Ring Out Freedom! The Voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. By Fredrik Sunnemark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. 273. $19.95, paper.

Where do you begin in trying to understand the persuasive power and vocal elegance of a person who fundamentally challenges the order, rationale, and structure of a society? Admittedly, the phrasing of this question may sound a bit grandiose, particularly given our (post)modern ideas regarding the displaced the subject and the instability of language and meaning. Despite these necessary – but by no means absolute – positions, such a question gestures toward the enormity of the task that one necessarily confronts when attempting to comprehend the example of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ring Out Freedom! The Voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement by the historian of ideas Fredrik Sunnemark is one of two – the other being David A. Bobbitt’s The Rhetoric of Redemption: Kenneth Burke’s Redemption Drama and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech” – recently published studies that examine the rhetorical dimensions of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s public discourse. Sunnemark’s contribution seeks to distinguish itself from previous studies of King’s vocal performance such as Richard Lischer’s The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America and Keith D. Miller’s Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources by offering a close and critical examination of “King’s rhetoric as a whole both in itself and from the outset” (2).

Sunnemark employs a complex dialogical strategy that thinks through King’s rhetorical project within the interstices of “white and African-American cultures” as well as “political, social, religious, and academic cultures; between African-American religion and white Protestantism; between faith and theology; between middle classes, working classes, and underclasses; between the South and the North; between the spoken and written word; between the pulpit and the picket line, and so on” (3). As rhetorician and representative figure of the Civil Rights Movement, King effectively crafts a vocal project that gives utterance to a social and political vision intimately shaped by the intense negotiations of these seemingly disparate discursive spaces. The rhetorical and ideological effect is nothing less than the transformation and iconization of a singular African American male Baptist minister’s voice into the moral conscious of a nation.

Ring Out Freedom! is based on a selection of King’s public statements and writings from 1955 until 1968. Sunnemark evades the two classic arguments within King scholarship – the question of the relative influence of the European and African-American dimensions of King’s thought and the issue of authenticity with respect to King’s published and unpublished materials – and opts to focus on the representation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. that is manifested in and through his public rhetoric. This move enables the author to analyze how King constructs and is, in turn, constructed by the rhetorical dynamics he employs in crafting a public language that challenges the American system of segregation and provides a critical representative voice of the Civil Rights Movement.

The central argument of the study is developed over the course of five thematically organized chapters. Sunnemark opts for an overarching methodological strategy that correlates, in a complex and continuous interplay, selected oral and written texts and the discursive and political contexts of the Civil Rights movement and American democratic culture. Each chapter examines the deployment of specific rhetorical strategies in King’s public discourse as critically informed by his thick and multi-layered textual representations as revealed in such texts as Strength to Love as well as selected public orations and sermons.

The long and somewhat unwieldy first chapter interrogates the religious dimensions King’s rhetoric and its dialogic relations with American political culture and the Civil Rights Movement. Sunnemark’s attempt to deal with a plethora of issues in this chapter such as the theo-ethical dimension of King’s rhetoric, the moral foundation informing his political critique, and the resonance of these elements within the Civil Rights Movement forces him try to integrate a number of different subjective, methodological, and theoretical arguments. At the end of the experience of this textual whirlwind, the reader is left mystified by such a disjointed treatment of this significant aspect of King’s rhetoric.

The second chapter, “Western Intellectualism and American Ideals,” reads as an extension of the first as Sunnemark explores King’s intellectual development and its relation to the rhetorical tactics, methods, and strategies developed and deployed within the discursive context of the Civil Rights Movement. Sunnemark selects King’s textual representation of his intellectual journey as presented in the autobiographical chapter “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Stride Toward Freedom as the basis for his analysis of “the language and legitimization strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr. [as] an act of definition and a constituting of meaning which is locked in constant interaction with a world of social determinations and definitions” (108).

The final three chapters interrogates King’s rhetoric in connection with the issue of race, the geopolitical reorientation of countries and cultures as a result of the decolonization movement and the Cold War, and the radicalization of King’s thought and his public discourse in the waning years of the Civil Rights Movement. In discussing race, Sunnemark goes beyond theme of inclusion with regard to King’s thought about the place and position of African Americans in American society in revealing King’s ideational complex that thinks race along a number of different registers resulting in a “rhetoric [that] works within a hegemonic understanding of race [while] at the same time that it contains a theme that goes beyond and challenges this understanding” (123). King’s travels abroad as well as the changing and challenging geopolitics of the era helped in forging a dynamic framework in which he would formulate a rhetorical practice that challenged the substantive and procedural boundaries of democratic politics in the United States. The shifting material and discursive terrain of United States society and the various social movements challenging the status quo forces King to rethink his previous rhetorical tactics and strategies he formulated just a decade earlier. In Sunnemark’s words, “King’s earlier strategy of positioning himself between cultures is no longer sufficient. . . . Now he must position himself between discourses and ideologies” (224).

Ring Out Freedom! presents an interesting thesis for understanding the rhetorical prowess of Martin Luther King, Jr. In as much as Sunnemark positions his study as a work that analyzes King’s rhetorical constructions, frames, and challenges, it fails to develop a coherent argumentative strategy regarding this rhetorical development. In addition, the text does not present a convincing and critical analysis that seriously interrogates the complexity of King’s thought. I was frequently frustrated with the less than rigorous analysis presented in support of the varied, and often confusing, arguments advanced by the author. A number of key ideas and concepts are left underdeveloped and undertheorized, such as the idea of a “Civil Rights discourse,” the (re)presentation and (re)positioning of King in relation to the Civil Rights Movement, and the construction of King as subject and object of a rhetorical practice that largely occurs within the boundaries of a “Civil Rights discourse.” On this last point, although Sunnemark initially gestures towards a displacement of an “original” and/or “authentic” King, throughout the text we are constantly confronted with a real King that is often conflated with a rhetorical King.

The theoretical slippage in the text, in large part, can be attributed to a major deficiency of the study: the lack of a cogent, coherent, and well articulated argument and methodological strategy. In light of this critical absence, Ring Out Freedom! reads as a loosely organized and somewhat repetitive book that presents a series of static and at times superficial readings of King’s rhetoric. Despite the theoretical density of King’s texts, Sunnemark does not provide a close and careful reading of the selected texts, thus leaving the reader with little more than an impression of King’s rhetoric. Indeed, much of what Sunnemark presents is more descriptive than analytical, more gestural than critical. Although Ring Out Freedom! The Voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement announces a new and promising line of research into Martin Luther King, Jr. scholarship, much of the work remains to be done.

Corey D. B. Walker, University of Virginia