Martin Luther King Jr.’s promissory-note framing treated the American Idea as sound but unhonored

Evidence

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white, would be guaranteed the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”….Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 418

Categorization

• XREF: This is King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ cash-a-check passage, quoted as the founding text of black liberal politics — hooks into how persuasively the promise is itself part of the problem. — connects to: King’s Christian-redemption framing mobilized America more effectively than Malcolm X’s rights language; Martin Luther King framed civil rights in a redemptive national-biblical language — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 705; King tied Black freedom to redeeming America’s sacred founding promise (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: King’s Christian-redemption framing mobilized America more effectively than Malcolm X’s rights language; Martin Luther King framed civil rights in a redemptive national-biblical language — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 705; King tied Black freedom to redeeming America’s sacred founding promise (+1 more)