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 and commodification of the speech that rubs me so very much the wrong way. Those few lines we hear over an over are so literally interpreted by some as to paint King as someone who would make no distinctions based on race, the logical conclusion being that he would have not supported programs and laws passed to bring about equality among the races.

A close read of King’s book Why We Can’t Wait tells us otherwise: “I am proposing, therefore, that, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veteran, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights of the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial,” King wrote. “Such a bill could adapt almost every concession given to the returning solider without imposing an undue burden on our economy. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged would immediately transform the conditions of Negro life. The most profound alteration would not reside so much in the specific grants as in the basic psychological and motivational transformation of the Negro.” King did go on to include aiding the poor of all races, stressing the need of poor whites.

Dyson’s call for a moratorium on “I Have A Dream” was about allowing the rest of King’s ideas to come off of the sidelines for a chance to be heard, taught, understood, and acted on. One of these was his opposition to the military action in Southeast Asia better known as the Vietnam War. I knew about it, but hadn’t given it any deep thought until I read the text to his speech called “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In it he, among other things, outlines what the U.S. must do to disengage from the Southeast Asia conflict.

He delivered the speech at a meeting of clergy and laity at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, the same year that Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted because of the war, and one year to the day from his assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. In the pocket of the dying man was a type written paper titled “The Ten Commandments of Vietnam.” His widow, Coretta Scott King, delivered a speech based on those commandments in New York City, a mere few weeks after his death.