Dyson’s April 4, 1968 reviewed in the NYT

April 4, 1968, by Michael Eric Dyson
9780465002122 | $26.95 hc | in stock
Basic Civitas / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Michael Eric Dyson’s book on Martin Luther King received a brief review in the NYT Book Review, July 20th:

Dyson, the Georgetown University sociology professor and author of many books, examines the impact of Martin Luther King’s death on his own world as well as on the national psyche. He was 9 when King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. After that day, Dyson saw the world differently. For a long time, he says, he felt afraid when he was at home in a bathroom that “opened onto a small balcony.” If King could be killed, he could be, too. “The bullet that shattered King’s jaw lodged fragments of fear deep inside my psyche,” he writes. King, of course, predicted his demise long before it occurred: “He ate, drank and slept death.” Ultimately, Dyson says, a violent end helped establish his place in the American pantheon (and speeded up the creation of a national holiday by decades). Dyson describes how close Americans have come to achieving King’s goals — or how far we still have to go (according to 2004 data, 25 percent of blacks live in poverty). He also evaluates the people who carry on King’s legacy, giving high marks to Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Some parts of “April 4, 1968” are hokey (for example, an imaginary interview with an 80-year-old King), yet many passages are lovely and haunting. “His unknowing final request … that chilly spring evening,” Dyson writes, was for the musician Ben Branch “to play the hymn ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ at the rally that night, and to ‘play it real pretty.’”