Monday, January 18, is Martin Luther King Day. When school kids are asked about this man and what he did, a typical answer is that King was a civil rights leader who tried to bring peace between the races. Nothing could be further from the truth.
On his birthday, King is often hailed as a dreaming peace-seeker instead of one who frequently said, “Peace is not just the absence of tension, peace is the presence of justice, and until there is justice, there will be no peace.” Of course, the implication is that the civil rights movement would disturb the peace as necessary.
One of the reasons for this mischaracterization of MLK is the great “I Have a Dream” speech he gave at the March on Washington in 1963.
King broke away from his prepared text and ad-libbed the ending that he had given several times before August 1963, including in his keynote address in June 1963 at a big march in Detroit led by the celebrated Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father.
Without that part, perhaps we would have experienced–then and since–more consideration of the address’s meat and the event. Here is some of that “meat” from the first part of King’s speech.
“We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. . .
There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
I was a participant in that event, and as a strong admirer of MLK, I was swept up in the oratory and the emotion of the moment.
As MLK went into the “I Have a Dream” ending, I was delighted thinking at the time that America would get a chance to hear his great orator like some of us who had been hearing such speeches for seven to eight years.
This speech has been heralded as one of the greatest speeches of all time, and deservedly so. But through the years, as Americans—black and white—seem to misremember the essence of the speech, focusing only on the words in the I have a Dream part that they interpret as pleading for us to “just to get along.”
Recently, I learned that there were some among King’s Lieutenants who did not want that part of the speech.
African American sociologist and current president of the American Sociological Association, Aldon Morris, provided some information about those debates last year. He informed me that Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, King’s Executive Director of the SCLC, had said in an interview with Morris that he and other members of King’s leadership team tried to talk King out of giving that same old “I Have a Dream” speech they had grown tired of hearing. MLK had gathered his team together the night before the March to discuss what the speech should say. I have learned that in that session some of these leaders thought the “I Have a Dream” segment might not have been consistent with the March’s overall message.
The March in 1963 was designed to push for economic and civil rights issues. The widely used theme was “Jobs and Freedom.”
Walker indicated that King had even rebuffed Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March and a speechwriter for King, when Ruffin tried to write a different speech. King objected, saying Rustin was the better organizer, but he was the better wordsmith.
King was probably correct in the short term, but I would argue that his associates were right in the long run because the celebration of the “I Have a Dream” oration has severely distorted remembrance of the work of Martin Luther King and the SCLC.
