In the “Letter,” King immediately sidled from the “we were here” refrain into another of his favorite passages of ancestor worship: “For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.” It is a mistake, then, to make too much of King’s occasional references to the American dream. He read American history in the light of the black experience of it. The labor of a slave was not the labor of a lonely individual who sought the pristine state of American nature, worked the land and acquired property. The story of the slaves was of a people in “exile,” King said, whose skin color and forced labor made for a different kind of “exceptionalism”: They were other people’s property, the instruments of somebody else’s dream.
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