Monday’s 54th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech offers a prominent milepost to measure the successes and failures of the civil rights movement.

The occasion draws our attention to “Civil War Memories,” a blog maintained by historian and teacher Kevin M. Levin of Boston, Mass. Levin dishes out history with a recipe of original words, deeds, time and circumstance — no modern frills or fillers.

By coincidence, Levin taught for 11 years at a prep school in Charlottesville, Va., where demonstrators clashed recently over the removal of Confederate monuments — a reminder that a portion of King’s lofty vision of racial harmony — of “little black boys and black girls ... able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers” — remains out of reach.

Lately, Levin has been using his blog (http://cwmemory.com) to dwell on the Confederate legacy — what was the original intent of these monuments and their makers, and what should be their fate?

He cites a civil rights pioneer, one who predates Martin Luther King by several decades. William Edward Burghardt “W.E.B.” DuBois was a sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and writer. Born in Massachusetts in 1868, he was the first African-American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909.

In 1928, DuBois wrote about the South’s dogged attempts to sanctify Confederate commander Robert E. Lee. “The New York Times may magisterially declare: ‘of course, he never fought for slavery.’ Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery,” DuBois wrote.

People don’t go to war for abstract theories of government, he argued. They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia was fighting for.

“And Lee followed Virginia ... not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan.”

Imagine the moral courage of a black man in the United States in 1928 as he composed the next paragraph, which amounted to blasphemy in the white South :

“Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.”

DuBois’ conclusion is as fresh and applicable today as it was 89 years ago when he wrote it. It’s harsh truth for some, but truth nonetheless. We adopt it as our own:

“Today we can best perpetuate (Robert E. Lee’s) memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white South. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928 (and in 2017). They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.

“It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel — not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.”

One final coincidence: W.E.B. duBois died at age 95 in Ghana, Africa, on Aug. 23, 1963 — the eve of King’s famous speech. Certainly he was there in spirit at the Lincoln Memorial as King spoke.

—TAH