Only by studying the past through the lens of democratic republican ideology can we complete King’s unfinished business, argues Luke Pickrell, in an analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s political legacy.
Paul Goodman said the use of history is to “rescue from oblivion the lost causes of the past”— an exercise that’s “especially important when those lost causes haunt us in the present as unfinished business.”1 Goodman’s influence was most substantial during the 1960s: the New Left was alive, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., half Goodman’s age, struggled to complete the unfinished business of America’s first Reconstruction.
In 1967, King published what would ultimately be his final book: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? In it, he said that the Civil Rights Movement had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights.”2
King’s words surprised me when I read them for the first time. I knew about King’s socialistic policy proposals, such as an economic bill of rights. However, I didn’t know he’d questioned the possibility of those proposals being realized through the existing Constitution.
Each January 15th, articles in Left-leaning publications retrace the development of King’s anti-militarist and anti-capitalist politics. They remind us that by the end of his life, he was admonishing the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and demanding the country be “born again” and change its entire “structure.”3 After taking part in his first anti-war march, King told his Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) colleagues that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism.”4 These reiterations are valuable, as most mainstream celebrations ignore King’s democratic politics and socialist convictions. However, the Left has far less to say about Martin Luther King and the Constitution.
In what follows, I put King in dialogue with America’s most famous piece of parchment. What did he say about the Constitution, and why? What were those around him, including people in and around the New Left and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), saying about the Constitution and the general condition of American democracy?5 Why is much of the contemporary Left silent regarding the Constitution?
Some of my conclusions may feel anticlimactic. In the end, the various movements of the 1960s could only express a profound understanding that something was wrong. They failed to locate the Constitution as the obstacle to lasting political and social change and could not develop a democratic republican ideology as a result.
As then, so today. What passes for the Left in the United States is long on problems and short on answers other than vague references to “socialism” and “workers’ power.” To repeat my recent response to Steve Bloom and M. Wilbur, we act as if what we are doing today hasn’t already been tried.6
Standing more than a half-century removed from King and his fellow travelers, we have the power of hindsight. Only by studying the past through the lens of democratic republican ideology can we complete King’s unfinished business.
Baptized by Fire
The Constitution was a part of King’s struggle from the beginning. In 1944, King, then a high school junior, gave his first public speech during an oratorical contest in Dublin, Georgia. The title of his entry was “The Negro and the Constitution.” In this speech, King explained that
America gave its full pledge of freedom seventy-five years ago. Slavery has been a strange paradox in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created free and equal. Finally, after tumult and war, the nation in 1865 took a new stand—freedom for all people. The new order was backed by amendments to the national constitution making it the fundamental law that there should be no discrimination anywhere in the ‘land of the free’ on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.7
Still, troubles abounded as the United States approached the mid-century. “Black America still wears chains,” King said: “The finest Negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man. Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar.”8
In an interview with Playboy Magazine twenty years later, King described the day of the debate as memorable for two reasons.9 King beat his opponent, Hiram Kendall, and claimed the top prize. However, he also had his first experience with racism when the bus driver made King and his teacher stand in the aisle during the return trip to Atlanta to accommodate white passengers. The fourteen-year-old had never been angrier. He had spoken truth to the assembled judges: a Black person in 1940s America remained “at the mercy of the meanest white man” despite the Union’s Civil War victory and the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments.
The Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board on May 17, 1954. Around the same time, a twenty-five-year-old King was ordained as a Baptist minister. Less than a year later, Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam lynched Emmett Till in Alabama. Then, Rosa Parks refused to obey the commands of Montgomery bus driver James F. Blake. Soon, “[s]omething like a panic seized many parts of the South,” wrote C. Vann Woodward, “a panic bred of insecurity and fear… On the white side, resistance hardened up and down the line, and in places stiffened into bristling defiance.”10 King threw himself into this environment of “stiffened and bristling resistance.” He was baptized by fire.
As a twenty-six-year-old minister, King linked the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement to the supreme law of the land, exclaiming, “[We] are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”11 During a 1962 speech before the National Press Club, King called the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “great wells of democracy,”12 and later, “promissory [notes] to which every American was to fall heir… the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”13 Many Constitution apologists, including Gregg Ivers of The American Constitution Society, have seized King’s 1962 speech and cemented it as his unchanging position on the Framers’ creation.14
However, King never expressed a genuine belief in the legitimacy of the Constitution. Unlike countless presidents, he never praised the “guard rails” created by the Framers. He shared little in common with James Madison, who extolled the United States’ new republican form of government as a means to frustrate any “interested and overbearing majority” and frustrate the power of the “people out of doors.”1516 The Constitution is designed to make swift and decisive action as difficult as possible. Dr. King, however, famously explained that “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”17 Freedom and justice were his guiding lights. If the Constitution facilitated that pursuit, it was good; when it impeded those goals, it was not. King told his congregation in 1955: “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.”18 He was probably referring to the Reconstruction Amendments and the recent decision in Brown v. Board, both of which were wins for the ongoing struggle for universal and equal rights.
Participants in the Civil Rights Movement often appealed to the Constitution’s authority to win the same rights held by whites including, first and foremost, the right to vote. It took a decade, but by the mid-sixties, the three branches of government seemed to be responding to mass protests. The Supreme Court handed down favorable rulings in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and Bailey v. Patterson (1962). In June 1963, John F. Kennedy used the National Guard to enforce school integration and declared on national television that racism had no place in American society. Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964.
However, King was devoted not to the words of long-dead enslavers but to the struggle for universal and equal rights. In his Letter From Birmingham Jail, he repeated Saint Augustine’s admonitions that “[a]n unjust law is no law at all,” and “[a]ny law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”9 Saint Augustine also said, “[w]ithout justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?”19
SDS and the “Military Event”
In 1965, the U.S. began Operation Rolling Thunder. The decision to carry out saturation bombing of Vietnam was initiated despite a well-defined opposition within the Johnson administration’s ranks, who understood aerial bombardment was counterproductive. The bombs fell plentifully and for a long time.
On April 17th, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the largest protest against any war in U.S. history, with 20,000 people marching on the Capital, the National Mall, and the Washington Monument. There, Paul Potter, a founding member of SDS, urged the assembled masses to “name the system” that made the War possible.20 At another rally on November 27th, SDS president Carl Oglesby gave one of the period’s most important speeches. Titled Let Us Shape the Future, it was a “devastating performance: skilled, moderate, learned, and compassionate, but uncompromising, angry, radical, and above all persuasive. It drew the only standing ovation of the afternoon…”21 Oglesby lambasted the “corporate liberals” who, unlike the “humanist liberals,” had thrown aside Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson and embraced the “menacing coalition of military and industrial power.”22
The U.S. had emerged from World War Two as the undisputed world hegemonic power. However, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the atomic bomb, and military interventions across East Asia combined to convince many that the U.S. was indeed a unique country— and not for the better. SDS was formed around the project of “participatory democracy.”23 It aimed to restructure the decision-making apparatuses of United States politics to increase freedom and equality for all.8 A twenty-one-year-old Tom Hayden met King in Los Angeles in 1960, and the preacher’s advice to the young man— “Ultimately, you have to take a stand with your life”— was transformational.24 Hayden later wrote the Port Huron Statement, the most famous text to emerge from the New Left. In its pages, Hayden described the “permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and the “enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb.”25 America was a country of affluence riddled with racism and greed, and ruled by a powerful and largely unaccountable elite.
The iconoclastic academic C. Wright Mills heavily influenced SDS. In his 1956 work, The Power Elite, Mills described the “domination of the military event” over post-war American society.26 According to Mills, many people, Black and white,
hear that the Congress has again abdicated to a handful of men decisions clearly related to the issue of war or peace. They know that the bomb was dropped over Japan in the name of the United States of America, although they were at no time consulted about the matter. They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know that they are not making any.8
Critiques of the Constitution in the academy were few and far between during King’s time, but they did exist. Everyone of letters, including King, knew the work of Charles Beard, including his semi-heretical An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.27 In 1948, historian Richard Hofstadter, a close friend of Mills’, published The American Political Tradition. There, he described the Framers’ “Calvinistic sense of human evil and damnation.”28 Like Thomas Hobbes, the Framers thought that “men are selfish and contentious” and in need of “a good political constitution to control [them].”29 Above all, the new Constitution was needed to confine the popular, democratic spirit present since the American Revolution.30
Like his intellectual contemporaries, King understood that a minority of the population had always affected U.S. politics through powerful institutions. This minority, King explained, kept America “far behind European nations in all forms of social legislation. England, France, Germany, and Sweden, all distinctly less wealthy than us, provide more security relatively for their people.”31 Still, despite appreciating the minoritarian stranglehold of the South over the country’s politics, King never explicitly connected this tyranny of the minority (and particularly a white minority) to the rules established by the Constitution— the Senate being the most egregious.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, was supposed to change everything. The event marked the “peak of optimism” for the Civil Rights Movement.32 King called it a “shining moment” and suggested that the new law might make mass protests unnecessary.33 James Bevel went even further than King, saying, “[t]here is no more civil rights movement.”34 The highs were high. “A wholesome national consensus [has] developed against extremist conduct toward nonwhite Americans,” King said in 1966, a feeling now expressed in “laws, court decisions and in the alteration of long-entrenched custom.”35
But the lows were low— and coming fast. Five days after the Voting Rights Act became law, the Watts Riots began in Los Angeles. Widely-televised riots would take place every summer up through 1968. Police abuse was rampant, and complaints of discrimination and a sense of powerlessness were prolific. Watts was like most cities in America, revealed the novelist Walter Mosely:
But if you come from down in Watts or Fifth Ward or Harlem, every soul you come upon has been threatened and beaten and jailed. If you have kids they will be beaten. And no matter how far back you remember, there’s a beatin’ there waiting for you. And you see some man stopped by the cops and some poor mother cryin’ for his release it speaks to you. You don’t know that woman, you don’t know if the man bein’ arrested has done something wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Because you been there before. And it’s hot, and you’re broke, and people have been doin’ this to you because of your skin for more years than your mother’s mother can remember.36
The strange career of Jim Crow, concluded Van Woodward, had become much stranger.37
During the 1960s, the U.S. changed from a system of non-universal and unequal suffrage, in which minoritarian checks such as the Senate existed alongside laws explicitly barring Blacks from voting, to one of universal and unequal suffrage, in which the Constitution’s minoritarian features coexisted with expanded suffrage. The hardwired elements of the Constitution remained intact.
As in 1944, when he compared the promises of Reconstruction to the reality of Jim Crow, King soon concluded that winning the battle was different from winning the war: “[T]he prohibition of barbaric behavior,” he wrote, “while beneficial to the victim, does not constitute the attainment of equality or freedom. A man may cease beating his wife without thereby creating a wholesome marital relationship.”38 The income gap was widening. Unemployment remained and was getting worse due to the automation of semi-skilled jobs. De jure segregation was declared illegal by Federal law, but de facto segregation continued. Many Black people were asking
what their problems had to do with freedom rides, sit-ins, and lunch-counter integrations— or, for that matter, with the ideal of racial integration and assimilation in general. While they had been stirred by the March on Washington, thrilled by the heroism of the Birmingham brothers, and moved by the drama of the Selma March, they could not see how such tactics were adaptable to the scene at Newark, Detroit, Chicago, or Harlem. Granted the effectiveness of such crusading strategies for limited goals, even granting that they finally toppled the formidable but hollow legal defenses of Jim Crow— what now?39
The Kerner Commission concluded that the U.S. in 1968 was moving “toward two societies, one black, one white— separate and unequal.”40 By then, King did not need an official report to tell him what was going on: “The quality and quantity of discrimination and deprivation in our nation are so pervasive,” he explained, “that all the changes of a decade have merely initiated preliminary alterations in an edifice of injustice and misery.”38 He continued: “The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky; they cast light on the imperfections in the civil rights movement…”41 King’s entire life’s work was only the beginning, and every beginning is difficult.
King felt he had run out of answers; Coretta told him they would come in time.42 In this context of frustration and increasing despair, King questioned the Constitution explicitly: “We have had constitutional backing for most of our demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we could be sure of legal support from the federal courts. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear.”9 The movement had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights.”43 King identified the boundaries of actions within the limits of the existing Constitution and voiced his feelings out loud in the context of a mass political movement. No one else in the ‘60s did anything comparable.
James Earl Ray pulled the trigger in Memphis on a cool and crisp evening. The Reverend Billy Kyles turned away and sobbed as the color drained from his friend’s cheeks.44 At the funeral, James Balwin wondered if “the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack.”45 In the end, Dr. King never had time to fully develop and articulate his theory of escaping the American political labyrinth.
King’s confrontation with the Constitution was inevitable and never-ending. It couldn’t have been otherwise. To live in the U.S., let alone as a figure with such immensity and reach, was to reside within the political parameters and “rhythm” established by a handful of men over two centuries prior— a predicament as absurd as it sounds.46
Unfinished Business
Whatever exists of a political Left in the U.S. has paid little attention to King’s comments in Where Do We Go From Here because it hasn’t understood the centrality of the Constitution. The Left’s difficulty comprehending the Constitution is primarily due to the immense power the Bolshevik Revolution has exerted over our thinking for more than a hundred years. Most people still move about in the quagmire of Third International communism’s idea of “bourgeois democracy.” Today, democratic republicanism is only beginning to make a comeback.
As in King’s time, all movements demanding change beyond a certain threshold must confront the Constitution. Take the modern Poor People’s Campaign (PPC). Grounded in King’s call for a “revolution of values” in America, the Campaign seeks to create “a movement that will shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections at every level of government, and build lasting power for poor and impacted people.”47 However, the PPC lacks any sense of King’s later-life skepticism regarding the structure of U.S. politics. Its Third Reconstruction program calls on Congress to raise the minimum wage, guarantee the right to form a union, expand healthcare and access to housing, increase taxes on the wealthy, and expand the (now defunct) Child Tax Credit. Other demands include reforming the Supreme Court, restoring the 1965 Voting Rights Act, establishing statehood for Washington D.C., abolishing the filibuster, relieving student debt, demilitarizing the Southern Border, and ending fossil fuel subsidies.48 Ultimately, all of these demands will slam against the minoritarian checks of the Constitution, including the obstructive Senate. The PPC is well-meaning, but the failure to critique the undemocratic political system (do they really think the Third Reconstruction Act can pass through Congress?) will only lead to unnecessary confusion.
The Civil Rights Movement came and went. King’s SCLC and Hayden’s SDS are no more. Every protagonist mentioned in this article is long-dead. Still, we have one crucial insight that neither the Civil Rights Movement nor the New Left understood: the U.S. is not a democracy because of its undemocratic Constitution. Democracy is the solution to the present lack of reforms. It will also lead to democratic control and management of the economy.
Despite solid efforts, political actors in the 1960s could not identify the Constitution as the obstacle to changing America. Some came closer than others, and King came the closest of all. Focused critiques of the Framers’ creation were a dime a dozen and resided only in the minds of a few academics. For various reasons, many of which may never be known, the demand for a democratic constitution never took hold. In fact, it never came close to congealing into a demand.
There will be frustration in the decades ahead. No doubt. However, we need not be confused about our objective. Not anymore. The demand for a democratic state is the “drastic summation of our daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction.”49 A democratic constitution is the keystone demand; it locks all other demands into position and will allow any future party to bear the weight of detractors and resist the siren calls of distraction and reconciliation. Big things can have small beginnings, but only if one has grabbed the decisive link in the chain.
During the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Alabama, high schoolers danced as they were doused by fire hoses and skipped into the waiting police wagons. During the wars of Reconstruction, enslaved people turned free Union soldiers turned veterans donned their old uniforms, picked up guns, and marched in formation to defend their hard-won rights. Something of this spirit— the ability to endure abuse, go to jail, and even die for one’s convictions— will necessarily return en masse when a new movement for democracy takes off in the United States. We have unfinished business. The question is not if but when.
Throughout his career, King channeled the poetry of his close friend and confidant, Langston Hughes. I will end with Hughes, who knew the trials and tribulations of life as a Black man and radical politico in America as well as anyone else. Hughes’ most famous creation, Let America Be America Again, was published when King was seven years old, long before his high school speech about the Constitution and the memorable bus ride back to Atlanta.
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
…
O, let America be America again—The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.50
- Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970. (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2002), 10.
- James M. Washington (ed.), Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). 58.
- Ibid. 231.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Three Evils of Society.” Northwest Educational Service District, Jan 28, 2021, https://www.nwesd.org/ed-talks/equity/the-three-evils-of-society-address-martin-luther-king-jr/
- For a general New Left and SDS history, see DSA Night School, “The Principle of Participatory Democracy,” Democratic Socialists of America, Jan. 30. 2024, https://dsasandiego.org/library/night-school/participatory-democracy-2024/
- Luke Pickrell, “Responding to Steve Bloom and M. Wilbur,” Cosmonaut, Feb. 16, 2024, https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/02/letter-responding-to-steve-bloom-and-m-wilbur/
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Negro and the Constitution,” Stanford University, accessed on Feb 10. 2024, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/negro-and-constitution
- Ibid.
- Washington, Testament of Hope, 340.
- C. Vann Woodward. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 128. The first edition of Woodward’s history of the Civil Rights Movement, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, was praised by King as the period’s “historical bible.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Black Past, accessed on Feb. 10, 2024, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1955-martin-luther-king-jr-montgomery-bus-boycott/
- Washington, Testament of Hope, 165.
- Ibid. 217.
- Gregg Ivers, “The Constitutional Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” ACS, Jan 14, 2018, https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/the-constitutional-vision-of-martin-luther-king-jr/
- James Madison, “The Federalist No. 10,” Oberlin College, accessed Feb. 9, 2024, https://www2.oberlin.edu/faculty/gkornbl/GJK/H103F05/Fed10annotated-A.htm
- Robert Ovetz, “The Constitution is a Plutocratic Document,” Jacobin, April 22, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/04/us-constitutio-we-the-elites-robert-ovetz
- Washington, Testament of Hope, 292.
- King, Martin Luther, Jr., “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Black Past. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1955-martin-luther-king-jr-montgomery-bus-boycott/
- “Extracts from St. Augustine: The City of God,” accessed Jan. 29, 2024, http://imagining-other.net/pp4augustineextracts.htm#:~:text=Without%20justice%20what%20are%20kingdoms,them%20by%20an%20agreed%20rule.
- Paul Potter, “The Incredible War,” Voices of Democracy, accessed Jan. 29, 2024, https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/potter-the-incredible-war-speech-text/
- Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 160.
- Carl Oglesby, “Statement of Carl Oglesby, President of Students for a Democratic Society,” Freedom Archive, accessed Feb. 10, 2024, https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC30_scans/30.sds.carloglesbyspeech.pdf
- DSA Night School, “The Principle of Participatory Democracy,” Democratic Socialists of America San Diego, Jan 30, 2024, https://dsasandiego.org/library/night-school/participatory-democracy-2024/
- Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, (New York: Random House, 1988), 35.
- Tom Hayden, “Port Huron Statement Draft,” SDS, accessed Jan. 29, 2024, https://sds-1960s.org/PortHuronStatement-draft.htm
- C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1st ed. (England: Oxford Press, 1956), 9.
- Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 2004).
- Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. (New York: Vintage, 1989).
- Ibid. 3.
- Ibid. 4.
- Washington, Testament of Hope, 564.
- Woodward, The Strange Career, 153.
- Jonathan Eig, King: A Life. (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2023), 457.
- Ibid. 458.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls,” The Nation, March 14, 1966, https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/last-steep-ascent/
- Eig, King, 461.
- Woodward, The Strange Career, 154.
- King, Jr., “Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls.”
- Woodward, The Strange Career, 155-6.
- Randall G. Shelden, “Two Nations, One Black, One White, Separate and Unequal,” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, May 26, 2015, https://www.cjcj.org/news/blog/two-nations-one-black-one-white-separate-and-unequal
- Eig, King, 461 467.
- Ibid. 530.
- Ibid. 58.
- David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 2nd ed. (New York: William Morrow, 2004), 623.
- Jason Sokol, “James Baldwin: ‘I Did Not Want to Weep for Martin, Tears Seemed Futile,” Literary Hub, April 14, 2018, https://lithub.com/james-baldwin-i-did-not-want-to-weep-for-martin-tears-seemed-futile/
- Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Volume 1, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.
- “About,” Poor People’s Campaign, accessed Feb. 10, 2024, https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/
- “Third Reconstruction Agenda,” Poor People’s Campaign, accessed Feb. 8, 2024, https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Third-Reconstruction_long_9-15.pdf
- Rosa Luxemburg, “Theory and Practice,” Marxists.org, accessed Feb. 5, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/ch01.htm
- Langston Hughes, “Let America be America Again,” Poets.org, accessed Feb. 10, 2024, https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again