between education and citizenship. Public education has existed since Colonial times. In Thomas Jefferson and the Ideology of Democratic Schooling, James Carpenter (2013) emphasizes the Jeffersonian view of education that amalgamated education and citizenship, subsequently laying the constitutional foundation for republican education. In this article, James Carpenter (2013) defines republican education, as used today, as “efforts to prepare students to be good citizens. Republican education hopes to help students know their rights and responsibilities, understand the political and historical legacy of important documents and government actions, and meet the expectations of citizenship” (p. 2). According to Carpenter (2013), “for Jefferson, education was not only instrumental in preparing citizens for their role in the new republic, but it also would serve to safeguard the United States and its citizens from the dangers posed by the British and their way of life” (p. 3). Education helped to civilize Americans from acting like the British. Furthermore, as Carpenter (2013) declares, “to ensure that the people were the best safeguard against an overzealous government, Jefferson’s political vision required an informed citizenry. Citizenship was integrally linked to power, responsibility, and freedom. It was axiomatic for Jefferson to connect freedom and responsibility, with republican citizenship” (p. 3). Such an expanded view of education as the rights of all citizens, which starkly differed from the educational norm of that time that only extended to the ruling class, buttressed whiteness as the model for American education.

Building upon the Jeffersonian view of education and citizenship, Suzanna Sherry (1995) asserts,

There is no dearth of literature of the rights of citizens, but it seems disingenuous (and maybe circular) to argue that one needs an education to exercise the rights of citizenship. After all, despite some claims that illiteracy is inevitably disenfranchising, one can vote – as well as earn a living, own property, raise a family, and do whatever else might be suggested as a right of citizenship – without an education. Millions do. The core of the claim that education is necessary to citizenship must instead be that education is necessary to the thoughtful or responsible exercise of citizenship rights. But focusing on how a right is exercised changes the nature of the argument. Citizens are no longer simply rights-bearing individuals. They are, rather, rights-bearing individuals with responsibilities. (p. 132).

For Sherry (1995), the rights and responsibilities of citizenship add virtue to the conversation, eventually “changing the nature of education itself ” (p. 133). From this perspective, “education is no longer something merely provided by the government and consumed by the individual. It is, rather, an ongoing lesson in responsible citizenship that requires participation and dedication on the part of present and future citizens” (Sherry, 1995, p. 133). Such virtues, fundamentally immersed in whiteness, has governed American education and laid the censorious role of schooling in educational institutions, both public and private schools alike. Whiteness prohibited Black Americans from acquiring formal education until Reconstruction. Even then, the normalization of whiteness manifested itself in institutional and instructional norms that denounced blackness. James Anderson (1988) argues, “both schooling for [republican] citizenship and schooling for second-class citizenship have been basic traditions in American education” (p. 1). It is Anderson’s use of the word schooling, coupled with the notion of education and citizenship, which solidifies the connection between blackness and schooling. It does not fall in the purview of this article to chronicle the historical evolution of American education, narrate the religious instruction of Black Americans, or offer a thorough account of the educational processes and norms that governed educational institutions during Reconstruction. On the contrary, this article unravels the paradoxical implications of blackness, substantiated in anti-black policies and practices that beset educational institutions or what this article references as schooling, and how such thought connects King’s ideological usage of the term “promissory note” to educational inequalities.

The ingenuity of emancipated Black Americans is no small endeavor. W.E.B. DuBois (1935) reveals, “the eagerness to learn among American Negroes was exceptional in the case of a poor and recently emancipated folks” (p. 637). American enslavement robbed Black Americans of many things, but it did not quench their insatiable appetite for formal education. Amid anti-literacy laws and severe repercussions, Black Americans maintained a positive outlook on the transformative role of education. In Black Reconstruction, DuBois (1935) highlights the role that Black Americans played in erecting educational institutions that served “at the expense of the state” (p. 638). Black Americans “sought to use the authority of the state to create universal and free schools open to all” (Tyack and Lowe, 1986, p. 239). White Americans, however, used the authority of the state to sustain whiteness. Emphasizing the “obstacles to a free public school system,” seeing as how the idea of public education has existed since the Colonial Era, DuBois (1935) highlights the attitude of white property owners who believed education created challenges to exploitation and manipulation, as the first major obstacle. According to DuBois (1935), “the second obstacle was that the white laborers did not demand education, and saw no need of it, save in exceptional cases” (p. 641). On the contrary,

It was only the other part of the laboring class, the black folks, who connected knowledge with power; who believed that education was the stepping-stone to wealth and respect, and that wealth, without education, was crippled. Perhaps the very fact that so many of them had seen the wealthy slaveholders at close range, and knew the extent of ignorance and inefficiency among them, led to that extraordinary mass demand on the part of the black laboring class for education. And it was this demand that was the effective force for the establishment of the public school in the South on a permanent basis, for all people and all classes. (p. 641)

Black Americans worked tirelessly, sacrificially, and collectively to erect educational institutions and adopt liberating pedagogies that helped to foster social change. As Black Americans sought autonomy and continued to demand their constitutional rights, education became synonymous with liberation. Black Americans held to the belief that education would ameliorate the educational advantages that whiteness fortified. Unfortunately, this was not the case. To restore the South to its former state, Black Americans “fell victim to violence, fraud, and national abandonment” (Foner, 1987, p. 878). The economic, political, and educational advancement of Black Americans came to an abrupt halt. According to Tyack and Lowe (1986), “with the restoration of white supremacy, blacks in the South were forced to attend schools universally segregated and increasingly starved for funds in comparison with the white schools” (p. 239). White Americans “did not dismantle the common school systems that blacks and their allies had created, but they used those educational systems to reinforce the caste system” (Tyack and Lowe, 1986, p. 239). Schooling reinforced the values, expectations, and behaviorism that whiteness normalized, and black students became versed in the inferiority of blackness in American democracy, from educational curriculums to educational standards and instructional assessments. Carter G. Woodson would later unravel the docility of American education and how Black Americans easily succumbed to whiteness.5 Herbert A. Simon (1993) defines docility as “the tendency to depend on suggestions, recommendations, persuasion, and information obtained through social channels as a major basis for choice” (p. 2). In a similar manner as anti-literacy laws that prohibited Black Americans from learning how to read and white, educational institutions, fundamentally steeped in whiteness, helped to restore the docility of American enslavement. Substandard facilities, inequitable funding, denigrating narratives, and the mischaracterization of black students, along with a resurgence of black autonomy and subjectivity, gave way to Brown v. Board of Education.

The Disintegration of Blackness: Brown v. Board of Education

The ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate public schools reinvigorated the ideal of racial justice and equality for countless Black Americans. Similarly to Black Americans living under the brute of Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws restored the racial caste system of oppression and dehumanization, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, consequently forcing Black Americans to once again grapple with the contradictions of American democracy. Reconstruction, albeit fleeting, became a joyous and celebratory period in the lives of Black Americans, no longer subject to the cruelties of American enslavement. However, as is the case with any advancements that Black Americans have collectively made in America, whiteness takes on new meanings. It manifests itself in the illusions of American democracy and the delusion that every American has access to the same opportunities. Whiteness is institutionalized and individualized. Reconstruction ushered in a period of economic, political, and educational opportunities, however, whiteness quickly robbed Black Americans of those opportunities through the restoration of anti-black laws, policies, and practices.

Jason Jordan (2015) interrogates the role that laws and courts played in the construction of race and the maintenance of whiteness in the American legal system. Courts have played a dehumanizing and liberating role in race relations in America. In analyzing the rhetoric of Brown, Jordan (2015) unravels how the court racialized subjects as “either black or white,” and ultimately concludes that the court was “not concerned with questions of equal facilities or educational standards, but instead the issue of whether the existence of white bodies within a school is a right that must be made available to all on equal terms” (Jordan, 2015, p. 24). For Jordan (2015), the equality that the court talked about in Brown was “an attempt to fix the problem of blackness” (p. 25) in public schools, not the eradication of whiteness.

Brown v. Board of Education, though a landmark case that “struck down state-sponsored racial segregation of America’s public schools” (Patterson, 2001, p. xiii), did not eradicate the permanence of whiteness in educational institutions. If anything, Brown became the judicial catalyst for the disintegration of blackness, as the assimilation to whiteness became the antidote against blackness. Legalized discrimination has existed in educational institutions since the Colonial Era, subsequently disclosing the economic and political conditions that created inferior schools. American apartheid, as mentioned earlier, plays an indispensable role in the makeup of schools today, as zip codes determine the quality of education and instructional resources that students receive.6 April L. Peters (2019) pointedly asserts, “education exists in a broader system of oppression,” in which she concludes that desegregation closed Black schools, not White one, and disintegrated the impact of Black educators on their students and the communities they served” (p. 521). It is not the intent of this article to regurgitate the historical and political context of Brown, nor to offer a thorough analysis of Brown’s failures. On the contrary, this article emphasizes how Brown contributed to the disintegration of blackness, following in the historical denunciation of blackness in the American legal system, and how the dissolution of blackness has contributed to an array of challenges that beset educational institutions today.

In The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration, Adam Fairclough (2004) examine the negative stigma attached to black schools before Brown and what black schools lost in the aftermath of Brown. Amid external challenges, inequitable funding, and the prevalence of whiteness in curriculums and educational standards, black schools played an essential role “in the formation and growth of black communities during the century following emancipation” (p. 3). Fairclough (2004) continues,

There is no doubt that in shattering the legal basis of white supremacy, Brown opened up new opportunities for black advancement. But desegregation also abolished, or at least radically transformed, an anchor of the southern black community. It exacted costs – institutional, economic, and psychological – of which black teachers paid more than their fair share. (p. 3).

Before Brown, there was an affirmation of racial identity, collective responsibility, cultural pride, and dedication that prevailed in black schools. Peters (2019) highlights some of the unforeseen consequences of desegregation and sheds light on the disintegration of black education:

• “The law did not protect Black teachers and administrators from being fired and systematically pushed out of their profession” (p. 521).

• “Desegregation meant that Black students were no longer taught by Black teachers. The Brown legislation created an experience where Black students received instruction from teachers who often were vehemently against desegregation in the first place (p. 522).

• “Teachers were disconnected from students’ culture and way of life” (p. 522).

• “The implementation of desegregation in schools meant the closing of many Black schools, the loss of jobs for many Black educators and Black administrators, and policy changes that would restrict the growth of Black educators and Black administrators in the K-12 system that could still be seen more than 60 years after the Brown decision” (p. 522–523).

Desegregation contributed to the displacement of black educators, the dissolution of black schools, and the disintegration of blackness. Zero-tolerance policies, inequitable funding, dilapidated buildings, the criminalization of black students, obsolete teacher preparation programs, and culturally insensitive curriculums, standards, and assessments would soon stigmatize black schools after Brown. Following the racial indignation of White Americans, when the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision, John Hope Franklin (2004) declares,

The South responded by saying that it would never permit white and black children to attend the same school. Southern members of Congress drew up the Southern Manifesto that was signed by all but three senators from that region that declared that they would use all lawful means to reverse the decision. Various school jurisdictions adopted measures to preserve racially segregated schools. They pass pupil placement laws, they established busing programs, and they fled to the suburbs or wherever they could be certain that the races would be kept segregated in the schools. (p. 13).

The disdain for blackness, as history records in the aftermath of Reconstruction, created the underlying conditions of black schools today. According to Franklin (2004), “although few people at the time saw the connection between the fight that Marshall led in 1954 and the fight that Martin Luther King, Jr., led a decade later, it takes only the slightest discernment to see the dots that connect them” (p. 13). During the March on Washington in 1963, nine years removed from Brown, King dramatized how “America had defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned” (p. 1). King continued, “instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’” (p. 2). Although a seminal case in educational reform, Brown did not unleash the educational changes that many expected. King was cognizant of such reality. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech illuminates the educational inequalities that beset Black Americans, not White Americans. Moreover, still to this day, the constitutional promises guaranteed to White Americans have not become actualized for Black Americans, particularly when it comes to education.

King’s Dream: A Pedagogical Nightmare

It does not require an anecdotal account of American history to realize the paradoxical implications of blackness in American democracy. From the constitutional shortsightedness of white framers who legislated the dehumanization and disregard for blackness to the systematic dismantling and disdain for blackness in American democracy today. America has reneged on the constitutional promises of freedom, justice, and equality for all. While White Americans have enjoyed the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizenship, the same cannot be said for Black Americans. Gary Younge (2013), in his book The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream, provides a thorough account of events that unraveled before the speech and the political context that helped position the speech. Without negating or diminishing the insights that other speakers offered on that day, the phrase “speech” specifically references King’s address and what we have come to know as “I Have a Dream.” Regurgitating a historical account of events that transpired before the speech, Younge (2013) states, “the march was held just ten weeks after [George] Wallace stood in a schoolhouse doorway to prevent Black students from going to college, and little more than two weeks before four Black girls were bombed to death in Birmingham, Alabama, during Sunday school” (p. 7). Several days before the March, intense discussions simmered around the contents of the speech, accompanied by days of editorial input and review. As King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, as the final speaker of the day, he “started by locating the demands of Black America as consistent with America’s historical tradition rather than aberrant from it” (p. 106). King understands the contradictions of American history and uses white normative discourse, enshrined in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Emancipation Proclamation, to expose the moral hypocrisy of White America through palatable language. Younge (2013) captures an array of voices that conclude, “substantively, ‘I Have a Dream” was not King’s greatest speech” (p. 6), nor does he speak in a militant tone. So, what makes this speech so powerful and persuasive?

King does not operate in a moral, intellectual, or historical vacuum. In recognizing the limitations of Brown, Herbert Lovelace (2017) postulates that “Brown gave activists, like King, a legal vocabulary to defend their struggle as constitutional, quintessentially American, and radically progressive” (p. 404). King does not speak as someone versed in constitutional law, nor had he “participated in the Brown litigation” (p. 396), but because he understood the historical significance of that moment, King used Brown to advocate for broader changes.7 King had already begun to employ the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in his attempt to extend the ruling of Brown to all facets of legalized discrimination and segregation in American democracy. Lovelace (2017) asserts, “Brown gave activists new moral, political, and legal language to negotiate the demands of civil rights leadership during the Cold War. King’s ability to connect Brown to Exodus built from an older tradition of black theology that blended secular and sacred concepts” (p. 397). As noted earlier, Black Americans drew strength from biblical passages in their attempts to contemporize the black freedom struggle in America, thereby aligning biblical interpretations of God with the struggle for freedom, justice, and equality in America. Hence, “Brown was an additional and readily available tool for [King] to argue that his position was right,” subsequently allowing King to “tie his activism to Brown” (p. 397). Furthermore, King utilized Brown’s ideals “to leverage the institutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court to appeal to government officials and everyday citizens who valued judicial review, federal supremacy, and the rule of law” (p. 406).

King, grounded in the historical trajectory of the black freedom movement in America, empathizes how America had reneged on its constitutional promises, which allowed him the rhetorical space to invoke the imagery of a bad check. America had paid Black Americans with a bad check. The imagery of a bad check highlights the depth of legalized discrimination and illuminates the role that courts played in legitimizing segregation and maintaining the validity of whiteness. Again, King comes from a long tradition of Black Americans to critically scrutinize the ideals and promises of American citizenship, but on this occasion, he does so in a digestible way. This speech and specifically the usage of the term “promissory note,” allows King to emphasize the moral and constitutional lapses of American democracy. Police brutality, housing segregation, voting rights, and educational inequalities are just a few examples of how “America had defaulted on its promissory note” (p. 1). These codified forms of discrimination all have one thing in common, the disdain and disregard for blackness in white spaces. Though intersectionality has provided an intellectual avenue to traverse different eras of American history and critical race theory has allowed readers to scrutinize the role of law, the intent of this article has remained the same. That is, to illuminate the paradoxical implications of blackness in American democracy, substantiated in anti-black policies and practices that beset educational institutions. Furthermore, to emphasize the connectedness between King’s public address and educational inequalities, which solidifies the ideological bond between blackness and schooling. America continues to default on its “promissory note” any time blackness acquiesces to whiteness.