For many white Americans, particularly outside the South, the King holiday did the opposite of what Eckstein said it would. It marked not the end but the beginning of shame, of an official culture that cast their country’s history as one of oppression, and its ideals of liberty as hypocrisies. The official understanding of the American race problem now came to resemble in almost every particular the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) through which Germans had for decades been confronting their responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.
