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Legacies and Liabilities of an Insurgent Past: Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr., on the House and Senate Floor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Francesca Polletta
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At a ceremony held in 1986 to install a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., alongside those of other national heroes in the U.S. Capitol, former King associate Vincent Harding reminded the audience that King himself probably would have joined the demonstrators outside the Capitol protesting American policy in Central America (Thelen 1987: 436). Harding’s comment captures the tension between commemoration and dissent, or, better, between state-sponsored remembrance and state-targeted opposition that is the subject of this essay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 4: Memory and the nation , Winter 1998 , pp. 479 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998 

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