"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.

As Clayborne Carson's quasi-autobiography of King illustrates, the debate over civil rights in modern-day America could very well begin and end with King. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., conceived by wife Coretta Scott King and culled by Carson from speeches, sermons, and letters throughout King's short but prolific life, offers alternative visions of how America should address the so-called "Negro problem."

Americans first learned about King when he led a year-long bus boycott to desegregate public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama. He went on to preside over the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which organized nonviolent protests throughout the segregated South. Drawing from the nation's republican and biblical heritage, King preached to an American choir that had forgotten the verses of their own political hymns—and the choir responded by passing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

King's popularity would soon wane, however, with both blacks and whites. When James Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, was shot during a solo 1966 "March Against Fear," Stokely Carmichael and other black leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) renounced non-violence and intimidated white volunteers with calls for "Black Power."3 A year later would find King publicly opposing the Vietnam War and calling for an Economic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged to provide a guaranteed job or income. Not exactly what most white Americans wanted to hear. But as Carson highlights from a 1952 letter King wrote to his future wife, King had long since found capitalism wanting, believing it created "a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes."

But what stands out about King's politics is not economics but theology. Carson, a Stanford historian and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project,4 previously published a selection of King's sermons entitled A Knock at Midnight (Warner Books, 1998). Unfortunately, the Autobiography excerpts only a few sermons. It does include King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," a Christian apologia of civil disobedience. After eight Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergymen of Birmingham, Alabama, chastised King for meddling in Birmingham's racial problems, he took dead aim at moderate church leaders and laymen whose complacency and appeals to "law and order" perpetuated segregation: "So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight be hind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice." This little light of mine, indeed.

While King sought to make visible the "citizenship rights" of black Americans, his ultimate goal was "the be loved community." As he put it during the 1955-56 bus boycott: "We are seeking to improve not the Negro of Montgomery but the whole of Montgomery." Believing in the God who "calls things that are not as though they are," King saw both oppressor and oppressed from God's point of view and acted in hopes of transforming their lives with words that gave rhetoric a good name.

Carson's "autobiography" lets King "make it plain" for himself. But as Carson admits, it is the public life of King on display in his book. King's first-person, running narrative highlights his social activism while offering only glimpses of his pastoral duties at the Dexter Avenue and Ebenezer Baptist churches, and even less about his role as husband, father, or friend. For example, the reader finds nothing about King's early effort to make the National Baptist Convention more active in the struggle for civil rights—an effort thwarted by its president, Joseph H. Jackson, and resulting in King's expulsion from the organization. For a more comprehensive and candid look at King's life, one must consult David Garrow's Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Morrow, 1986) and Taylor Branch's America in the King Years trilogy: Parting the Waters, 1954-63 (Simon & Schuster, 1988), Pillar of Fire, 1963-65 (1998), and his forthcoming At Canaan's Edge, 1965-68.5

The last two years of King's life take fictional flight in Dreamer, a thought-provoking novella by Charles Johnson. The reader follows Matthew Bishop, a nondescript volunteer in the civil rights movement, as he trains one Chaym Smith to act as a body-double for King. But for his uncanny physical resemblance to the Right Reverend King, Chaym Smith believes he has little to offer the movement or the world by way of a lasting deed. The Chaym or "Cain" of his persona, manifesting "envy and divine rejection," drives a plot that explores the nexus between King's "sacred principle" of human equality and Chaym's experience of "the staggering inequities of personal fortune."

Winner of the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage and 1998 recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, Johnson intersperses Dreamer with a fictional King's ruminations about his leadership in the Cause. Comparing King with his lookalike, the question arises, Why did King turn out so much like a king but Chaym Smith, well, like any old Smith6 one would find in the phone book? That King found strength for the journey in a Christian God and doting parents, whereas the orphaned Chaym became a misfit of eclectic faith in a world full of sheep and "group-think," offers a clue to the diverging paths of the two dreamers.

In one scene, Chaym takes offense when he is mistaken for King in a diner. When Bishop later reminds him not to say anything when he prepares to accept an award as King's stand-in, Chaym remarks, "As long as he's alive, I guess I'll always be nothing." The more he looks and sounds like the great civil rights leader, the more he resents being admired only for who he appears to be and not who he truly is.

Later, as he recovers from taking a bullet as King's double, Chaym grows a moustache, beard, and Afro. He is now mistaken for LeRoi Jones (later to be known as Amiri Baraka), the Black Arts Movement trailblazer, suggesting a black nationalist alternative for making oneself visible in a predominantly white America. Unfortunately for Chaym, the question of who he was or should be come drives him literally into oblivion as he tries to emulate King while striving to achieve fame in his own right.

This universal struggle to become known—to make one's identity a visible reality—could justify in some minds that most controversial of civil rights policies: affirmative action. Be cause government permitted discrimination against racial minorities in the past, government should now permit "benign" racial preferences to in crease the visibility of individuals hitherto excluded.

The most weighty of recent tomes to defend affirmative action in higher education is authored by two former presidents of prestige universities, William G. Bowen (Princeton) and Derek Bok (Harvard). The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions examines "what race-sensitive admissions policies have meant over a long stretch of the river—both to the individuals who were admitted and to the society that has invested in their education and that counts so heavily on their leadership." Wielding survey results of graduates from elite colleges and universities from the years 1951, 1976, 1989, Bowen and Bok conclude that the beneficiaries of affirmative action have not felt stigmatized by their reception into the erstwhile lily-white halls of the Ivies; have graduated in higher percentages than those who en rolled at less selective schools; and have entered the social and occupational flow of American life with heightened self-esteem and civic commitment.

Few would argue against colleges and universities taking "affirmative action" to rid the admissions process of racial bigotry. The debate arises over the principle of inequality that drives affirmative action in practice: namely, the unequal assessment of applicants based on race. Bowen and Bok calculate that a "race-neutral standard" in admissions would reduce black enrollment at the most selective colleges and universities between 50 and 70 percent. They therefore defend "race-sensitive" policies as necessary to promote racial diversity on college campuses.

But critics see affirmative action as no less discriminatory than the bigoted policies of old. To secure the equal opportunity of each citizen, the government of all should be partial to none. Moreover, discrimination for the sake of diversity presumes that the current "achievement gap" between blacks and whites7 is permanent, implying that blacks are incapable of measuring up to the standards applied to whites. Whatever the rationale, critics have affirmative action on the ropes; at last count, nine states have banned the use of racial preferences by state colleges and contractors.

After a trial of 30 years, what has affirmative action taught Americans? That whites are sincere about redressing their privileged position in American society by trying to smooth the entry of minorities into the American mainstream? Or, that minority success depends less on their skills, preparation, and experience, and more on the special assistance of schools and employers that offer no comparable aid to their white (or Asian) neighbor? Like abortion, affirmative action has be come a national Rorschach test, revealing opposing definitions of justice and rights and thus portending no easy transition to the "color-blind" treatment of American citizens by their government.

Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of English at San Jose University, interprets this impasse as evidence of the derailment of the civil rights movement. In A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, Steele pulls no punches in holding "redemptive liberalism" responsible for promoting a double standard regarding the individual responsibility of whites and blacks. Why is it, he asks, that race-related re form since the 1960s "always asks less of blacks and exempts them from the expectations, standards, principles, and challenges that are considered demanding but necessary for the development of competence and character in others"? Steele adds, "It cannot be coincidental that in those areas of greatest black achievement—music, literature, entertainment, sports—there have been no interventions whatsoever."

And so Steele condemns the contrived visibility of minorities, or group representation, that Bowen and Bok laud as the glory of affirmative action. By presuming that only "white power" can cure "black impotence," affirmative action perpetuates the notion of black victimization. Instead of excusing and accepting black weakness in exchange for alleviating white guilt for the plight of black America, truly liberal policies should have fostered "a hunger for responsibility" to stimulate individual black achievement.

Readers of Steele's earlier collection of essays, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (Harperperennial Library, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, will find much that is repeated in A Dream Deferred—with the volume turned way up. Nevertheless, Steele's concern for removing barriers to any individual's freedom and for preserving the moral agency of each member of society makes his book an instructive contribution to the debate over the role of government in the advancement of minorities in America.

In A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, Ron Suskind chronicles an inner city youth's triumphs and travails as he makes his way from Ballou Senior High School in southeast Washington, D.C., to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Suskind's play-by-play narrative, which began as a Pulitzer Prize-winning pair of articles for the Wall Street Journal, shows how Cedric Jennings's pursuit of academic excellence in a hostile environment made him a stranger in a strange land even before he arrived at Brown.

Cedric dreamed of studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked hard to earn a 4.02 GPA at a high school where nearly 50 percent transferred or dropped out. But after struggling through a summer program for minorities at MIT, he discovered that his high school studies left him "miles behind" for work at the top of the academic food chain. After a disappointing, second-effort 960 on the SAT, he applied for "early admission" to Brown University—"still Ivy League," but where the average sat score for admittees is 1290—and was accepted. Affirmative action at work? Readers may draw their own conclusions; it certainly didn't hurt that Suskind's profile of Cedric's academic journey appeared in the Journal during Cedric's junior year.

Persecution for studying, even from his absentee father, was perhaps the most formidable obstacle Cedric overcame through faith, family, and friendship. In particular, his mother provided him an ordered world, as best as she could muster as a single parent, bolstered by faith and high expectations. And when Mama says, "I'll save you, and me, too," she puts her finger on the kind of solution to the problems of the inner city that no government program could match.

After a slow start, Cedric graduated from Brown last year with a 3.4 GPA in applied mathematics and educational studies. Passing up an offer from Goldman Sachs to enter a financial analyst training program, he now develops software for Vienna-based MicroStrategy Inc.

Reflecting on Cedric's success to date, Suskind concludes: "He had hope in a better world he could not yet see that overwhelmed the cries of 'you can't' or 'you won't' or 'why bother.' " This gloss on Hebrews 11:1, a favorite of Cedric's, highlights the faith he found necessary to achieve more than his circumstances or surroundings might otherwise predict. By making the invisible visible, Cedric became visible himself. As Suskind puts it, "That's the thing, he figures, that built the country, that drew often luckless people across oceans to a place they could barely imagine."

Ralph Ellison once wrote that "the obligation of making oneself seen and heard was an imperative of American democratic individualism." This was especially the case when prejudice barred many from fully developing and exercising their talents and skills. The unfortunate saliency of race, given America's history of bigotry, certainly complicates the trouble we all have with invisibility. But as the books under review illustrate, the road to racial reconciliation and the beloved community can be built—if only by a "hope in the unseen."

Lucas E. Morel is assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Lincoln's Sacred Effort: Defining Religion's Role in American Self-Government (Lexington Books).

Footnotes

1. "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" (July 5, 1852), in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip S. Foner and abridged and adapted by Yuval Taylor (Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), p. 201. For a sourcebook of black testimonies in the religious history of America, both Christian and otherwise, see Milton C. Sernett, African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Duke Univ. Press, 1999), recently published in a second edition that incorporates more writings by and about women.

2. For divergent responses of Christians to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, see Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997).

3. For a firsthand account of the ouster of John Lewis from the presidency of SNCC, see John Lewis with Michael D'Orso, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

4. Symbol of the Movement, January 1957-December 1958, the fourth of a projected 14 volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Univ. of California Press), has recently been published.

5. For King's speeches and writings, see I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World (HarperCollins, 1992) or the more expansive A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986), both edited by the late James M. Washington.

6. Curiously enough, the Hebrew word for "smith" or metal-worker is "cain" (see Gen. 4:22).

7. For example, Bowen and Bok show that the graduation rate of blacks at elite colleges and universities (79 percent) trailed that of Hispanics (90 percent), whites (94 percent), and Asians (96 percent). Moreover, the average GPA of blacks (2.61) trailed that of whites (3.15), while the class rank of blacks (23rd percentile) trailed that of whites (53rd percentile). This measure of "underperformance" holds for blacks and whites with similar SAT scores.

Books discussed in this essay

Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000). 404 pp.; $25.

Clayborne Carson (editor), The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Warner Books, 1998). 400 pp.; $25.

Charles Johnson, Dreamer: A Novel (Scribner, 1998). 236 pp.; $23, hardcover; $12, paper.

William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton Univ. Press, 1998). 472 pp.; $24.95, hardcover; $16.95, paper.

Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom(HarperCollins, 1998). 185 pp.; $24, hardcover; $14, paper.

Ron Suskind, A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (Broadway Books, 1998). 372 pp.; $25, hardcover; $13, paper.

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