On King's 'Great Wells of Democracy'

January 21, 2008
By Josiah Bunting III
Times-Dispatch Guest Columnist

PLAINS, VA – The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest principles of liberty were enshrined in America's founding documents and that one key to securing equal justice for all was to make certain that Americans remembered -- and remained true to -- their national heritage.

Someone visiting Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, King once wrote, would have seen not only America's most segregated city, but also a place where the municipal leaders had never learned basic lessons of American history.

"You might have concluded that here was a city that had been trapped for decades in a Rip Van Winkle slumber," he said, "a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, or the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools."

When King was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 for marching without a permit, he wrote a letter from his cell that is a supremely logical, yet passionate, defense of civil disobedience in pursuit of civil rights. It was the demonstrators in city after city, not the authorities who imprisoned them, King argued, who were defending America's founding principles.

"One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," he wrote.

LATER THAT YEAR, when he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, King returned to this theme. "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," he said, "they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."

As we remember King today, it ought to be obvious that future generations of Americans will not be able to claim this inheritance unless they know what it is.
Unfortunately, a recent survey revealed that American colleges are doing a miserable job when it comes to teaching students many of the basic facts about our founding documents and how the principles they enshrine have -- or have not -- been implemented through the decades.

Last fall, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute surveyed 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges nationwide. Each student was given a 60-question multiple choice "civic literacy" test that focused on American history, government, international relations, and economics. The average freshman scored 50.4 percent, or an "F." The average senior did little better, scoring 54.2 percent -- also an "F."

The results revealed, for example, that only 45.95 percent of college seniors knew that the line "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . " comes from the Declaration of Independence. Only 47.71 percent knew Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg, which came before Appomattox. Only 61.42 percent knew Abraham Lincoln was elected sometime between 1851 and 1875. Only 42.77 percent knew that the struggle between President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans was over Reconstruction.

THE RESULTS also revealed that our nation's colleges especially disserved self-identified minority students (Asian, black, Hispanic, and multiracial), with minority seniors scoring an average of 48.2 percent on the civic literacy exam, or just eight-tenths of a point higher than the average for minority freshmen. On average, in other words, American colleges teach minority students virtually nothing about America's history and institutions.

The failure to significantly increase civic knowledge among college students has immediate practical consequences: The more civic knowledge a student gains in college, the survey data demonstrated, the more likely he or she is to vote and participate in other civic activities.

It also has profound consequences for the longer term. As King argued, the rights enshrined in the Declaration, protected by the Constitution, and eventually redeemed by all Americans through decades of civil struggle and reconciliation, are universal and irrevocable.

If we forget what they are, we will forget who we are: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Lt. Gen. Josiah Bunting III, president of the H. Frank Guggenheim Foundation and superintendent emeritus of the Virginia Military Institute, serves as chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's National Civic Literacy Board.