MLK Symposium

The title of this year’s Symposium, Beyond the Whirlwinds of Revolt, comes from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In that epoch-making moment, Dr. King proposed: “Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”

Our keynote speaker, Thomas Chatterton Williams, will consider the present moment and ask: what is ahead? He will recall the moral lucidity of Dr. King from the perspective of the current cultural moment, as the nation is polarized by moral dogmatism and reactionary backlash.

Thomas Chatterton Williams’ recent work grapples with the legitimate concerns presented by the social justice movement of the 2010s and early 2020s as well as its excesses. He is staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He serves as Visiting Professor of Humanities and Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Named a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, he is also a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s, his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from New America, Yaddo, MacDowell, and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Nothing Was the Same, will be published by Knopf.

Thanks to Kalita Beck Blessing, SMU English, and SMU Dedman College of Interdisciplinary Studies for their support of the Dallas Institute's MLK Symposium.