Chapter 3: The King’s Two Bodies

The nonpareil American writer Ralph Ellison mined the historical substrate of U.S. culture not merely for exempla to enrich his commentaries but also for proofs to back greatly more polemical claims. Thus he had no problem invoking “elders” who, despite racial discrimination, “recognized their presence and influence in areas of American life from which they were physically barred.”1 Ralph Ellison, “Haverford Statement,” 1969, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. and with an introduction by John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 434–35. For these cultural practitioners, “the problem was not that of identifying with the scene, but of having others give public recognition to their contributions. Certainly there was no question of trying to withdraw in a pique or of surrendering their investment in the experiment.”2 Ibid., 435. You’d have to want to miss it not to register Ellison’s fondness for citing cases where discomposure reigns, where it’s utterly definitive for both the constitution and the substance of the case, and where his account conveys his incredulity at the ease with which American audiences elide that discomposure’s complexity, as though through a blockage of sense. When speaking of Melvin Tolson, Ellison goes so far as to implore his listener to believe him: “I can remember another figure whom I held in as much esteem as Alain Locke when . . . I was growing up, and this was a man by the name of Melvin Tolson. Many of you might know his poetry, but I first knew Tolson as a teacher at Wiley College in Texas. Tolson was training a drama group but his special pride and joy was a debating society through which he had inherited all the techniques of debate and rhetoric in the nineteenth century as they have been filtered down through those young New Englanders who went south during the Reconstruction to teach the Freedmen. Tolson extended these traditions and techniques to such an extent that more than once the debating team of Oxford used to come out there and get clobbered. Now, this isn’t the kind of knowledge of American education or American cultural history that you find easily available but I assure you I am not creating fantasies. I am speaking of what actually happened. How confusing it was to find that what was considered so excellent that it could defeat the members of a great university was not honored throughout the larger society.” Ellison, “Alain Locke,” 1974, in Collected Essays, 447. Nothing captures the spring of Ellison’s conviction like the captivating mobility of what he tactically called “the American language”: “It is not . . . a product of ‘white’ culture as against ‘black’ culture; rather it is the product of cultural integration. And the realities of discrimination and racism notwithstanding it is a fact that culturally the melting pot has indeed melted.”3 Ellison, “Haverford Statement,” 434. Ellison’s emphasis. According to the editor of Collected Essays, “Ellison made this statement using his ‘situation as a Negro American’ to explain his ‘personal affirmation of integration without the surrender of our unique identity as a people’ and his belief that ‘the only way to be an effective Negro intellectual is by being a most perceptive and responsible American intellectual.’” Callahan in Collected Essays, 431. It was entirely to the good to be able to see oneself in “all the movements of American life no matter how confused the scene.”4 Ellison, “Haverford Statement,” 435. For Ellison, such manifestations of what I call discomposure were inexhaustible sources of American optimism.

In the spring of 1969, a decisive cultural moment had put Ellison’s optimism to the test. He found himself speaking on a thickly confused scene. Ellison was at Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, where he had prepared some brief remarks for a panel discussion. The commendatory aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 was continuing, sanctifying King in a way, even as the fervor around nascent black determinisms, such as the Black Arts Movement, that had shot to power in the wake of King’s death was also at its height. Ellison stepped soberly into that fray to talk about optimism. Even amidst such breakage, the writer insisted that the task remained “to explore the wholeness of American life and the interrelationships between the various groups which compose it.”5 Ibid.

I am calling attention to the cultural pluralism of American life because until the present college generation this pluralism as expressed in art, folkways, and style was an important source of Negro American optimism — just as that optimism was a support of the general faith in the workability of the American system.6 Ibid., 434.

Feeling considerably less sanguine in that cultural moment, Ellison observed, “Today that sense of having shared creatively in the common American experiment is under assault by passionate young blacks who have lost their mooring in tradition.”7 Ibid., 435. The critic didn’t find it to be entirely their fault, however; the “assault,” or the impulse to separate, originated in despair over “the illusory possibility of unrestrained movement”: “instead of plunging in and testing themselves against the unknown, they choose rather to argue with the deficiencies of the past and to direct accusations against their parents.”8 Ibid., 436.

Five years later, Harvard’s class of 1949 invited Ellison to share his view of the preceding quarter century. “Since 1954, say, events both negative and positive have rendered . . . innocence impossible. American society and the world alike have changed more drastically than at any time during our relatively short history, and this generation of students has observed and been a part of that change.” The “legal supports of racism [were] giving way” and a relatively broad dispensing of justice and “broadening of access to our institutions” had begun. These changes brought “new chaos and indecision as well as a rectification of past inequities.”9 Ellison, “Address to the Harvard Alumni, Class of 1949,” 1974, in Collected Essays, 426. “One could almost believe that racial discrimination and disenfranchisement were nothing more than a tactic, a symbolic gesture.”10 Ibid., 427. One could, that is, were acute dismay not embedded in the process Ellison was tracking. “This generation of students has, like ourselves, observed vast changes in redirection of the American social drama and felt the shock and trauma of acts that have deprived us of a president, a senator, and a great spiritual leader.”11 Ibid., 426. With order came chaos.

How profoundly King concurred with Ellison that to see the chaos in the order is, in a crucial sense, to keep contact with the “workability” of the precarious ground on which we stand. How thoroughly King’s distinctive and distinguishing rhetoric therefore pressed home the impact of discomposure on contemporary American life. How developed was his instinct to lose no moment to pessimism, to reward no setback with a backslide, but rather to recognize that “what America has instead of a sacred past” is the opportunity — though nothing more — to develop a sense of the sacredness of the present.12 Ellison, “Alain Locke,” 451. This was the project: to translate into communicable forms the feeling about life given uniquely by the new prevalence of discomposure.

Indeed, more than any other figure, King effectively transposed Ellison’s cultural thought — generally, a “move in the direction of some sort of conscious assessment of the pluralistic condition of the United States” — to the political sphere.13 Ibid., 446. It is therefore curious to find Ellison, in a 1973 tribute lecture on Alain Locke, tangentially invoking King’s cultural meaning and its legacies only to elide him a moment later. Ellison is still traveling his complaint about black culture’s retreat from inspirited reckonings with discomposure to “assertions of purity”: “It seems amazing to me that we have moved away from that complex mysterious perplexing sense of our role in this country to something which is much too simplistic.”14 Ibid. Locke and the practitioners included in his anthology The New Negro (1925) had tried to “discover who we are and what we want to add to the ongoing definition of the American experience . . . to bring to bear all that [Locke] knew about the complexities of culture.”15 Ibid., 447. Indeed, from his first encounter with Locke — in 1935, at Tuskegee, where Ellison was a student — the younger writer took courage from Locke’s iconoclastic theories of the race-culture relation, which held that “culture has no color” and that no individual, group, or nation possesses “special proprietary rights” to culture.16 Alain Locke, “Frontiers of Culture,” 1949, in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 433. To produce culture that could evade such claims — to deracialize culture — would be to abandon a practice that buttressed imperialism and “has been responsible for the tragedies of history.”17 Locke, “The Contribution of Race to Culture,” 1930, in ibid., 203. For an excellent discussion of Ellison’s reception of Locke and his interlocutors see Ross Posnock, “Introduction: Ellison’s Joking,” The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Posnock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–10.

In 1974, Ellison looked back: “Some of us have tried . . . to think consciously of what it meant to be an American and a Negro. . . . I had hoped that by the 1960s people like you would be telling me who I am, and maybe you tell me sometimes, but what I have found is that during the decade these strains of continuity, these linkages between people on the basis of ideas and experience were automatically, arbitrarily thrown overboard.”18 Ellison, “Alain Locke,” 450. As we have seen, Ellison had much to say against efforts, especially in the wake of King’s assassination, to deter conscious thinking about “what it mean[s] to be an American and a Negro.” It may have been a limitation of Ellison’s formalist historicism that so perceptive a commentator as he could bury, or fail to identify, the causal link between King the spiritual leader and King the indefatigable cultural worker. Ellison found it salutary “that Dr. Locke saw the importance of trying to define [black identity] in that sophisticated moment, in that moment of great transition,” whereas King, whose rhetorical images militated against this sense of definition, emphatically did not.19 Ibid., 451.

Glancing back at the period Ellison’s speeches and idiom strove to render, we see that much of its hindsight vividness derives from crossover entertainments, interracial coalitions in and beyond the political domain, and other spectacles of affinity — social and cultural interconnections and diffusions that tested the constancy of the “black-white relation” by hammering away at the color line. Not all of the pertinent activity fell under the aegis of the staggeringly inventive movement for civil rights that King led. A formal process of deintegration had already begun in May 1966, with the election of Stokely Carmichael to the chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Even earlier came the hugely influential (though insufficiently studied) Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), which formed in Cleveland in 1963, initially as a subsidiary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to build “an interracial movement of the poor.”20 A thoroughgoing historical investigation of ERAP can be found in Jennifer Frost, “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York: NYU Press, 2001). The extent of the discomposure under way was also reflected in popular spectacles such as the enormous success, especially in the Southern states, of Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), and in the work of those who engineered the sound of discomposure: the Lenox School of Jazz, and the creation, first, of a fully racially integrated listenership for entrepreneurial gospel prodigy Sam Cooke, and second, of the conditions that would be needed to sustain and develop those audiences. The specialness of the singer-songwriter as we know it owes everything to the promulgation of the Sam Cooke effect, which even provides a character sketch: such a figure typically is a lover, not a fighter.

What established the character of progressive activity at this moment, then, was a definitive moving toward the other. Freedom Summer was but the most conspicuous example of related phenomena that extended well beyond the formal culture that Ellison surveyed with such acuity. For most of the ’60s, the broad swath of nonviolent campaign activity constituted a full-scale social experiment in confronting the received morality with the ethics fomenting in cross-racial coalition.

A highly coordinated publicity apparatus contributed a hugely important ingredient: the encouragement of sympathetic images, not of mixing alone but of vigorous and persistent action to restructure the relations between citizens and social space, in a spirit of de facto interracialization (figs. 51–53). Indeed, just as formal prohibitions against interracial sociality began to lift, the phenomenon found increasingly durable popular manifestations, further intensifying the power to know and stave off the dangers of mixing — a power freely exercised from both sides of the color line. For most authors of the record handed to us, it has proven more critical to contain the cultural decentering that animated this trend than to describe it; as though the resistance of discomposure formed the zeitgeist itself, as though a black America — an irreality, a strange construction of human minds — could be, or do, anything on its own. As a result, encounters and articulations stemming from informal manifestations of interracial sociality, historically crucial activity less broadcast-ready than integration efforts per se, prove increasingly hard to historicize.

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Description: Freedom Summer participants at Western College for Women, Oxford, Ohio by Polumbaum,...

Fig. 51 / Freedom Summer participants at Western College for Women, Oxford, Ohio, 1964

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Fig. 52 / Selma Wall, 1954

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Description: Untitled (Civil Rights Demonstration No. 1) by Brittin, Charles

Fig. 53 / Charles Brittin, Untitled, Civil Rights Demonstration No. 1, Los Angeles, 1965. Gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)

It has been said that “despisers of the body want their self [sic] to go under.”21 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part,” 1883, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954, reprint ed. 1976), 147. Exactly such a vanishing of Eros is needed both for group cohesion and to make historical accounts jell as one wishes. Norman Harris’s book The Sixties: A Black Chronology (1990) is typical in describing “a general shift towards nationalism in all aspects of the African-American quest for self-determination. Electoral and protest politics were affected, as were artistic and cultural activities.”22 Norman Harris, The Sixties: A Black Chronology (Athens, Ga.: Black Resource Center, 1990). In fact, entire realms of disciplinary practice — from ostensibly theoretical practices to fastidiously sociological ones — proceed from an utter conviction in this notion of “general shift” of which Harris speaks so assuredly. I want to point out, again, that to conceptualize generality and “self-determination” this way, especially in this period of unprecedented levels of nonerotic social intimacy between the races, required a prior vanishing of the body. (The word “culture,” in Ellison’s writing, depoliticizes discomposure in much the same way.) It makes all the sense in the world to see this as a function of love: a key to understanding the thorough resegregation of the Civil Rights Movement is to be found, after all, in the love that black people, for historically explicable reasons, decided to lavish upon themselves. This benevolent, humanistic impulse of Black Power toward its own people bears the mark of a trauma of separation born of crushing frustration. But the nourishment of this discrimination blocks the affective dimension from view. King contradicted this impulse at every turn. Without ever dissolving the real historical and political differences between the parties that the color line would separate, he required his listener — as Jacqueline Rose writes of Edward Said — “to hold together in their hearts and minds the polar opposite emotions of empathy and rage (however reluctant the first, however legitimate the second for your people might be).”23 Jacqueline Rose, “On Edward Said,” The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 196.

The frameworks that King resisted have succeeded him. And how. And in obliging ambient cultural pressures to clarify difference, they wind up exerting pressures of their own that, in turn, make intercultural processes and forms — those originating, for instance, in creative uses of the new proximity of differently colored bodies — extremely hard to recover. I don’t mean that this nearness was new in King’s time, but rather that a new provisioning of cultural space was under way, and brought with it a broad awareness of novel ways to utilize that space. People were already recognizing the creative social and historical forces generated by the integrated nonviolent movement and related cultural practices, though many ostensibly liberal histories continue to resist those forces fiercely, by containing or altogether denying their catalytic role in the process of discomposure.

Even an argument like the present one, which draws attention to discomposure and its manifestations, need not deny the facticity of the “general shift.” I want simply to mark and explore the costs of any reckoning that would give it too much primacy in the framing of historical fact. To be sure, narratives of the shift capture something real; I know of no instance in which they are simply “wrong.” They have their place, and my arguments intend neither to disprove nor to displace them. But such narratives achieve their coherence at great cost, which is, too often, erasure of those equally historically effective intimacies and solidarities that the dominant story must occlude.24 My thanks to Mark Reinhardt for pointing out that an early version of this argument, in rhetoric and framing, left this matter problematically ambiguous. If we do not reckon with discomposure’s manifestations, we risk prematurely synthesizing these multiform new cultural practices. And like all humanistic boundary work, these practices are productive, prompting us to historicize culture from the standpoint of conjuncture, by which I mean the merging of conditions in the black and white worlds. What brought them together? What allowed the resultant complexes to jell? How have these fared? What methodologies do we need to study them? The time has come to answer their invitations, outstanding for half a century.

King referred to these practices obliquely but relentlessly. A sampling of his rhetoric proves this:

Racism is total estrangement. It separates not only bodies but minds and spirits.

In the final analysis the white man cannot ignore the Negro’s problem, because he is part of the Negro and the Negro is part of him.

“I” cannot reach fulfillment without “Thou.” Self-concern without other-concern is like a tributary that has no outward flow to the ocean.

In a multiracial society no group can make it alone.

Let us be loving enough to turn an enemy into a friend.

Nonviolent resistance avoids not only external violence but also internal violence of spirit.

A nonviolent army has a magnificent universal quality.

The unity of the movement[’s different organizations] is a remarkable feature of major importance. Unity has never meant uniformity.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.25 The quotations above appear in the following sources: Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 70; ibid., 101; ibid., 180; ibid., 50; King, “Statement on Ending the Bus Boycott,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 3, Birth of a New Age, December 1955–December 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 487; King, “Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” Christian Century 74 (February 6, 1957): 166; King, Why We Can’t Wait, 1964 (reprint ed. New York: Signet Classics, 2000), 32–33; and ibid., 163.

At its most morally naked, King’s discourse guided its receiver through scenes of encounter between races effectively separated by law or custom. These scenes pleaded with their listeners to enter into one another’s predicaments, to make what might at times have seemed, if not an impossible, then certainly one of the trickiest journeys of the mind.26 This formulation originates with Rose; see her “On Edward Said,” 193. He planned his oratory to let these scenes ramify by unfolding them slowly over the course of an address. In this way he both dramatized the sincerity of his optimism and brought home the pragmatism of his proposals, whose utopian mood was belied by the inarguable realness of the actually occurring cultural transformations that his rhetoric merely embellished. King’s fantasias sketched genre scenes composed to make (and continually remake) a single, theoretically fundamental point: that every encounter — actual or imaginary — between strangers in a structurally racist society is an opportunity for criticism of, and intervention in, the rituals that shape life in democratic culture. Every encounter counts; every one.

These scenes could also harbor a searingly erotic charge. Especially from 1963 onward, King frontloaded his rhetoric with varying reflections on interracial partnership. Much as these caused pride among his allies, they equally stirred apprehension and even hysteria among his opponents. Eric Sundquist has shown convincingly that, while King’s interracial image was pointedly suffused with innocence, it was calculated nonetheless to touch the deepest nerves of segregationists of every color:27 Eric J. Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 78.

Anxiety about being forced to cross over intimate areas could be arrayed along a spectrum. At one end was mere proximity — blacks and whites sitting side by side on a bus or the dime store lunch counter. Even this could arouse deep aversions. At the other end, toward which white fears of mere association with blacks continually tilted, lay the threat of sexual intimacy and intermarriage.28 Ibid., 79, 81.

And we know this went both ways.

Everyone knows about King’s power to fixate those who opposed him. (What standing do his mortal and political lives — one ended, the other barely under way — have in the fraught cultural politics of the present?) It’s manifested in everything from white and black separatists’ declarations of the futility of his project to the event of his destruction. Portrayals of King as a hinge figure between a pro-integrationist attempt and an anti-integrationist triumph either forget or deny the complexity of a process with which he merely coincided, and which his rhetoric activated as dancers do a choreography. Admittedly, the particulars of this process get a bit fuzzy in the relucent glow of King’s titanic symbolic authority. We may recover some of the contemporary power of his discourse, heighten somewhat the hindsight legibility of his ambition, by turning briefly to the political philosophy that discourse revised.

Sheer intolerance wasn’t the only target of King’s rhetoric: even progressive political thinkers tended to accept the color line, that Ur-boundary of modern American culture, as natural. Hans Kohn was a radical progressive philosopher who was born in Prague and emigrated to the United States in 1934; he specialized in the psychological and emotional causes of race conflicts. Listen to Kohn, writing in 1934: “Race conflicts are among the most important factors of political and social unrest in the contemporary world and their significance increases as racial feeling grows in emotional intensity.”29 Hans Kohn, “Race Conflict,” in Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 13:36. So did Kohn commence his entry “Race Conflict” for volume 13 of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, an ambitious venture in cultural accounting overseen by a crack team of left intellectuals, including Franz Boas, John Dewey, and Margaret Floy Washburn. For Kohn, “Racial relations today present more dangerous features in the field of interhuman relations than any other point of conflict.”30 Ibid, 41. It is axiomatic for Kohn that

the color line, which is to be found in varying degrees wherever different races live side by side, prevents the weaker races from realization of a fuller life, cuts off from them all possibilities of rising and makes both races permanently conscious of their differences. In racial conflicts the individual plays no role; the most friendly relations may exist between individuals of different races, but the color bar acts always to deter members of the lower race from the struggle for higher qualification and efficacy. Sooner or later it leads to a policy of racial segregation designed to retard the process of the natives and to continue their exploitation. . . . Intermarriage and social intercourse are legally or tacitly prohibited, and the superior race generally asserts its superiority by reserving all economic advantages to its members. . . . Thus the races are kept distinctly apart and cannot arrive at the degree of mutual esteem and self-esteem necessary for the establishment of friendly relations.31 Ibid., 39.

What strikes me in Kohn’s discourse is the insistence with which it stresses the instant of contact without ever questioning the determining primacy of the color line, or the prior naturalization that empowers it to constrain not just interracial sociality but also the capacity of those it would suppress, thereby securing for them a more precarious personhood. One sees this conviction reflected in countless mobilizations of “progressive” thought today.

When I find myself in a subjunctive mood, wondering how things might have been different from the way they are, King is a figure to whom I regularly return. Which King, you might wonder, to which wondering I might reply, the sexy King. The minister who was also a known infidel with regard to the vows of Christian marriage he took. The King whose oratory depended utterly on what, in a listener adapted to difference, remained seducible by shared sense. The King whose conception of love never used dogma to snuff out the actuality of a possible seduction. This King, it should be clear, is quite different from the one on offer in most American political thought. About this King it is not crucial to think that his patience was fated to end with him; in fact, the idea of a two-bodied King works havoc on the logic of separatism.32 It was of course Ernst H. Kantorowicz who, in a legendary 1957 study, analyzed the idea of the two-bodied king for medievalists and students of early modern political thought. See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, reprint ed. 1997). This King’s death doesn’t need to be absolute, a passage without a wake. This King lives on in the countless American discomposures that it was key to his project to unbury, to reward with recognition, and to mobilize. This King was the prime image-generator in a historical process real enough that it had to be terminated in a spectacle of lurid violence; this King was ended, and — precisely by dying as he did, at the hand of a puppet of anxious state power33 If we accept the not improbable idea that James Earl Ray was part of a U.S.-government conspiracy. — unwittingly inaugurated the rhetoric of decisive, irreversible “shift” that, a moment ago, I cited Harris summarizing. It’s King the breathing body, the furious optimist, the worker whose life and project ended when, standing alone on a motel balcony in Memphis, he fell into a puddle of blood, promptly formed at his feet when a bullet blasted open his neck. The King I intend is, for me, an object of periodic return because of a specific complexity that the conversation on race lost when he exited the national stage in this manner: I mean the complexity that a sensitivity to the actuality of discomposure brings to view.

For some time, a particular object has been enabling and focusing my thinking about this King (figs. 54, 55). While its ambiguous status as art doesn’t worry me, this hasn’t stopped me thinking that serious historians of culture would do well to take a long look at it. When I first encountered this thing, in 1999, it was among a selection titled Buildings of Disaster, a series of architectural miniatures conceived by the New York design firm Boym Partners and initiated in 1997 (fig. 56).34 Boym Partners, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York, was established by Constantin Boym in 1986. Born in Moscow, Russia, in 1955, Boym trained as an architect there before immigrating to the United States, where he gained an AIA registration in 1988. A SoHo design store I was fond of salivating in showed a number of the Buildings of Disaster from the start of their run. One alone held me. It stood in sharp relief against the rest of the series, which seems, partly, to run on a stultifying morbidity. But the Lorraine Motel gave me feelings that I associate with unfinished business: incompleteness and regret, for sure, but also expectancy and even promise. Less than the thing itself, some quality of it, and its entreaty, felt to me needed. After making several visits to the store, I paid $150 for a miniature of my own. I lived at the time on a graduate stipend, and I liked this thing, but I didn’t love it. At this price, however, it was just possible to have it — and having it seemed the only way fully to hear out its appeal.

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Description: Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968 (from the series Buildings of Disaster) by Boym...

Fig. 54 / Boym Partners, Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, from the series Buildings of Disaster, 1998. Bonded nickel, 6.3 × 2.5 × 1 in. (16.83 × 6.35 × 2.54 cm)

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Fig. 55 / Boym Partners, Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, from the series Buildings of Disaster, 1998. Bonded nickel, 6.3 × 2.5 × 1 in. (16.83 × 6.35 × 2.54 cm)

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Description: Buildings of Disaster by Boym Partners

Fig. 56 / Boym Partners, Buildings of Disaster, 1998–present. Bonded nickel

Like the other twenty-six entries in the series, the Lorraine Motel, famous as the site of King’s assassination a half century ago, is cast in bonded nickel. A sober material originally formulated for the restoration of historical hardware, bonded nickel has the weight and feel of metal but is actually a composite combining fine metal powder with a binding epoxy. Hand finishing gives it the appearance of solid cast metal (fig. 57). Boym believes that he is the first to use bonded nickel as a material for new objects. The series itself he has dedicated to the “alternative history of architecture, one based on people’s emotional involvement rather than on scholarly appreciation.”35 Constantin Boym, electronic correspondence with the author, October 4, 2015. Boym likes the Lorraine as an “example of a building undistinguished from architectural point of view, yet known worldwide.” Originally intended to comprise “souvenirs for the end of the twentieth century,” the series was briefly revived when, having already made one for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Boym recast the site after 9/11.36 Ibid.

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Fig. 57 / Boym Partners, Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, from the series Buildings of Disaster, 1998. Bonded nickel, 6.3 × 2.5 × 1 in. (16.83 × 6.35 × 2.54 cm)

My replica of the Lorraine Motel — number 104 from an edition of 500 — is the manifest subject of my arguments here. It propels and focuses a procedure that develops essayistically (to borrow an Adornian connotation): an elaboration of thoughts about history as it might have been, an imagining of forms history may yet assume. Until King emerged for me as a particular suggestion or evocation of this object, I didn’t think about him any more than the next person did. My irrational affection for this thing constituted the most interest in King I could recall having since, as a child in the early ’80s, I discovered my parents’ cache of commemorative publications, full to the gills with all the pictures. But this object was so elliptical, more than a little bit sordid — like a pornographic version of those picture books that only showed the motel’s balcony and the casket views (figs. 58, 59). From the way it haunted me, though, I learned that I’d been thinking about King for a long time: wishing he were still around, wondering how he might have evolved his radicality, or adapted his oratory to the sound-bite thrift of contemporary public discourse, or confronted the expansion of the black middle class, or addressed the protracted traumas of putative development in urban centers, or failed differently.

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Description: April 4, 1968 by Louw, Joseph

Fig. 58 / April 4, 1968. Photo by Joseph Louw

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Description: April 7, 1968 by Thornell, Jack

Fig. 59 / April 7, 1968. Photo by Jack Thornell

When I initiated the transposition of the Boym Lorraine from a desk object into an object of study, with some fretfulness about the decision, I did so with a specific question in mind: “what ignorance can this description eliminate?”37 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Shättle (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), 40e. After all, it’s far from immediately clear what this thing is, or what we might need it for. I need it clear that it has for me a partly fetishistic quality. I was deeply sympathetic with it from the first. Suggestible as I am, little of the repulsion it incites in many visitors to my office transfers to me. With apologies for the ambiguous antecedent, this is what I mean by the sexy King. The Boym Lorraine is at one critical level a pornograph, an object offered to erotic rather than generally emotional or intellectual interest, pandering to base appetite, virtually mocking the notion of aesthetic distance. It’s charged with blankness; one can make of it almost anything at all, investing as one wishes in its many thingly idiosyncrasies. There’s pleasure to be taken in it, though it doesn’t come easy in the solemn atmosphere this object sets up.

I should say a little about the edifice that the Boym souvenir renders, in its queer way. Established in the mid-’20s at 450 Mulberry Street in down-town Memphis, the Marquette Hotel was purchased in 1945 by Walter and Loree Bailey, a black couple who renamed it the Lorraine before making the renovations — including drive-up room access — that converted it into a motel (fig. 60). The Baileys also made the once all-white establishment a safe haven for nonwhite visitors. It was considered safe enough to be listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, which indexed safe spaces under Jim Crow. King made room 306 famous by occupying it during the last of his several visits to Memphis, but the motel was already well known as a preferred upscale accommodation for entertainers and athletes and a comfortable mingling place for black and white Americans.38 The site and its history are elegantly glossed by Alyson Hobbs in “The Lorraine Motel and Martin Luther King,” New Yorker, January 18, 2016. In 1991 the Lorraine was reincorporated as the National Civil Rights Museum, whose creation entailed the demolition of everything but the motel’s yellow-brick facade and two of its rooms, numbers 306 and 308, now restored to appear as they did in 1968 (fig. 61).

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Description: Lorraine Motel, Memphis by Unknown

Fig. 60 / Lorraine Motel, Memphis, summer 1968

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Description: National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis by Unknown

Fig. 61 / National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, 1999, Memphis

Akin to what architects call a massing model — made to show the distribution of building volumes on a property — the Boym Lorraine displays a solitary structure, isolated and abstracted (figs. 62, 63). We could be anywhere. Such qualities concentrate perception in a particular way, effectively making the Lorraine Motel over as a meditation object. The site and date of King’s murder are spelled out in relief on the pedestal, whose perimeter roughly draws the Lorraine’s property lines (fig. 64; see fig. 68). Circa 1968, the area between the horizontal bent-flag form near the object’s front edge and the motel building contained a parking lot and a swimming pool. Like the actual motel at the time, the structure itself comprises two elements: the blocklike unit at left represents a service building with a restaurant, ballroom, and offices; the other unit, which jags away from the front of the property, represents a hybrid structure typical of motels of this kind, combining storage areas, HVAC equipment, and two stacked rows of guest rooms.

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Fig. 62 / Boym Partners, Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, from the series Buildings of Disaster, 1998. Bonded nickel, 6.3 × 2.5 × 1 in. (16.83 × 6.35 × 2.54 cm)

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Fig. 63 / Boym Partners, Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, from the series Buildings of Disaster, 1998. Bonded nickel, 6.3 × 2.5 × 1 in. (16.83 × 6.35 × 2.54 cm)

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Fig. 64 / Boym Partners, Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, from the series Buildings of Disaster, 1998. Bonded nickel, 6.3 × 2.5 × 1 in. (16.83 × 6.35 × 2.54 cm)

The Boym Lorraine further abstracts this structure by removing the entire program of portals and windows, as well as the balustrade on the famous balcony. The only sign of the event responsible for the building’s notoriety is a tiny patch with the proportions of a door, which projects extremely shallowly from the third section of the building’s facade, just to right of center (fig. 65). Presumably working from photographs, Boym took this to be the location of King’s room. In fact, this detail marks the location of a room now excised from the structure in order to create the viewing platform from which present-day visitors to the National Civil Rights Museum can see the section of balcony just outside room 306 — the room next door to them — where King’s body lay prior to its removal to the Shelby County Coroner’s Office (fig. 66). Didactics at the museum indicate the focal points of this view: a bathroom window in the boarding house across the street, from which James Earl Ray fired the killing shot, and a framed section of bloodstained concrete from the original balcony, set into a reconstructed one right outside the plate glass behind which the visitor stands (fig. 67).39 Charlie Jenné, lead contractor during the Lorraine’s conversion into a museum, told me that this eight-inch-square relic is the only existing piece of the original balcony-balustrade assembly. July 21, 2016, Memphis.

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Description: Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968 (from the series Buildings of Disaster), detail of...

Fig. 65 / Boym Partners, Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968 (door detail)

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Description: Lorraine Motel by Fowler, Earl

Fig. 66 / Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit

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Description: Unknown by Groskinsky, Henry

Fig. 67 / The Life Picture Collection, Henry Groskinsky © Getty Images

The Boym Lorraine appreciates rather than laments the Lorraine Motel’s low standing among America’s representative cultural edifices.40 The Buildings of Disaster series recognizes a number of these sites; its totality pretends to survey the built environment of American infamy. A few examples of the other sites in the series — the Watergate Hotel, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the Pentagon — bear out the low standing of the comparably modest Lorraine Motel. The only other structure in the series with the Lorraine’s almost-anonymity is the cabin of the Unabomber. Among the most widely published structures of modern architecture, the Lorraine is ever seen but rarely perceived. Powerful though division and its figurations, such as the color line and the black-white relation, continue to be, they simply don’t stand up to this site’s power not merely to raise but to keep open questions about the historical career of King’s pragmatic optimism.

Visit the site now, though, and you’re bombarded with didactic placards and environments, including some putatively pedagogical disclosures about the Lorraine’s late-’60s look and feel. The Boym Lorraine’s generality permits a consideration of the accumulated historical character, up to now, of the process in which the Lorraine serves as a singular flashpoint. Being, as it is, a little bit of then in the now, the Boym Lorraine asks to be regarded as a functionally transitional object. In this way it can the more compellingly disclose the Lorraine’s transitional function in U.S. political culture: a point not of ending but of the commencement of unfinished business, a point of transfer between King’s work and ours, if “we” want a world to whose making King committed nothing less than his life.

If this object harbors notions about how it’s to be interpreted, it keeps them to itself. Because the object sits just a little over an inch high, one looks down upon it, made — or at least strongly encouraged — to increase one’s proximity and narrow one’s vision. It calls for a certain fixation. In ordinary light, one’s eyes travel all about the thing, probing its shadows and recesses, tracing its irregular geometry, tracking its surprising many-facedness, scanning its many-textured surface. In these textures one sees that the prototype that generated the bonded-nickel edition was made of wood (probably basswood or chipboard), painted with a primer for better mold production (fig. 68). All the while, one is coming to grips with the further defeaturing this rendition inflicts upon the motel’s indistinctive styling, already insipid enough. Really to see it, one rolls it around in the hands, notes its heft, sets it places, sidesteps and stoops to peer at its six faces.41 The Boym souvenir’s weight of 7.6 ounces is equivalent to that of a typical athletic shoe. There’s delight in the excavation of tiny views; the unfolding of each will be felt, though not necessarily as an opening. One discovers all this as a body whose looking, feeling, and thinking parts engage it in unison. Architects with whom I’ve discussed the Boym Lorraine noted more than once that it summons several trade-specific habits of looking (architects customarily produce this kind of model, but not in bonded nickel): the need to bring the object toward the eyes, which then crawl along, around, and under it; the object’s congeniality to an oblique, tabletop view that can consider at once its proportions and its use of the site; the queerness of its appearing to be equal parts plan and elevation, model and miniature. In other words, it’s a jumble — and a rather marvelous one for reawakening the historical imagination — of the aspects of a thing, of prospective and retrospective views, of ways to learn from what is about what may be possible.

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Description: Prototype of Lorraine Motel by Boym Partners

Fig. 68 / Boym Partners, Prototype of Lorraine Motel. Primer-painted wood

For all its intimate suggestiveness, the Boym Lorraine is categorically unvivid. I would name its color “unpainted,” so reminiscent is the sulky taupe-gray of a support awaiting application of decorative surface color. One experiences the object’s depth, really quite shallow, as though it were drastic. The eye needs a while to crawl the distance separating the object’s near edge from the crooked bilevel edifice. Along the way, real changes in space and texture need attending to. Deep cuts into the wooden prototype register in the cast as channels in which impressive shadows form — the cuts so deep and the shadows so impressive that, even after you find the miniscule door, you need just the right light to locate it again.

By “unvivid” I mean the Boym Lorraine has the secret salience of a crime scene after its restoration to full functioning, usually a key stage in forgetting. But I think it more apt to consider this an object of renewal. Its condition — call it aesthetic withdrawal — pushes the viewing situation toward the concrete: it is a materialization of the collision of values represented by King’s death site, here set up weakly but decisively in the present tense. We might expect a designer-cum-architect to display such a bias toward presence, but the Boym Lorraine keeps the determinate character of its presence at a certain remove. Heavy looking but slight feeling, hard edged but graphically muddled, it appears unfinished but nothing remains to be done, except engagement. Indeed, a private fantasy is the only place where anything like “meaning” will stick to this thing. From this, I think, emerges a key term of its abstraction: the arrival of an abstruse physical presence, decipherable only by oneself, exactly where one feels sure an image, message, or avatar ought to be.

A thorough reckoning with the Boym Lorraine readily opens one onto the fantasy dimension of social thought circa April 1968. While I’m afraid that the replica itself is not thinking deeply about much, it does harbor the power to initiate consideration of the possibility that the true discourse of cultural society in the civil rights era was about the power exerted in interracialization — that what propelled the clarification of difference that so preoccupied cultural politics (if cultural practice less so) before and after King was the power of interracialization to obviate any clarity it might achieve. The will to know the source of interracial socialization’s power to transform the culture beyond recognition unifies enterprises that King’s destruction only ostensibly separated. The Boym Lorraine’s perversity makes visible what accounts of the death site rarely if ever regard: these favored narratives occlude the power of interracialization; this thing at once surfaces them and offers them shelter. That is, among other functions, in the context of a mobile culture, the motel offered bodies an opportunity of restoration: a resting place, a semiprivate, temporary haven for anyone — or two — who could pay the bill.

Within the cultural logic of King’s widely projected but tragically excerpted discourse, the “black-white relation” was no simple conflict but rather a dialectic. As proof, he mobilized a litany of images of black and white children at play. To be sure, these images play on the innocence of children and exploit the futurity-anxiety that figures of the child uniquely inspire.42 Lee Edelman has diagnosed this help-fully in another context. See No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Not yet initiated into the objectified difference that was normative for King’s audience, children symbolize in almost graphic fashion the faculty of recognition operative in all healthy relations. The nonerotic social intimacy of the interracial child-relation had an imagistic force that offered a way of talking about the future: a carrot thrown. But such images also operated more dangerously, by surfacing a listener’s negotiated consciousness of already, actually existing love. Which also made them a kind of permission, given to adult listeners to unleash what, in them, might otherwise remain dormant or illicit. Such images impelled their receivers to rethink the black-white relation with conjuncture in mind.

King could well have pointed to those who in their mature relationships renounced objectified difference and moved freely toward the other. Prevailing regulations governing public discourse about private conduct meant keeping his imagery palatable. But all the talk of children — King’s refrain “We cannot walk alone” enjoining progressives disinclined to mix to see the practical need of doing it anyway, the proverbial bread broken at the “table of brotherhood,” and other seemingly anodyne rhetorical mise-en-scènes — these tactically shrewd figurations advanced a strong theory of mounting proximity among the races. What made them relatable was King’s audience’s cognizance of the widespread crossover already taking place at the level not only of the culture but of the body. Manifestations of crossover functionally disabled any attempt to use the black-white relation as a figure of nonnegotiable alterity. Crossover made it impossible for transformations in the symbolic construction of race difference to go unnoticed.

Concepts central to King’s discourse turn out to be concepts whose content we cannot grasp by reference to groups, since they’re boundary concepts between group and individual: extant concepts that acts of crossing over merely carried out. To countenance King’s disarticulations of the black-white relation entails acceptance of a prior thesis: he saw mass cohesion — unfree socialization in a racial group — as a threat to Eros.43 One imagines that it may have been the daily work of campaign leadership that brought Martin Luther King to this acceptance of, and ability to emphasize with, the local reality of bodily being — what Sigmund Freud called a “withdrawing of expectations from the other world and concentrating [one’s] liberated energies into [one’s] life on earth.” Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 41. The 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail already defines history as a promulgation of group morality: “History,” wrote King, “is the long and tragic story of the fact that . . . groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but . . . groups are more immoral than individuals.”44 King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 (Stamford, Conn.: Overbrook, 1968), 5. Forty-three years earlier, Sigmund Freud, another student of the troublemaking historicity of libido, had described mass psychology (unfree socialization) in these terms:

In the great artificial groups [Freud’s examples are the Church and the army] there is no room for [the] sexual object. The love relation . . . remains outside those organizations. . . . Even in a person who has in other respects become absorbed in a group, the directly sexual impulsions preserve a little of his individual activity. If they become too strong they disintegrate every group formation.45 Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” 1920, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 18:41.

When we talk about the failure or futility of integration, we’re only saying what everybody already knows — it didn’t “win the day.” We avert our gazes from the contradiction that, while belief in the inevitability of interracialization has little standing amid the reductivism of so many American Studies programs, it dwells deep in the American fabric, shaping countless lifeways, from friendship and collaboration to cultural production and consumption patterns.46 Another kind of exposition might describe this as the making of what we share and the sharing of what we make. When we don’t historicize the sharing of assorted everyday pleasures arising from the philosophical and physical proximity among black and nonblack Americans, we’re unable to see that, already in the 1960s, that nearness was a starting point for politics. The nearness we now inhabit, ever more characteristic of the general society, has authentic historicity, but apparently the details impair the divisive forms, significations, and narrations that we continue to implement. Having this conviction, I can’t help but think that a history of the actual present would acknowledge that the movement from the interracial sociality of the nonviolent movement to the isolationist sociality of separatism did not constitute an advance. It would look closely at the fantasies and experimental social forms that fervently pursued interracialization, or simply seized its potentials, and that found validation in King’s hypervisible nonviolent campaigns — fantasies and forms that come to look culturally nonviable upon the commencement, at his death, of a “general shift towards self-determination.” This, I believe, is what makes studies of cultural deviance during this period imperative.

What ignorance can this description eliminate? What draws me to the Boym Lorraine is its capacity to focalize a creative social-historical force strong enough that it had to be stopped, and, further, to remind us with its obdurate quiddity about the persistence of this conflict of values (to mix or not to mix) — even to insist that this same conflict of values engages us today. Sometimes we need a discomfitingly elliptical view of a past thing to grasp buried facets of its urgency for the present. That is, a gift of the Boym Lorraine is a not-perfectly-clear visual idea of its subjects. Its opacity and pregnancy form an ill fit with typical souvenir objects: it’s similar to them in freely offering itself to countless possible sitings (there are 500 of these things in the world, after all), in sharing the souvenir’s ability to help a person to carry a moment forward or keep with her a place from which she has moved on, but it is quite dissimilar in detaching itself from a particular, prefabricated message. Here, the intrinsic mobility of such trinkets is reconciled to a fuller complement of interpretive and projective potentials. To engage with King via the Boym Lorraine is to face a refracted set of choices about how to think this moment in relation to the cultural history of the present.

Clear from the object’s intimation of the shooter’s perspective — a debatable point that I won’t pursue here — is the Lorraine’s status as a figure of a world-historical encounter between the races, between the principles of violence and nonviolence, between optimism and pessimism, a figure for the “transition” from one phase to another of the Civil Rights Movement. This makes the Lorraine an extremely valuable instrument for thinking about the U.S. racial matrix conjuncturally. It fits well enough with readings of King’s discourse as a kind of critical patriotism, a critique rooted in an appreciation of the American project, or at least of its founding ideals (so people like him have a “lover’s quarrel” with America). But it also fits in an utterly natural way with a commitment running alongside King’s investment in pursuing the best version of the nation, namely, his commitment to other forms of more individual and embodied love, as in interracial intimacies. The Lorraine becomes a monument not to the anxiety and passionate anger that interracialization inspired, but to the sacredness and precarity of the relational moment itself.

When King spoke of encounter, there was always another discourse, a lover’s discourse, at work. The thesis about interracial sociality that runs through so many of his proclamations gains rhetorical power from the sheer size of the domain it invokes (“all God’s children” and the like), but its emotional force gathers when claims about places and entities swiftly transmogrify into discrete meditations on encounter and movement as such, their diction swooping into the realm of the interpersonal. In this awareness, listen to a legendary passage from the Birmingham letter. Mind, especially, the shift of emphasis from the polis to the person:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.47 King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 2.

The Boym Lorraine installs several incommensurate elements of history in “an inescapable network of mutuality.” On this souvenir converge the moral imaginary inhabiting King’s so-called “dream,” the anger toward King-the-living-object that delighted in reducing his life to a physical substance, and the fraught aftermaths of both. In the work’s time, all three occupy a suspended present that finds its motive in the keepsake’s merit as an aid in one’s effort to make the meanings of a place one’s own. Frankly engaging our capacity for fantasy, the replica permits us to place our self-representations ahead of its depiction — all the while holding fast to its determinate form. Textbook introjection is off the table. Actually relating is mandatory. One remains a body, the motive or engine of whatever desire this constellation of evocations arouses.

Probably the Boym Lorraine’s archetypal ambience, its grayed-out schematism, brings home the dream’s quality as a fantasy: one reluctant spokesperson’s fervently expressed wish for a nation. I need it clear that this usage of FANTASY entails no disparagement whatsoever. What I want this consideration of the Boym Lorraine to do is demonstrate the historicity of the cultural process that King’s articulations merely described. I would heartily welcome the accomplishment, on a mass scale, of a recognition that these spectacles of affinity were the strongest force for interracialization ever to impress itself upon U.S. political culture.48 Arguably, the sole legatee of King’s most radical moral philosophy was Bayard Rustin, ad hoc editorialist whose 1949 New York Post articles led to the abolition of the chain gang in North Carolina. He was organizer of fundraisers for the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56; youth officer of the unrealized, first March on Washington of 1941; planner of the first Freedom Rides; mentor on nonviolent resistance to King and the Montgomery Improvement Association; cofounder, with Ella Baker and Stanley Levison, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and sexual outlaw cast out by the organization in 1960 over perception fears. Rustin militated against separatism in all his civil rights work. Among the many good words he dedicated to the subject are these: “Anybody can say to white people, ‘Roll over, we don’t need you.’ But that is not political expression.” The journalist and historian Elton Fax, in his 1970 chronicle Contemporary Black Leaders, seizes unrelentingly upon those, like Rustin, who pressed for the idea that racially mixed coalitions in all affairs were central, rather than ancillary, to effective antiracist activism. Circumspect (to say the least) about nonviolence and strategic interracial alliances, Fax characterizes Rustin’s responses to the emergence of cultural separatism in a tellingly unforgiving fashion: he’s out of touch with young militants, sympathetic with authorities; hell, the New York City police department does him favors. Tellingly, Fax’s book contains no profile of King. See Elton C. Fax, Contemporary Black Leaders (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970). The cynical, pessimistic belief that King’s assassination proved the invalidity of his ambition (as though it occurred by referendum), or that the movement would stop cold without him — these are fantasies too. Yet cultural history accords both beliefs a truth-value long in need of questioning. Equally in need of interrogation is the passive optimism of those who sympathized with or supported King but then capitulated to the backlash against nonviolent action that followed in the wake of his murder. In the traditional sense, the doubleness of the king’s body allowed the political entity “king” to embody law continually, regardless of whose ego inhabited the function. In the extended, perhaps infelicitous sense that I intend, although King’s politics are said to have died with the man who mobilized them, large numbers of citizens think of racial difference in ways that are utterly cognate with them.

Those who know the Lorraine Motel know it in gross detail, which is hardly to say they know it well. Thanks to a widely distributed cache of contemporary camera views trained on room 306, the balcony running along the building’s facade, and the cluster of King associates pointing in the direction of the shot, we know it precisely as the Boym Lorraine does not display it. We know an elegantly named, undistinguished building that provided the backdrop for King’s murder. Absenting almost all the detail that lends the Lorraine poignancy, the Boym miniature re-presents it to us as a kind of architectural prop for screen memory.

In any case, it fails as sculpture, according to that medium’s most influential modern definitions. That very language nevertheless suggests a helpful way to understand how the Boym Lorraine presents a historical instant for intellectual consideration. In his legendary discussion of the conception of relief, Adolf von Hildebrand described the aim and purpose of sculpture as being to convey to the spectator “instantly a perfectly clear visual idea and thus remove the disturbing problem of cubic form.”49 Adolf von Hildebrand, “The Conception of Relief,” 1893, trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907), 96. Hildebrand’s essentialism induces a fantasy about “the transformation of the cubic into a simple visual impression.”50 Ibid., 97. Such a visual idea or impression, on his account, will be essentially pictorial. Thus when Hildebrand confronts the problem of a dimensional figure’s various aspects (itself a problem of choice), he makes it the task of his analysis to demonstrate how successful sculpture assimilates this multiplicity to a unified appearance in a “plane layer” or “plane picture.”51 Ibid., 94, 96. For him, the dimensionalized object comprises a proliferation of aspects in which, however, “there will always be one that dominates.” Moreover,

this one is representative of the total plastic nature of the object, and, like a picture or relief, expresses it all in a single two-dimensional impression. It stands for the virtual visual idea . . . which dominated the artist’s mind when he created the work. All other aspects are subordinate to this one. . . . The problem in a plastic ensemble consists in arranging a solid figure so that it can afford us such a picture.52 Ibid., 94.

It is for the sake of “the clearness required of a representation” that Hildebrand seeks so intently after the “picture effect” of a work that may actually offer its top, back, side, or deepest recess as proudly as it does its more prominent facing features.53 Ibid., 96, 95. It will be clear that, to my eyes, the Boym Lorraine represents the complementary reverse of Hildebrand’s formulation: in its introverted smallness, this obdurate, matte, cast multiple is so rudely three-dimensional as almost to scoff at the notion of the “perfectly clear visual idea.”

If we might describe historical thought about King as similarly flat, it may begin to become incrementally less so under the pressure of the Boym Lorraine, which offers a space for reflecting on that flatness. What we see in the replica is spelled out on its base, but what we actually perceive is a fairly indeterminate spatial mass. A building as such is intimated, but no more clearly than the disorienting perimeter of the lot it occupies, here delineated in the uncongenial idiom of the land-use map. The event that gained the structure infamy is indicated in the subtlest possible way, and incorrectly at that. The yield of all this minimization of detail, I suggest, is a thrillingly vivid depiction of the country’s abandonment of the project and process of interracialization. A theoretical object of a kind, the Boym Lorraine approaches the task of describing this specific, subjugated knowledge about U.S. culture: the sometimes intense eroticism of interracialization, which official Movement knowledge casts as disqualified, marginalized, fugitive, below and outside the realm of model figures and events. As King’s rhetorical images attest, interracialization was structurally altering the United States through recognition of the new reality precipitating from desegregation and concomitant efforts to integrate. His ideal of democratic community granted interracialization as a supposition; within this framework, neither desegregation nor integration was acceptable as a terminal goal of political action.54 Desegregation designates the “ending of a policy of segregation,” while integration merely accomplishes “the intermixing of people or groups previously segregated.” Desegregation was a functionally legislative process; integration was always the more difficult task. For many individuals and groups on both sides of the color line, integration was also the less desirable. Interracialization occurs on a whole other plane of difficulty, manifesting not through formal efforts to integrate but through informal manifestations of interracial sociality.

Much of King’s later thought simply described the actions of nonviolent civil rights campaigners, its rhetorical atmospheres borrowing from the optimistic timbre they brought to the portrayal of life at the color line. Again and again they strove to show what it meant to make manifest the moral and social desire to cross that line, which would order the instituted society.55 Further, they rarely missed an opportunity to refer their work to the long agenda of unfinished business of the American experiment with democracy. Especially germane in this connection is King’s increasingly vocal stance against both the Vietnam War and cross-cultural economic disparity in the months preceding his death — a robust socialism in everything but name. These atmospheres (to which I am ascribing historical agency) demonstrated Castoriadis’s incisive observation that “beneath the established social imaginary, the flow of the radical imaginary continues steadily.”56 Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power Politics Autonomy,” in Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Ames Curtis, Odéon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 153. They addressed the exhausted figures of instituted society, such as the color line itself as well as other fixed images of black-white relation, with figures of radical imagination deployed precisely to assert the instituting agency of what might otherwise seem “mere” discourse. On these scenes, optimism itself was radical imagination. The terms of that optimism were a refusal to focus on suffering and incapacity and a tactical concentration on conceptual and actual manifestations of the boundary itself as a scene of both crisis and naissance.

It’s a peculiar exercise, thinking hard about a toy motel. There’s something finally insurmountable about the unspecialness of its form, which mimics one of the most generic in vernacular American architecture. A single occupant makes this one special. And, being a transient like all who take rooms at such places, King is not so much to be distinguished from the others. On the one hand an ersatz monument to the death of one man, on the other the Boym Lorraine depicts a by-the-way habitation for many. It achieves a figuration of singular historical subjectivity from which the full complement of human instincts and passions has not been excluded. This is what true respect for the individual looks like.57 I want to underline the corresponding recognition of decades of convincing criticism of the uses of King to support a masculinist ideology of respectability that grossly constrains the livability of black skin for men and women of countless dispositions who would elect not to undertake public life in costume. The Boym Lorraine is a monument not to King but to the marginal social process that his submerged discourse promoted. In this way, King disappears into his nation — a teeming mass of groups in live motion across roads connecting everything, and dotted with resting places just like this. That live motion pre- and postdated his mortal life, but his activities made it palpable as a ramified social process slowly but certainly re-forming the society that we its subjects, in uncoordinated co-population, continually engender and modify.

The fixating idea for King was an image of the United States as achieving itself through its people’s act of recognizing that the “network of mutuality” invoked in the Birmingham letter is inescapable, like the weakness accompanying old age. Hence his discourse’s tendency to dwell long on images in which as-yet-unrealized potentials for interhuman relationship had come to full flower, albeit in nascent social forms. If the ’60s-era motel means anything, it’s as a testing ground for the kind of affinity that develops among strangers, stemming from or precipitating the most scandalous intimacies. Here is the domain onto which the Boym Lorraine’s closure opens, if we want to look. The motel represented one of the culture’s only unpoliced spaces for exercising and exploring such affinities (fig. 69).

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Description: Complimentary postcard, Lake Eufaula Motor Lodge, Eufaula, Alabama by Unknown

Fig. 69 / Complimentary postcard, ca. 1965, Lake Eufaula Motor Lodge, Eufaula, Alabama

The narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) opens part two of his story — the tale of a fifty-five-year-old man and a twelve-year-old girl’s scandalous closeness — in what might seem, on another occasion than this, like a most peculiar site. Humbert Humbert takes a virtually magisterial tone in extolling the freedom that the motel affords him and Lo: “It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel — clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love.”58 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955 (reprint ed. New York: Vintage, 1997), 95. For Nabokov, the motel amplified individual prerogatives, providing privacy in relative anonymity.59 See John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle, and Jefferson S. Rogers, The Motel in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 16.

The motel also attracted considerable attention from commentators who saw it as emblematic of a country in motion.60 In 1925, Los Angeles architect Arthur Heineman built the first structure designated by the name “motel” in San Luis Obispo, California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He coined the term, a contraction of “motor” and “hotel,” to capture its spirit as a lodging designed for motorists. From the 1940s on, when they ventured away from home by car, “nearly all Americans depended upon motels. The motel is a vital part of the service infrastructure that insures the geographical mobility so vital to modern American life.”61 Jakle, Sculle, and Rogers, Motel in America, xi. In a telling sign of the motel’s minorness as a cultural form, even this authoritative volume — which synthesizes what its authors claim to have been the whole literature on the motel produced up to the time of their writing — contains no reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., or to the Lorraine Motel. Located along well-traveled roadways, at regular coordinates along the perimeters of metropolitan areas or at the midpoints between them, the American motel exemplified affordable accommodation, able as it was to operate at lower fixed and variable costs than a hotel, and thereby to charge tourists less. The standard motel was usually a one- or two-story structure, most often consisting of a single building of adjoining rooms whose doors faced a parking lot. Within the morphology of the motel, the Lorraine is a motor-inn type with a loosely interpreted “center-core L” arrangement tightly fitted to its site. According to the motel’s leading mid-century technical commentators, “Where the site is too small for any real privacy of outlook, the best that can be achieved is to draw back as much as possible from the road by building two stories high, with a central spine, so that the required number of units will cover the smallest feasible site area.”62 Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro, Motels (New York: Reinhold, 1955), 148.

Because the motel also sat low against the social horizon, most motel-based activity went virtually unnoticed. Thus it was associable with both wanted and unwanted social change. The motel enjoys vaunted status among historians of the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement, “the cause of [which] was advanced substantially from motels, as leaders traveled across the [United States] coordinating activities.”63 Jakle, Sculle, and Rogers, Motel in America, xiii. The motel’s link to less equivocally deviant behavior was real enough to attract the attention of J. Edgar Hoover for a time: as early as 1940, the FBI director took to the pages of American Magazine to urge its clean-living readership not to be deceived by these low-slung “Camps of Crime.” “Behind many alluring roadside signs are dens of vice and corruption,” read the lead-in to Hoover’s philippic, which cheerfully predicted the motel’s imminent demise.64 J. Edgar Hoover with Courtney R. Cooper, “Camps of Crime,” American Magazine 160 (February 1940): 14–15, 130–32.

There’s something perfectly apposite about the Boym Lorraine’s opacity, then. Today, at the climax of a strictly orchestrated tour experience at the National Civil Rights Museum, visitors can turn left and peer through plate glass into a typical American motel room circa 1968, or turn right and study a reconstruction of the room King shared with Ralph Abernathy as they had left it at 6:01 P.M. on April 4, 1968. These views afford no insight at all. The museumization of the motel’s interior feels more than a little uncanny: what, precisely, is one meant to see in the curated, dollhouse version of a cultural microclimate whose myriad possible uses are, in a sense, designed to remain unindexed?

In the wake of King’s death, a reactive logic of division largely monopolized civil rights activism. The expressed desire of effective black cultural politicians was to direct the increasingly free movement of their disheartened constituents. This development entailed a certain surrender to separation as a guiding principle in cultural politics, which has largely become a cultural politics of difference. These formations’ focus on the boundary required them to downplay the way certain avatars of the movement, such as Emmett Till, Bayard Rustin, and King, were boundary figures, their definitive contributions both underlying the distinctness of the races and promoting cognizance of their growing nearness to each other. This complementarity clearly obsessed King the rhetorician, for whom desegregation and integration were but the formal targets of his activity during these years. The motel form turns out to be a wildly effective means of surfacing the cultural deviance narrated in King’s submerged discourse, that discourse being both a rhetorical experiment in redescribing American social organization and a sustained articulation of everyday life in an informal culture where public order and private urges were clashing — strong forces meeting forces weak, though not easily shaken.

1 Ralph Ellison, “Haverford Statement,” 1969, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. and with an introduction by John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 434–35. »

2 Ibid., 435. You’d have to want to miss it not to register Ellison’s fondness for citing cases where discomposure reigns, where it’s utterly definitive for both the constitution and the substance of the case, and where his account conveys his incredulity at the ease with which American audiences elide that discomposure’s complexity, as though through a blockage of sense. When speaking of Melvin Tolson, Ellison goes so far as to implore his listener to believe him: “I can remember another figure whom I held in as much esteem as Alain Locke when . . . I was growing up, and this was a man by the name of Melvin Tolson. Many of you might know his poetry, but I first knew Tolson as a teacher at Wiley College in Texas. Tolson was training a drama group but his special pride and joy was a debating society through which he had inherited all the techniques of debate and rhetoric in the nineteenth century as they have been filtered down through those young New Englanders who went south during the Reconstruction to teach the Freedmen. Tolson extended these traditions and techniques to such an extent that more than once the debating team of Oxford used to come out there and get clobbered. Now, this isn’t the kind of knowledge of American education or American cultural history that you find easily available but I assure you I am not creating fantasies. I am speaking of what actually happened. How confusing it was to find that what was considered so excellent that it could defeat the members of a great university was not honored throughout the larger society.” Ellison, “Alain Locke,” 1974, in Collected Essays, 447. »

3 Ellison, “Haverford Statement,” 434. Ellison’s emphasis. According to the editor of Collected Essays, “Ellison made this statement using his ‘situation as a Negro American’ to explain his ‘personal affirmation of integration without the surrender of our unique identity as a people’ and his belief that ‘the only way to be an effective Negro intellectual is by being a most perceptive and responsible American intellectual.’” Callahan in Collected Essays, 431. »

4 Ellison, “Haverford Statement,” 435. »

5 Ibid. »

6 Ibid., 434. »

7 Ibid., 435. »

8 Ibid., 436. »

9 Ellison, “Address to the Harvard Alumni, Class of 1949,” 1974, in Collected Essays, 426. »

10 Ibid., 427. »

11 Ibid., 426. »

12 Ellison, “Alain Locke,” 451. »

13 Ibid., 446. »

14 Ibid. »

15 Ibid., 447. »

16 Alain Locke, “Frontiers of Culture,” 1949, in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 433. »

17 Locke, “The Contribution of Race to Culture,” 1930, in ibid., 203. For an excellent discussion of Ellison’s reception of Locke and his interlocutors see Ross Posnock, “Introduction: Ellison’s Joking,” The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Posnock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–10. »

18 Ellison, “Alain Locke,” 450. »

19 Ibid., 451. »

20 A thoroughgoing historical investigation of ERAP can be found in Jennifer Frost, “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York: NYU Press, 2001). »

21 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part,” 1883, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954, reprint ed. 1976), 147. »

22 Norman Harris, The Sixties: A Black Chronology (Athens, Ga.: Black Resource Center, 1990). »

23 Jacqueline Rose, “On Edward Said,” The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 196. »

24 My thanks to Mark Reinhardt for pointing out that an early version of this argument, in rhetoric and framing, left this matter problematically ambiguous. »

25 The quotations above appear in the following sources: Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 70; ibid., 101; ibid., 180; ibid., 50; King, “Statement on Ending the Bus Boycott,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 3, Birth of a New Age, December 1955–December 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 487; King, “Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” Christian Century 74 (February 6, 1957): 166; King, Why We Can’t Wait, 1964 (reprint ed. New York: Signet Classics, 2000), 32–33; and ibid., 163. »

26 This formulation originates with Rose; see her “On Edward Said,” 193. »

27 Eric J. Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 78. »

28 Ibid., 79, 81. »

29 Hans Kohn, “Race Conflict,” in Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 13:36. »

30 Ibid, 41. »

31 Ibid., 39. »

32 It was of course Ernst H. Kantorowicz who, in a legendary 1957 study, analyzed the idea of the two-bodied king for medievalists and students of early modern political thought. See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, reprint ed. 1997). »

33 If we accept the not improbable idea that James Earl Ray was part of a U.S.-government conspiracy. »

34 Boym Partners, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York, was established by Constantin Boym in 1986. Born in Moscow, Russia, in 1955, Boym trained as an architect there before immigrating to the United States, where he gained an AIA registration in 1988. »

35 Constantin Boym, electronic correspondence with the author, October 4, 2015. Boym likes the Lorraine as an “example of a building undistinguished from architectural point of view, yet known worldwide.” »

36 Ibid. »

37 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Shättle (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), 40e. »

38 The site and its history are elegantly glossed by Alyson Hobbs in “The Lorraine Motel and Martin Luther King,” New Yorker, January 18, 2016. »

39 Charlie Jenné, lead contractor during the Lorraine’s conversion into a museum, told me that this eight-inch-square relic is the only existing piece of the original balcony-balustrade assembly. July 21, 2016, Memphis. »

40 The Buildings of Disaster series recognizes a number of these sites; its totality pretends to survey the built environment of American infamy. A few examples of the other sites in the series — the Watergate Hotel, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the Pentagon — bear out the low standing of the comparably modest Lorraine Motel. The only other structure in the series with the Lorraine’s almost-anonymity is the cabin of the Unabomber. »

41 The Boym souvenir’s weight of 7.6 ounces is equivalent to that of a typical athletic shoe. »

42 Lee Edelman has diagnosed this help-fully in another context. See No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). »

43 One imagines that it may have been the daily work of campaign leadership that brought Martin Luther King to this acceptance of, and ability to emphasize with, the local reality of bodily being — what Sigmund Freud called a “withdrawing of expectations from the other world and concentrating [one’s] liberated energies into [one’s] life on earth.” Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 41. »

44 King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 (Stamford, Conn.: Overbrook, 1968), 5. »

45 Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” 1920, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 18:41. »

46 Another kind of exposition might describe this as the making of what we share and the sharing of what we make. »

47 King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 2. »

48 Arguably, the sole legatee of King’s most radical moral philosophy was Bayard Rustin, ad hoc editorialist whose 1949 New York Post articles led to the abolition of the chain gang in North Carolina. He was organizer of fundraisers for the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56; youth officer of the unrealized, first March on Washington of 1941; planner of the first Freedom Rides; mentor on nonviolent resistance to King and the Montgomery Improvement Association; cofounder, with Ella Baker and Stanley Levison, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and sexual outlaw cast out by the organization in 1960 over perception fears. Rustin militated against separatism in all his civil rights work. Among the many good words he dedicated to the subject are these: “Anybody can say to white people, ‘Roll over, we don’t need you.’ But that is not political expression.” The journalist and historian Elton Fax, in his 1970 chronicle Contemporary Black Leaders, seizes unrelentingly upon those, like Rustin, who pressed for the idea that racially mixed coalitions in all affairs were central, rather than ancillary, to effective antiracist activism. Circumspect (to say the least) about nonviolence and strategic interracial alliances, Fax characterizes Rustin’s responses to the emergence of cultural separatism in a tellingly unforgiving fashion: he’s out of touch with young militants, sympathetic with authorities; hell, the New York City police department does him favors. Tellingly, Fax’s book contains no profile of King. See Elton C. Fax, Contemporary Black Leaders (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970). »

49 Adolf von Hildebrand, “The Conception of Relief,” 1893, trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907), 96. »

50 Ibid., 97. »

51 Ibid., 94, 96. »

52 Ibid., 94. »

53 Ibid., 96, 95. »

54 Desegregation designates the “ending of a policy of segregation,” while integration merely accomplishes “the intermixing of people or groups previously segregated.” Desegregation was a functionally legislative process; integration was always the more difficult task. For many individuals and groups on both sides of the color line, integration was also the less desirable. Interracialization occurs on a whole other plane of difficulty, manifesting not through formal efforts to integrate but through informal manifestations of interracial sociality. »

55 Further, they rarely missed an opportunity to refer their work to the long agenda of unfinished business of the American experiment with democracy. Especially germane in this connection is King’s increasingly vocal stance against both the Vietnam War and cross-cultural economic disparity in the months preceding his death — a robust socialism in everything but name. »

56 Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power Politics Autonomy,” in Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Ames Curtis, Odéon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 153. »

57 I want to underline the corresponding recognition of decades of convincing criticism of the uses of King to support a masculinist ideology of respectability that grossly constrains the livability of black skin for men and women of countless dispositions who would elect not to undertake public life in costume. »

58 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955 (reprint ed. New York: Vintage, 1997), 95. »

59 See John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle, and Jefferson S. Rogers, The Motel in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 16. »

60 In 1925, Los Angeles architect Arthur Heineman built the first structure designated by the name “motel” in San Luis Obispo, California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He coined the term, a contraction of “motor” and “hotel,” to capture its spirit as a lodging designed for motorists. »

61 Jakle, Sculle, and Rogers, Motel in America, xi. In a telling sign of the motel’s minorness as a cultural form, even this authoritative volume — which synthesizes what its authors claim to have been the whole literature on the motel produced up to the time of their writing — contains no reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., or to the Lorraine Motel. »

62 Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro, Motels (New York: Reinhold, 1955), 148. »

63 Jakle, Sculle, and Rogers, Motel in America, xiii. »

64 J. Edgar Hoover with Courtney R. Cooper, “Camps of Crime,” American Magazine 160 (February 1940): 14–15, 130–32. »

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