NEWS FEATURE: Beyond The Dream: Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Less Known Words

c. 2003 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Everybody knows about The Dream. But 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his most famous speech in the nation’s capital and 35 years after his April 4, 1968 assassination, many Americans remain oblivious to the rest of the civil rights leader’s oratorical works. In so doing, they […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Everybody knows about The Dream.

But 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his most famous speech in the nation’s capital and 35 years after his April 4, 1968 assassination, many Americans remain oblivious to the rest of the civil rights leader’s oratorical works.


In so doing, they miss the richness of the civil rights movement, said Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University.

“It’s a great speech, but it doesn’t talk about any particular part of the struggle that was going on,” Carson said of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “It has references to ‘sweltering discontent,’ but you wouldn’t find out very much about that discontent or the campaigns that were going on at the time.”

Many of King’s other speeches had more political and emotional content, Carson said. Some of those ideas, Carson said, might not have been as popular with a broader audience.

“The speech at the (Aug. 28, 1963) March on Washington was more palatable because it was a restatement of traditional American ideals, and to some degree, as we can see in the present, people across the political spectrum can accept parts of that speech or interpret it in their own way.”

The content of the beloved speech “can easily be appropriated with momentary sentimentality,” said Cain Hope Felder, author of “Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives.”

“It’s consistent with the kind of imagery and rhetoric that is part of our national mythology,” said Felder, a professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Howard University’s School of Divinity in Washington. “That’s what makes it attractive.”

But Felder said he has a problem with the famed speech.

“It gives the image of sleep and passivity,” he said, and may encourage people to think: “`We don’t have to do anything: Lay back, and one day this is going to happen on its own.”’

After all, Felder said, dreaming is innocent.

But people sometimes grow concerned when dreamers attempt to realize their visions, Felder said. Today, he said, King’s dream remains unrecognized.


Still, 35 years after his assassination, the slain civil rights leader has words of wisdom for Americans who would pursue his vision.

Felder said he finds particularly relevant a 1958 statement King made to Montgomery (Ala.) Judge Eugene Loe, who found King _ who had been attempting to enter a friend’s court hearing _ guilty of loitering.

King told Loe, who fined him $10 plus $4 in court fees, he would accept a jail sentence rather than pay a fine. King made the decision, he said, because of his love for America and “the sublime principles of liberty and equality upon which she is founded. I have come to see that America is in danger of losing her soul and can so easily drift into tragic Anarchy and crippling Fascism,” King said.

“Something must happen to awaken the dozing conscience of America before it is too late.”

The state of America’s soul remains at risk now, Felder said.

As the United States fights a war on terrorism and confronts a mounting army of external enemies, citizens need to remember King’s call to liberty rather than retaliation.

“There is a sad mood of vindictiveness,” Felder said. “The church is too silent in the midst of this growing danger.”


Felder also cited King’s famed “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” as timely. The letter might be mailed to white church leaders today, Felder said, noting that xenophobia persists in 2003.

King penned the missive April 16, 1963, in response to eight “liberal” Alabama clergy who warned King that nonviolent resistance would incite civil disturbances, urging King to allow the battle for integration to continue in the courts.

King responded: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. … We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.”

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Still, King confessed that he once doubted his own role in the civil rights struggle.

Carson said one of his favorite King addresses was a sermon delivered at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago on Aug. 27, 1967. The Baptist preacher told those gathered there of his own crisis of confidence during the early days of the Montgomery bus boycott. At the time, King said he was receiving threats, losing courage and wondering whether he was doing the right thing.

His address 12 years earlier _ at the beginning of the boycott _ does not give evidence of any such fears. Presented a few days after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person, King told those gathered at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church that “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. …


“As we stand and sit here this evening and as we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, let us go out with the grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, `There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.”’

King didn’t have very much time to prepare for the speech, said Carson, who named it as one of his personal favorites.

“He didn’t know before that day that he was going to be doing that speech,” Carson said. “And yet, it was a brave and visionary speech.

“This was the first day of a boycott, and a boycott that hadn’t really gained any major press attention. It’s a boycott that might not have even made it to the second day successfully,” Carson said. “Yet he took that event and made the claim that it was an event of historic significance. … That was a very brash kind of claim.”

DEA END CAMPBELL

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