Greensboro's African American Community Newspaper since 1967
ELON, N.C. - New York University professor and ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine, Kwame Anthony Appiah, delivered the keynote for Elon University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address on Thursday, Jan. 8. As part of the university’s speaker series, the address offered an analysis of the civil rights leader’s complex life and enduring legacy.
Appiah used the life of Dr. King—”warts and all”—as a blueprint for navigating the challenges of modern citizenship. In an exclusive interview with the Carolina Peacemaker prior to his address at Elon. He reflected on the nature of human connection and the persistent challenges of racial and political division.
Born in London to a Ghanaian father and an English mother, Appiah’s own life has been a study in navigating complex identities. During the interview, he emphasized that a functional society requires more than just tolerance; it requires a form of civic care that transcends personal intimacy. “You can’t run a society together... if you don’t have care and concern for each other,” he noted, distinguishing between the love shown to family and the necessary concern we must extend to fellow citizens we may never personally meet.
Appiah further explored the psychological barriers to unity in an age of intense polarization. He noted that while citizens often feel “divided” and overwhelmed by the “craziness going on in the world,” the path to reconciliation starts with a fundamental shift in how we view our opponents.
Appiah observed that “conversation is an activity between consenting adults,” and cautioned that we cannot reach a state of mutual understanding if we only view the “other” as “bad people” or “people that are not you.” He emphasized that even when we fundamentally disagree with someone’s politics, we must find common ground in shared human experiences, whether through music, sports, or the mutual desire to see our children flourish in public schools.
He suggested that the first step toward healing is recognizing that “anybody you disagree with, you also agree with” on a fundamental human level. By fostering these “non-political” connections, Appiah believes we can build the essential “trust” required to eventually engage in the difficult, necessary work of running a republic together.
As he delivered the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address, Appiah provided a nuanced examination of Dr. King himself. While acknowledging King as the “prophetic leader” and “prophet on the mountainside” who provided “legal recourse to Blacks in the American South,” Appiah was unapologetic about examining the man behind the monument.
Appiah insisted that to truly honor King, one must acknowledge his “roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything.” He spoke directly about King’s personal failures, stating, “Dr. King was a flawed individual in some ways, as we all know... he was also no saint.” He noted that by contemporary standards, King was “remarkably chauvinist, concerning his wife,” and acknowledged the painful realities of King’s “energetic” adultery and his “creaturely borrowings (plagiarism)” in his academic work.
“We want a solid plot,” Appiah told the audience, “and so we flail about unhappily when confronted with a life like King’s” that contains both profound achievement and public failure. He argued that separating the “real” man from the “bogus” one is a mistake: “The courteous minister with his oratorical mastery in the pulpit is the same person as the philandering... cinemagoer.”
Ultimately, Appiah’s message was that by acknowledging the “warts and all” of our heroes, we can better understand how to move forward in a country he described as “dangerously divided.” Appiah argued that King’s power lay not in organizational genius, but in his role as a “performer”—the “galvanizing voice and countenance of the civil rights struggle.”
He noted that while King was not a “brilliant strategist” like Bayard Rustin or a “gifted organizer” like Ella Baker. He added that King mastered the “theater of practice” and that the solution to the “mystery to King’s power” is found in his voice, intonation and cadences.”
Appiah concluded that in a “dangerously divided” modern America, King’s oratory remains the most relevant tool for unity and his words remind us that we are “one people, entrusted with the government of this republic,” and that our shared inheritance is a nation “united in the search, to live our true meaning of the American creed.”
