More than a dreamer
Weeks before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. decried the enduring ugliness and despair in ‘this other America’
He was more than a dreamer. Far more. The man whose legacy this nation observes every third Monday in January is too often reduced to the ideas he expressed in a single, monumental speech.
Often overlooked or forgotten is that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” message in Washington, D.C., was delivered nearly five years before he died. By the metrics of an evolving and visionary mind, five years is practically a lifetime.
To limit his life’s work to a few immortal words on the Martin Luther King holiday is to restrict, even sanitize, his vision.
The “I Have a Dream” speech delivered Aug. 28, 1963 (actually for the second time, the first being in Detroit two months earlier), climaxed the most visible march of the civil rights movement, attracting 250,000 multi-racial demonstrators. It became a corporatesponsored event with no less formidable a brand as the UAW co-organizing. Later, Dr. King’s views and public positions, which went far beyond the sentiments of holding hands and singing songs, would generate considerably less support.
One such address took place near my hometown Detroit, in the affluent Grosse Pointe suburb, just three weeks before his assassination on April 4, 1968. King visited Grosse Pointe South High School’s gym, filling the 2,700-capacity space to decry economic inequality.
“There are two Americas,” King told the predominately white crowd. “One America is … the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. ... But there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this other America, thousands and thousands of people, men in particular, walk the streets in search for jobs that do not exist.”
That doesn’t sound much like a dreamer to me.
The Grosse Pointe community hadn’t welcomed King; protests and hostility in public meetings marked the days leading to his visit. One local supporter who hosted the appearance recalled how the police chief sat on King’s lap to protect him during their drive to the event. The host, a white woman named Jude Huetteman, also said she had been threatened with violence for inviting King to speak. This event, it should be noted, took place in Michigan, not the deep South, where segregation was the law of the land just a few years earlier.
Speaking mainly to affluent whites that day, King turned his attention to America’s longstanding problems of poverty and class.
“In this other America,” he continued, “millions of people are forced to live in vermin-filled, distressing housing conditions where they do not have the privilege of having wall-to-wall carpeting, but all too often they end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches.”
No longer limiting his critiques to racial barriers, King added, “Probably the most critical problem in the other America is the economic problem.”
It was a clear-minded, prophetic
statement, not a sleep-induced mirage.
One year before he was murdered while standing on a Memphis balcony, King condemned the Vietnam War in a speech at Riverside Church in New York.
By then, his views on the bloody conflict were wellknown. He’d said America’s strength should be used in “service of peace and human beings, not an inhumane power against defenseless people.” Shifting from the “I Have a Dream” theme of racial brotherhood into the perilous territories of wealth distribution and U.S foreign policy might have led to King’s death, many believe. It’s not a stretch, considering he’d been a marked man since, at least, 1955 while helping to lead the regional Montgomery bus boycott.
King followed the dictates of his conscience, whether they led him to a Birmingham jail cell or the front lines of a sanitation workers’ strike.
We can all use this King Holiday to re-examine our own conscience — our most deeply held moral beliefs — and how it aligns with justice for every human being.
The holiday has been promoted as a time for public service; but truth be told, “MLK Days” are mostly treated as three-day weekends, a time for, say, sleeping in or skiing.
At minimum, we can honor the man and support his ideals by reflecting on our social, political, cultural and religious positions.
Expanding our minds is possible only by examining our truths. Dr. King went to his grave believing America could truly become the “promised land” by closing the gap between its heralded values and actual practices.
Or was that only a dream?