Not Dreaming : Martin Luther King Jr.’s Critique of America

Not Dreaming: Martin Luther King Jr’s Critique of America seeks to deepen the American public’s understanding of its most famous African American protest leader. These flaws that plagued America in MLK’s lifetime persist in twenty-first century America, giving a striking contemporary relevance to King’s social criticism.

Not Dreaming: Martin Luther King Jr’s Critique of America seeks to deepen the American public’s understanding of its most famous African American protest leader. While Americans venerate MLK as great orator who dreamed of a world free of racism, most are unfamiliar with King’s penetrating and radical social criticism. Not Dreaming reveals that MLK spoke and wrote extensively about what he termed the “triple evils” afflicting the U.S.: racism, militarism, and the extreme materialism that yielded vast economic inequality. These flaws that plagued America in MLK’s lifetime persist in twenty-first century America, giving a striking contemporary relevance to King’s social criticism. His democratic vision of an America that embraced non-violence, valued people over profits, abolished poverty, rejected war, and broke with its white supremacist past is one our nation badly needs to reconsider. Not Dreaming offers us MLK not merely as a historical figure but as a critic whose ideas can help twenty-first century America become a more just, humane, and democratic society.