MLK Jr. Imagined an America That Transcended Race

A little-known text sheds some light on the civil rights leader's imagining of the future.

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Martin Luther King Jr. Day brings with it spirited debates about what the late civil rights leader believed. King is for many Americans a sort of prophetic figure; people across the political spectrum invoke his name to argue for sometimes diametrically opposed ideas. That’s because respect for the man is so wide and deep in American society that arguing he was actually on your side of a contentious argument could be a debate winner.

With that being said, I have to admit that I do think that King was on my side of a very thorny debate: like me, he believed that race as a social category should eventually fade away.

In a little-known 1961 document preserved at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, King explained what he believed the future would look like if the civil rights movement succeeded.

The text, titled “After Desegregation—What,” serves as a window into King’s mind. He argued that the goal wasn’t so much desegregation — tearing down barriers between white and black residents — but integration.

What did integration look like, in King’s view?

He wrote that once “the laws between them have been struck down, both Negroes and Whites will need to win friends across the invisible, though nonetheless real, psychological color line.”

Achieving that meant not only ending the practices of whites-only establishments but approaching minority spaces in the same way.

“The question remains," he wrote, "will Negroes generally find it as easy to give up their own prejudices as it is now to demand their rights of others? Will the same forthrightness be shown in admitting whites to Negro clubs, fraternities and other voluntary associations that is now being shown in pressing for admittance to restaurants and theaters.”

He hoped that integration would not only remove the barriers that held African Americans back but also eliminate racial thinking altogether.

“As the color differential fades,” he wrote, “so will the racial point of view. Less and less will it be possible to speak with accuracy of Negro newspapers, Negro churches or the Negro vote. More and more, economic, social, and professional status will be more decisive in determining a man’s orientation than the color of his skin.”

It’s important to note that King did not believe that America could go from slave state to apartheid state to colorblind overnight. Importantly, he saw integration and the elimination of the “racial point of view” as the outcome of the “color differential” in society fading away. There’s still tremendous work to do to make sure we reach that point in American society — expanding opportunity to every community in America and continuing to reduce prejudice are ongoing projects.

But I think it’s important to remember what MLK viewed as his North Star and make sure that the cultural and political elites who invoke his name so frequently make it theirs as well. Achieving King’s dream means eventually transcending race, not reifying it.