George Bush once told us that he wanted to be a "uniter, not a divider."  It's obvious that Barack Obama wants to be the same in a culture whose divisions have reached fever pitch.  If a president can't unite us, maybe role models from our history can.

A television ad campaign this fall featured a boy, approximately 9-years-old, African American, beautiful, and exhibiting a sort of strangely precocious or precognizant satisfaction. He was appreciating, appropriately, the sight of the recently unveiled Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C. 

 The commercial went on to play audio of lines from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech and corresponding images, seemingly from the boy’s imagination, depicting generations young, old,  ethnically diverse, all engaging in friendly discourse across an infinitely long banquet table. Teens found their table in the hallways of their schools as they emerged from their classrooms, while adults found their table sheltered among the white columns of the Lincoln Memorial (or perhaps intentionally ambiguously, the White House). 

Curiously, there was no food on these tables yet, but each was set with table clothes, the finest china and the best silver. Everyone was relaxed and smiling in anticipation of a wonderful time.

If I could spell out the sound a needle makes as it scratches across the surface of a vinyl record on an old-fashioned turn table, I would do it now.  I would have to in acknowledgement of a few of my public high school students—generally white—who refuse to recite “The Pledge of Allegiance” each morning in my classroom. 

They stand respectfully and politely, but refuse to say “The Pledge,” a ritual imposed by law in the state of Idaho, because they are young, generally very liberal and idealistic, and they view“The Pledge” as a lie. 

 Generally these students have one of two objections to “The Pledge.”  Either to the promise of “justice for all” or to the line ”under God.” For the purposes of this article, I’ll comment only on the first of these objections.  (I should say now that I wish to acknowledge these students, to respect them, but not necessarily to applaud them.)

 Every year come September, I wait with a certain amount of trepidation, to see what sort of class I’ll have during the period when “The Pledge” is recited.  No kidding, there have been years, mostly pre 9/11, when I have had to say the entire “Pledge”almost on my own. As my students would say, this can be quite “AWKWARD.” 

 Since 9/11, I find myself less alone, but I’m not altogether certain if it is for the right reasons. What I hope all my students eventually come to understand about “The Pledge” is that, despite whatever may have been meant by “justice for all” among those who originally made “The Pledge” a national treasure and tradition, it should be viewed as an expression of our best ideals, an essential goal, even if it doesn’t yet reflect our reality.

 So now I return to the African American boy in the ad campaign with a sense of precocious or precognizant appreciation.  The ad works for me as long as I envision it as an expression of an ideal that King and others have thought worth fighting for, despite all the hypocrisy and travesty that our nation’s cultural and legal past and present have given us.  

To more accurately reflect current cultural reality, the conversations at the King memorial banquet table would need to start with some clever ice breakers that might erupt in laughter, followed later by some dramatic disagreements, followed, hopefully,  by a sense understanding and peace.  As I write this, the film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" comes to mind.

Want to engage the attention of a bunch of teenagers, regardless of race?  Present them with material from the Civil Rights Movement. On the one hand, in a school culture like the one I teach in, kids may feel like they don’t need yet another lesson on why racism is wrong or proving that it still exists.  But like many of us, they still need a reason to believe that the U.S. is not just a country, but a cultural experiment in justice worth fighting for. 

This is why voices from the Civil Rights Era are an easy sell (much easier, by the way, than those of the founding fathers). Such voices serve as a vehicle of hope with power to cut across a whole spectrum of problems and issues we are facing in the Barack Obama years of this country.

 There are so many divisions—Main Street vs. Wall Street, conservative vs. liberal, gay vs. straight,  man vs. woman, “American” born vs. immigrant, majority vs. minority (soon to evolve into majority), environmentalist vs. big business interests, etc.  The Civil Rights Movement as embodied in a leader like King gives all of us hope that such vast and contentious divides may some day be bridged. 

 This potential for hope in the face of broken American dreams is what inspires my students when they read a play like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun or a piece like King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”  The messages of these African American pieces and others resonate so strongly when paired with literature reflecting struggles of other cultures and time periods, pieces like Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Streetor John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. 

 Everyone needs hope.  Richard Wright and other important authors have taught us what happens without it in novels like Native Son. The silver lining in the evil legacy of racial and economic oppression in this country lies in our cultural legacy of protest and hard fought social justice. We refuse to give up hope.

 For this reason, I understand, yet perhaps more importantly cringe when I see controversy between races over a novel like Kathryn Stockett’s The Help—now a somewhat controversial film nominated for various Academy Awards.  Yes, a white woman attempted to write parts of this book from the point of view of horribly mistreated and underpaid African American servants, but is anyone really saying Stockett got it all wrong?  Do we really want to say that she has no place imagining, empathizing, and expressing the point of view of the oppressed? 

Don’t empathy and hope for change and justice go hand in hand, and can’t we discover some reassurance in the notion of oppressed and oppressor finding themselves on the same team?

 Maybe it is unfair that this book and not others penned by African Americans about African Americans found its way to Hollywood. But is it really all bad?  I would offer that it may be more important now than ever—as racial tensions grow more subtle and therefore potentially more insidious—that we begin to truly share the Civil Rights Era as a national treasure.

 If we can’t yet share this hope and pride about our cultural progress, maybe, as in the dreamlike vision of people at a banquet table in the commercial for the National King Memorial, it’s an ideal worth striving for.  Maybe this is what the precocious,  precognizant boy in the ad sees as a future possibility, and that’s why he’s smiling.