When I started this letter, it was an open challenge to the Texas State Board of Education to provide textbooks that presented a fair, balanced, and accurate history of the United States. That with their plans to include the Black Panther Party and their “violent philosophy” in the chapter on civil rights, they include the party’s 10-point platform of self-determination and all the good work that many members did in black communities.

But then I got a phone call from a reader. She had called me to commiserate over the breaking news that the Memphis civil rights photographer Ernest Withers had been a spy for J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. She had called American Legacy specifically because we had featured Withers in our Winter/Spring 2010 issue. When I hung up with the reader and did a quick Internet search, I found that Withers indeed had been passing on information about Martin Luther King, Jr. and other figures in the movement even as he snapped the iconic images that would become a valuable part of American history. I had to hold back the tears of disappointment.

We may never know why he did it, and because Withers is now gone and cannot shed any light, we can only speculate. Did he volunteer, or was he coerced or threatened in some way? Was he deeply conflicted about his role, or did he secretly consider Martin Luther King a rabblerouser who was doing blacks more harm than good? Or did he just do it for the money, since he was on the FBI payroll? What we can’t deny is the indelible mark he has made on history. What that mark will look like is one for future history books. I’m hoping there will be mitigating circumstances around Withers’ choice. Whatever the case may be, we’re going to have to acknowledge the whole man, warts and all. We cannot ask the Texas State Board of Education to adhere to a fair, clear-eyed standard and not hold to that standard ourselves.

And speaking of Martin Luther King, Jr., recent events have reminded me of our national penchant for putting Dr. King into a more and more profound and iconic deep freeze. This may upset some reading this, but I’m a big fan of a moratorium on the “I Have a Dream” speech, an idea put forth by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University. He is also a Baptist minister and the author of the 2000 book I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., one that dares to reveal Dr. King as multidimensional, a human being who made mistakes, but whose herculean and ultimately selfless effort to help the poor, downtrodden, and disenfranchised of the earth far outweighed his personal flaws. It’s not the speech—a speech that must be noted was first given on June 23, 1963, in Detroit during a memorial for race riots that had occurred in that city in 1863 and 1894. This was two months before King’s famous oration during the March on Washington in 1963.

Dyson’s call, a decade ago, for a moratorium on “I Have A Dream” was, in part, about allowing the rest of King’s ideas to come off of the sidelines for a chance to be heard, taught, understood, and acted on. If you haven’t already I ask you to take the time to read King’s 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, in which with eloquent exasperation he called for immediate equality for African-Americans; or the text to his antiwar speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” that he delivered to clergy and laity at Riverside Church in 1967. King’s beliefs and philosophies went far beyond a few overused lines from one speech, however brilliant it was.

There has been a point in the past 12 years that I have worked for American Legacy, and for you, our readers, when I wondered if what we do here at the magazine might one day become obsolete, that telling the world about our history may not be necessary. I look at what is going on today, in a country that has an African-American in its top office and realize that we’ve come far, but we’ve got a long way to go, and as long as that is the case, we are still here, and we’re not going anywhere but forward.

AUDREY M. PETERSON, Editor