MLK Out of Context, and In
Every year that Martin Luther King's birthday arrives I am reminded 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 first put forth by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. 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. , a book that dares to reveal Dr. King as multi-dimensional, 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 was actually first given on June 23, 1963, in Detroit during a memorial for race riots that had occurred in that city in 1863 and 1894— two months before his famous oration during the March on Washington. It’s the co-opting ...