It’s Black History Month in the 50th anniversary year of
Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. I recently had the honor of delivering the
keynote address at a memorial luncheon in King’s honor, sponsored by the Mohawk
Valley Frontiers Club. Here is an edited version of that address, which
revisits some interesting aspects of King’s speech that aren’t always widely
known.
While Dr. King’s life and legacy are filled with many
fascinating elements, I have taken a particular interest in his “I Have a Dream” speech. I don’t make passing reference to it; I mean it. In 2013, the
50th anniversary of King’s speech, I downloaded it in its entirety on my iPhone
and put it on a playlist of songs I listen to in quiet moments. The more I’ve
listened to it, the more I've found his words to be like true lyrics. His cadence
creates a beautiful baseline, his inflections and tone hit remarkable notes.
His refrains of “100 years later, Now is the Time, We cannot be satisfied, and
I have a Dream” create beautiful verses of what feels like a 16-minute
masterpiece. I can’t recite the whole speech, but I’ve listened to it so many
times over the years that I can essentially “sing along” from start to finish,
like I do with most songs I listen to in private.
August 28, 1963, was a sun-filled summer day in Washington,
D.C., when an estimated 250,000 individuals gathered for an event that Dr. King
said was “to go down in history, as the greatest demonstration for freedom in
the history of our nation.” It was officially called the “March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom.” Of the 250,000
marchers, an estimated 60,000 (nearly 25 percent) were white, which is partly
why King said “… many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence
here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our
destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound
to our freedom.” That got some of the loudest applause in the whole speech —
there was unity among those at the march.
There were actually 10 speakers that day. I don’t know if
any of you have ever seen the hilarious skit on “Key and Peele” about what
the man scheduled to speak after Dr. King might have said. Can you imagine if
someone had to follow Dr. King? What do you say? It’s a great skit. Fortunately,
no one had to bear that burden; Dr. King was indeed the final speaker that day.
To me, the most fascinating anecdote about King’s “I Have a
Dream” speech is that the “I have a dream” part was improvised. I heard about
this on National Public Radio several years ago and found an interview with
Clarence Jones on the website of the British newspaper, The Guardian. Jones was
a speech writer for Dr. King and would often write the initial draft of his
speeches, as he did for the speech that day in 1963.
The night before the march, Dr. King finished the outline at
about midnight and then edited the draft in longhand. One of the aides who
visited King’s suite that night saw words crossed out three or four times. He
said it looked as though King were writing poetry. King went to sleep at about
4 a.m., giving the text to his aides to print and distribute. The “I have a
dream” section was not in it.
Jones recalls that King was winding up what would have been
a well-received, but by his standards, fairly unremarkable oration. As King was
telling people to go back to their homes in the South, singer Mahalia Jackson,
who performed earlier in the program, shouted: “Tell ’em about the dream,
Martin.” She had seen him deliver the dream refrain in Detroit two months
earlier and was moved by it.
King continued, “Go back to the slums and ghettoes of our
northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”
Jackson shouted again: “Tell ’em about the dream!”
King continued, “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
I say to you today, my friends.” Then he grabbed the podium and set his
prepared text to his left. Jones said he turned to the person standing
next to him and said: “These people don't know it, but they’re about to go to church.”
The most famous part of the speech almost never happened.
And in later years, as Dr. King moved to focusing on opposing the Vietnam War and
took up issues like poverty, he became more controversial. From 1965 until his
death, the “I Have a Dream” speech was hardly mentioned. It was only upon his
death that the speech was resurrected and memorialized as the inspirational
beacon it is today.
I personally think that in the same way religious texts are
used as guidance for individual behavior, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
serves as guidance for societal behavior in this complex democratic nation
called the United States of America. Just saying those words United States of
America while gathering regular news stories these days can give a person
pause. How united are we when it feels that we as a nation are as divided as
we’ve been since Dr. King’s death?
How is it that hate has become so prevalent? How is it that
misunderstanding has become so common? The internet has amplified our
individual apathy to sift through the massive array of information and sort
fact from fiction. Instead, we often go to our safe spaces and find information
that affirms our own thinking because it’s easy, and we have other stuff to
tend to in our busy lives. This allows half-truths to gain traction and fuel
misunderstanding and hate.
We don’t mention enough that hate is learned. How do we know
this? Because the typical 6-year-old does not naturally hate. Six-year-olds ask
“Why?” — they seek to understand the world around them. The answers they are
given slowly layer one on top of another … answer after question, question
after answer, and with each answer comes an emerging worldview that forms the
child, molds the adolescent, shapes the teenager, and creates the adult, which aligns
their individual and, in turn, societal behavior to Dr. King’s dream … or
not.
As adults, we find it easy to joke about how as teenagers we
think we have all the answers, but that implies we somehow get back to asking
questions and learning as adults. The most important part of this is that as
adults, we need to rekindle that childhood curiosity of asking why: Why are
certain things the way they are? Why do others think the way they do? Why do
we, as individuals, think the way we do? Where is the common ground?
How can we find the middle way to collaborate and find
solutions to problems big and small? That is how we understand each other and
move forward together.
I believe curiosity comes from education, and that education
is a fundamental principle to democracy fueled by an educated citizenry. I was
inspired a few short years ago when President Obama and others were begging the
question if the time was right to expand our baseline of a free, compulsory
education from a high school diploma to a two-year associate degree. He noted
how the farmers of the 1890s thought it was crazy to require children to attend
school until they were 18 — with the advent of free secondary education, the
miracles of the 20th century, sometimes called the American century, were made
possible. As technology and society change, where will America’s place in the
world be in the 21st century?
A recent study surveyed parents of high school students.
They were asked to rank the importance of a college education relative to the
benefits that so many of us academics see in education. Research shows that
college graduates live longer, are healthier, are more likely to vote and be
engaged in their communities, experience greater levels of overall happiness
and well-being, have more stable home lives and families, and numerous other
benefits. All of those things paled in comparison to the reason these parents
wanted their children to go to college, which was to get a good job. This
parallels results of the Gallup World Survey, which included 250,000
respondents in more than 100 countries. What was the most important thing
people wanted in life? A good-paying job — no matter the country. More and more
in today’s modern world, a good-paying job comes with some level of college
education. The reality for the foreseeable future is that college has
increasingly become a precondition for upward mobility.
As we contemplate that inherent linkage between education
beyond high school and securing a good-paying job, we should consider that the
national poverty rate has not moved since 1965. The percentage of Americans
living in poverty in 1965 was roughly 15 percent. It may vary a percent one way
or the other periodically, but the poverty rate remains, to this day, roughly
15 percent of all Americans.
This stubborn percentage seems inextricably wrapped around
the axle of our society. It is tangled in the fabric of our federal and state
laws and policies. It is knotted in the strands of our educational system and
tightened by the wrenches in our legal system — a system that, according to the
Center for American Progress, increased incarceration rates 700 percent between
1970 and 2005, and, without fundamental change, will incarcerate one in three
black men at some point in their lifetime.
When we remember Dr. King, it’s important to remember that
he believed in the power of education. He believed in education as the primary
tool to empower individuals and communities to untangle the complex, inhibiting
reality of situational and generational poverty in this country. Additional
education also empowers individuals to think critically, solicit opinions and
ideas from others to challenge their own way of thinking, to find common ground
and solve problems together. And yet surprisingly, the conversation about a
college education in this country today is questioning its very value, and
policies in several states are moving education from a public right to a
private good — available only to the few who can afford it.
In the context of today, it would be easy to feel that we
seem more pointed away from than toward Dr. King’s dream. And although he often
said in later years that his dream had become a nightmare, Dr. King himself
never gave up on that dream. On Christmas Eve 1967, at Ebenezer Baptist Church
in Atlanta, he told his congregation:
"I am personally the victim of deferred dreams … but in
spite of that, I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know,
you can't give up in life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality
that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps
you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream."
May those words inspire us in the same way that Dr. King’s
Mountaintop speech in Memphis did the night before he was assassinated. You may
recall that he took us on a mystical journey through time to tell God that
given the chance, he would rather live in his time than any other time in the
history of the world. There in Memphis in April of 1968, he said, “now that's a
strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is
sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement.
But I know, somehow, that only-when-it-is-dark-enough … can you see the stars.”
For many of us, in different ways, we could likely say the same
thing. The world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land;
confusion all around. But I hope you agree with Dr. King that somehow, only
when it is dark enough can you see the stars.
So let us live in our time today. Let us join together in
hope. Let us work together with vitality to stay the course and fight for the
inches while we hold true to the vision of the miles we must gain to move those
stubbornly unjust numbers of poverty, incarceration, and educational
attainment. May we find courage and resilience in knowing that it lies within
us, in that unvarnished 6-year-old self we each carry within us, that which can
animate and bring to life the dream of social and economic justice, equity and
inclusion — and through our individual and collective actions each and every
day we can honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his memory.
Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu.
