ABSTRACT
MARTIN LUTHER KING’S vision of a future without ethnic or cultural discrimination is rightly regarded as programmatic for the past thirty years and the next fifty. Its sentiments have been echoed in dozens of struggles across the globe to obtain equality for all, regardless of ethnic, cultural, or religious differences. Whether this
meant equality in treatment, rights, recognition, life chances, or success was a moot question then. Yet in hindsight, King rallied the troops, but they did not follow his strategy. The leader of the Civil Rights Movement wanted exactly that: equal rights based on civil rights, that is, based on the premise of equal and individual citizenship. In some ways, this line of argument had been overtaken even as it was being cast into its visionary form. The struggle against ethnic or cultural discrimination took on an entirely different logic within a few years of King’s murder: The Civil Rights Movement lost its combative edge to the Black Consciousness Movement, and this and its many successors put forth a different argument altogether-discrimination, and for that matter emancipation, was not a question of individual civil rights, but of collective rights, that is, rights assigned to groups, be they real or imagined. There were two transformations in this process.
