Reclaiming King: Beyond 'I Have a Dream'

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. --Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 1963

The "I Have a Dream" speech has become a cliché. It's played every Martin Luther King Jr. Day and perhaps again during our so-called "Black History Month." With each passing year it feels more distant to me, more quaint. Its power has always been its simplicity and clarity, but its unassailable message has turned the man who delivered it into more of a myth than a human being made of flesh and blood.

I have vivid memories from my childhood of watching the famous speech in class and hearing an obnoxious white classmate of mine mock King's dramatic tones and rhetoric while other white students chuckled uncomfortably. Aside from wanting to strangle this kid, in part because I was so fascinated with King, I also felt far removed from the black-and-white images on the screen and from the dire times in which he and his supporters lived. Even his name -- the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., intimidated me. It felt more literary than literal.

My father is a black Baptist preacher in the King tradition, he even attended King's alma mater, Morehouse College. As a child, I was encouraged to essentially worship King. His striking face adorns several walls of our home. The sound of his voice moved me to tears before I could even comprehend what he was saying. It was the sound of truth. Truth so deep it both hurt and inspired. As I grew older I was indoctrinated with the King story and was encouraged by my father to explore beyond King's 1963 plea for racial equality.

After his life was tragically cut short, as was a similarly honest and righteous Robert Kennedy a few months later, we, not just in the black community, but in a nation as a whole, have spent the past forty years trying to grapple with his legacy. The mainstream media would like us to look at "I Have a Dream" and virtually nothing else. They can package that speech as a nice two-minute nostalgia clip. But I believe every good progressive American should look more to the King of '68 for inspiration.

By that time King's house had already been firebombed. He'd been wiretapped, stabbed, and assaulted with a brick. He was never uncontroversial, and although he never officially claimed to be a member of any political party, his positions and message were unapologetically progressive. These were in some ways darker times than his earlier more celebrated days during the Montgomery bus boycotts and the peace he helped achieve in Birmingham.

During the final two years of his life, King took on the far more complex de facto racism of northern cities like Chicago, addressed labor inequality, and took a very bold and highly criticized stance against the Vietnam War:

"As I have walked," King told the crowd assembled in Riverside Church a year before his assassination, "among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.

But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

By 1968, King's opposition to Vietnam and his unwavering commitment to nonviolence made him largely an outcast. The far right still despised him and everything he represented. But even more telling was the rejection he received from the left. He endured editorials from the Democratic establishment calling for a moratorium on civil rights and a break from marches. He was called a "disservice to his cause" and his people. New, younger voices in the Civil Rights Movement began ridiculing his nonviolent stance, calling him out-of-touch and out-of-date.