DALLAS — I have a dream that ad campaigns will one day be judged not by the color of the icon they showcase, but by the creativity of their content.
While most of what comes out of Madison Avenue these days certainly ain’t Shakespeare, the fuss over a new advertising campaign centered around the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. does seem like much ado about nothing.
Alcatel Americas, the U.S. branch of a French technology and communications company, recently got a lesson in American history — and American hysteria. Since it creates voice and data networks, Alcatel wanted to get across the idea that “before you can inspire … you must first connect.” So it naturally turned to one of the most inspirational events of the last century — King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered Aug. 28, 1963, on the Washington Mall. The result is a nifty television commercial and print ad campaign that envisions a scenario in which the civil rights leader — having failed to “connect” with his followers — faces an empty Mall.
Now Alcatel faces criticism. And the fact that the company has received both permission from the King family and positive feedback from African-Americans and others who saw the televised spot did not stop veterans of the civil rights movement from accusing Alcatel of acting in bad taste.
Among the first to rush to the microphone was Julian Bond, who claimed that the ad commercialized and exploited King’s legacy. It is no surprise that Bond, as chairman of the national board of the NAACP, would be eager to fight this battle. Tantrums aimed at companies and corporations have become the stock-in-trade of some of the nation’s most well-off grievance organizations. Activists figured out long ago that by accusing companies of racial insensitivity, it becomes easier at some later date to hit them up for contributions. Outfits like the NAACP — and Hispanic variations like the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Council of La Raza — feed on white guilt, tapping corporate contributors for tens of millions of dollars in the past decade alone.
That money is supposedly meant to help the companies “reach out” to minority consumers. It serves the additional purpose of buying protection for the next time — and there is always a next time — someone among the mostly white executive ranks of corporate America clumsily wanders into the nation’s race-relations minefield.
Produce an ad campaign with a talking Chihuahua? Pull out your checkbook. Get caught talking disparagingly about black executives? Pay up.
Yet this is about more than greed and opportunism. The storm has as much to do with what the rest of us have already lost. It is impossible to listen to the eloquence of Martin Luther King, or to see film footage of him hauled away in handcuffs by Southern thugs with badges, or to read his thoughts on civil disobedience as recorded in the Birmingham jail and not conclude that they just don’t make leaders like him anymore.
Time has not been kind to the ideal of American leadership. Historical figures like King — and John and Robert Kennedy — keep their place in our imagination not only because their lives were cut short, but also because, nowadays, their brand of courage and conviction seems to be in short supply.
Clear thinking is no more abundant. But there are exceptions. Michael Eric Dyson, a DePaul University professor and King biographer, detects a silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the Alcatel ad. Dyson notes that since the campaign promotes a technology company, it may be that King’s legacy isn’t being exploited at all but “repackaged” for a new generation.
Dyson makes a good point. Whatever their color, today’s teen-agers — born in the 1980s, long after that hot summer day when King shared his dream with the world — are more likely to know their way around a computer keyboard than they are to know their own history.
“It does bring that whole civil rights generation into the generation of technology,” Dyson told The Washington Post. “It says that the Internet is something for African-American people, too.”
Right again. Even with the existence of the so-called digital divide, many African-Americans and Hispanics do have access to the Internet.
This latest controversy shows that they also have a choice: They can spend time and energy fighting to preserve the past, or they can focus their efforts on building a new future.
