Reflection on Martin Luther King Jr. the day after MLK Day

Yesterday, we celebrated one of the greatest human rights leaders the United States has ever seen.  When Martin Luther King Jr's memory is invoked, it is most often for his I Have A Dream speech delivered at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963 (Watch/listen at: http://youtu.be/smEqnnklfYs).  King's dreaming sermon, a poetic revisioning of race relations five scores after the Emancipation Proclamation, was either unplanned or strategically left out of his prepared written remarks (or some other explanation)...  though this speech had been previously delivered and performed publicly. 

Dr. King said some months later about why he went off script at the protest: 
“I started out reading the speech … just all of a sudden — the audience response was wonderful that day — and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used — I’d used it many times before, that thing about ‘I have a dream’ — and I just felt that I wanted to use it here” (cited in Gates 

Others on stage that day report that part way through Dr. King's prepared speech, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, prominent, controversial voice Of The Civil Rights Movement (NPR).  Sister Mahalia Jackson was onstage after moving the crowd earlier in the day with her rendition of “I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned,” started calling out to Dr. King during the first half of his speech, saying, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin!  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-mlk-improvise-in-the-dream-speech/
(You really have listen to short live recording of Jackson's spiritual, video below) 

Dr. King is typically remembered for this visionary dream about racial equality, "a dream deeply rooted in the American dream...a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal...a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood... a dream that (his) four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Paradoxically, the reverend's dream speech on Washington has been used and appropriated by groups on the Left and the Right to advance very different ideas about social progress.  But Dr. King's politics went far beyond merely dreaming of a time when things would be different, nor did he pretend to assume in real world terms that changing the hearts & minds of the sons and daughters of former slaves and slave owners would lead to salvation of people and communities of color inside the U.S. and globally.  King understood that racial equality must be linked to the socio-economic equity, the redistribution of wealth, and access to viable economic opportunities.  He was thus actively opposed the nation's racially-structured class system, which continues to prove rigid for large swaths of Americans (particularly people and communities of color), despite our strong national myths of mobility and meritocracy.    

"You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism."

He was also outspokenly against poor and black men from being sent off to fight the country's global military wars against other brown-skinned people.  J. Edgar Hoover called Dr. King "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation" and the FBI surveiled King for years in unsuccessful attempts to mount a legal case against him or tarnish his public reputation.  Yet and still, MLK WAS a radical visionary who demonstrated the capacity to tie the historic struggles of racial equality with that of class inequality, something we should heed today. 

Consider what you make of his words, excerpted from LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL:

...I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states.  I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.  Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. (April 16, 1963)

And for a beautifully stitched documentary collage of the events around Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, watch MLK: The Assassination Tapes, (46 min, produced by the Smithsonian Channel). 

The video uses historical news reports and rare footage, and the Smithsonian Channel won a George Foster Peabody Award for the episode.

I look forward to see you in class tomorrow.