We live in King’s shadow, and his mountaintop’s
His final speech laid out a sweeping new vision, still unrealized
I was born in 1968, three weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. My generation grew up in his shadow, with a viewpoint on race and class framed by condensed versions of his I Have a Dream speech.
But as my generation is learning, King’s vision was so much larger than that. In King’s 1968, blacks seemed to be within sight of the promised land he spoke about in his final speech to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on April 3. Thanks to legislation inspired by the civil rights movement he led, blacks were beginning to have better access to education, jobs and homes than ever before.
But the disheartening Kerner Commission report, issued a month earlier, had demonstrated that stark, intractable disparities remained between the experiences of blacks and whites. King’s death on April 4 generated an agony that played out in uprisings in 125 cities that spring, in the ghettos where the dream of equality and inclusion he outlined at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 seemed as distant as the moon.
The soundbites of King we hear belie the complexity of King’s philosophy and obscure its expansion at the end of his
At the end of his life, King was talking revolution, but not a revolution of blood. It was a revolution of the mind.
life, when he was beginning to get to the heart of the matter that plagued blacks in small Southern towns and huge Northern cities alike. Neither the world nor his vision was ever merely black and white.
The King we hear in that final speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, knew that the struggle for civil rights for blacks could not be separate from the struggle for human rights. And if he was going to talk about human rights, the argument for him naturally led to a discussion of economic rights — wealth redistribution, as King historian Clayborne Carson notes.
And no discussion of wealth redistribution could occur without a review of all of the forces that combined to result in poverty, powerlessness and maintenance of a racial hierarchy that writer Isabel Wilkerson has likened to a caste system.
At the end of his life, King was talking revolution, but not a revolution of blood. It was a revolution of the mind based in symbiotic, multicultural unity in opposition to his three evils of society: war, poverty and racism.
Though he didn’t get there physically, King reached the mountaintop before the rest of us. He was operating from inside the dream of equality he described for us in 1963.
And in operating from that place of pure love, he had no fear.