The dream and the nightmare. Martin Luther King in Italian publishing in the 1960s Photo Library of Congress
The first systematic publication of some of King’s writings is due to the Turin-based publisher SEI, of Salesian tradition: La forza di amare, in 1968, and Il fronte della coscienza, with a preface by Coretta King, the following year. A short collection of writings, The Measure of Man, was published by Morcelliana press in 1969. In 1968 SEI again published a short biography by the Salesian priest Terenzio Bosco. This was followed in 1969 by the Protestant publisher Claudiana publishing the successful biography edited by Lerone Bennett, later republished by l’Unità in 2008, entitled Martin Luther King. The man from Atlanta.
Other fundamental texts, such as the Letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963, circulated for a long time only as informal publications by various associations. A better fate befell another famous speech by King, delivered at the Riverside Church in New York on 4 April 1967, known as A Time to Break Silence, published in 1968 by the Vicenza-based publisher La Locusta, also linked to the tradition of democratic Catholicism, under the title Beyond Vietnam. That small volume was of fundamental importance because it made explicit, even for the Italian public, that criticism of the war in Vietnam that definitively soured the relationship between King and President Lyndon Johnson who, only two years earlier, had signed the Voting Rights Act.
In many ways, with that speech King radicalizes his analysis of the power structures of American society and, above all, denounced the “evil” intertwining of racism, militarism and materialism in American society. In fact, even after his death, Italian publications tended to give King the reassuring interpretation of the hero of non-violence, the moderate leader who rejected the revolutionary and violent methods of Malcolm X and other Black Power leaders.
Only recently, new research has revealed a more complex figure. Studies by Paolo Naso, Nadia Venturini, Gabriella Lavina and others have shown that King was not only the leader who was able to reinterpret the “American dream” in inclusive and anti-racist terms, but also the lucid witness to the “nightmare” of racism and violence that continued to mark American society.
Other fundamental texts, such as the Letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963, circulated for a long time only as informal publications by various associations. A better fate befell another famous speech by King, delivered at the Riverside Church in New York on 4 April 1967, known as A Time to Break Silence, published in 1968 by the Vicenza-based publisher La Locusta, also linked to the tradition of democratic Catholicism, under the title Beyond Vietnam. That small volume was of fundamental importance because it made explicit, even for the Italian public, that criticism of the war in Vietnam that definitively soured the relationship between King and President Lyndon Johnson who, only two years earlier, had signed the Voting Rights Act.
In many ways, with that speech King radicalizes his analysis of the power structures of American society and, above all, denounced the “evil” intertwining of racism, militarism and materialism in American society. In fact, even after his death, Italian publications tended to give King the reassuring interpretation of the hero of non-violence, the moderate leader who rejected the revolutionary and violent methods of Malcolm X and other Black Power leaders.
Only recently, new research has revealed a more complex figure. Studies by Paolo Naso, Nadia Venturini, Gabriella Lavina and others have shown that King was not only the leader who was able to reinterpret the “American dream” in inclusive and anti-racist terms, but also the lucid witness to the “nightmare” of racism and violence that continued to mark American society.