Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King jnr stood before the Lincoln Memorial and proclaimed his most famous words: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character."
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Poetic, evocative, hopeful, these words have inspired people the world over. In Australia today, however, campaigners against the Voice to Parliament are carelessly misusing them.
Tony Abbott recently used King's words to oppose the Voice, as did Peter Dutton in May. Dutton said, "The great progress of the 20th century's civil rights movement was the push to eradicate difference - to judge each other on the content of our character, not the colour of our skin." Dutton missed the point. King fought to eradicate racism, not difference.
King spoke at the March on Washington amid the almighty battle for civil rights. He came via Birmingham, Alabama, where Bull Connor's police had jailed him for opposing racial segregation. On June 11, 1963, president John F. Kennedy had announced the Civil Rights Act and on 28 August 1963, 250,000 marchers, including Native Americans, urged Congress to pass the act. In 1964, Congress passed the act, and then the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
King cut an inspirational figure but was unafraid to tell hard truths. In Why We Can't Wait, he wrote of British colonialism in America, "Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race." History demonstrates that the British transported this doctrine to Australia.
King's voice too reached Australia. The US civil rights movement inspired Charles Perkins and the 1965 Freedom Ride, and the 1967 referendum to count Indigenous Australians as part of the population. 90.77 per cent of Australians voted "yes".
Ignoring the fact that King inspired reform in the 1960s, the "no" campaign uses him to block reform now, arguing that the Voice would give Indigenous Australians an unfair advantage, based on skin colour.
In Australia, where policies once existed to "breed out the colour" of Indigenous Australians, this is beyond offensive. And condemning the Voice with King's words is completely contradictory. King thought that if one group experienced unique discrimination against it, there ought to be a unique remedy in their favour.
While "no" campaigners quote King's dream, they also deride the Voice for lacking detail.
They appear to have heard King exclaim, "I have a 'detailed' dream." No campaigners want King's dream but without his imagination, without his sense of justice, without his anti-colonialism. They use him to stoke fear not to challenge an unjust status quo.
A better way to follow King's dream is to write some dreaming into Australia's constitution.
A better way to follow King is to write some reconciliation into our constitution. King adhered to the Christian maxim of loving one's enemy. This may seem sentimental, yet the Voice is in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. If Australia has a heart, we need that in our constitution, too. If those quoting King's "I have a dream" speech don't want some heart, reconciliation and dreaming, in Australia's constitution, they are quoting the wrong person.
King is not the historical ally that they think he is.
King faced opponents ranging from the Ku Klux Klan, racist politicians, and even conservative African-Americans. Most falsely accused him of being a communist (the "no" camp attempts to do likewise to "yes" campaigner, Thomas Mayo). Others told King to slow down, that he was needlessly stirring up racism. King responded, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, that, "For years now I have heard the word 'wait'. However this 'wait' has almost always meant 'never.'" King did not wait for racists to quiet; he confronted them.
Malcolm X derided the march on Washington as the farce in Washington; King kept his eyes on the prize and kept moving.
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Australia, too, needs to keep moving. Australia has voted only eight times to change the constitution. The US has amended its constitution 27 times since 1789, with the first 10 amendments coming in one slate, in 1791.
After the Civil War, Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to abolish slavery, protect civil rights, and protect voting rights. The southern states so abused these amendments that the civil rights movement became a necessity in the 1950s. Yet King, the movement, and Congress built on the amendments with legislation, and they still stand as vital safeguards for civil rights.
Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders in our constitution can do likewise.
In 2018, one of the four little children that King spoke of in 1963, his now adult son Martin Luther King III, visited Alice Springs during Reconciliation Week. Shocked by what he found he said, "In a real sense, your nation should be embarrassed about how it treats First Nations people." He added: "For some reason, there's been this desire to re-oppress people who are already oppressed." Let us not take that nightmarish path.
The Voice referendum will measure the content of Australia's character. It is a once in a generation opportunity to act upon "the fierce urgency of now", as King would say, and to bend "the arc of the moral universe" toward justice. If Australia votes yes to the Voice, First Nations Australians will be heard more clearly than ever, and we will amplify the echo of King's voice for ages yet to come.
- Daniel Fleming is a lecturer in US history at the University of Wollongong. He recently published the book "Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day".
