King’s Dream Not Achieved, Yet

Today is Martin Luther King Day, and I thought that I should mark it by sharing with you some excerpts from two of King’s most well-known speeches. However, I’m going to share some of the less widely known parts.

You see, Dr. King gets a lot of lip service around this day each year. Suddenly, we all like to seem post-racial, holding virtual hands across social media, and claiming that King’s dream is not only our dream but a practical reality. Any day now, we will all “join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”

But this is the first King Day after George Floyd, after the turbulent protests and riots of the summer, after an attempted nationalist insurrection at the US Capitol that saw the Confederate battle flag paraded through the halls.

Maybe we’ll be a bit more sincere this year? Actually, I don’t think that people are being insincere. I think that people sincerely believe that they understand what King was saying and think that their simple assent to the rightness of his dream of racial harmony is all he wanted. (By the way, you are free to reread “people” as “white people” in this paragraph.)

But King wasn’t asking for a simple agreement that racial and religious harmony would be a good thing. He was demanding justice and equality as a means of achieving that dream. He may have dreamed the dream, but he was calling upon those in power—who in King’s day and age would have all been white men—to make good on the founding principles of the American experiment: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The first speech I want to excerpt for you is “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, which King did indeed write from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama after being arrested for attempting to defy a judge’s injunction against protesting in the city. While in jail, a group of eight white ministers wrote an open letter that urged the Black citizens of Birmingham to abandon the protests organized by “outsiders,” like King. While these ministers did not defend the segregationist policies of the city, they did not clearly denounce them either. Instead, they asked for more patience among the Black community while stating that they “recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”

King’s response follows:

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
[….]
But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
[….]
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored….

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham….

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

King was released from jail a few days after this letter was written.

Four months later, as the keynote speaker at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King gave his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.”

As I explained above, King was not attempting to give white America a feel good image of the future that would naturally appear over time. He was demanding that white America finally make good on the ideas of justice and equality that the country claimed as its founding ideals. Only then could the dream be realized.

Five score years ago, a great American [Abraham Lincoln], in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot [Lincoln Memorial] 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. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
[…]
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

There are a lot of facts and figures I could point to as proof that the US has still not made good on this check, that Black Americans and other racial and religious minority groups have still not been given full equality as citizens of this great country, but I fear that if you didn’t already believe it, I wouldn’t convince you.

Some will try to rationalize and say that we have come so far since 1963, and I would not disagree.

But we still have so far to go! I will not take time here to point out all of the signs and symbols and symptoms of white supremacy that still infects our body politic because it will only take away from King’s words, and I think his argument is the one that should have the day.

So, to those who think that we have achieved justice and equality for all, let me ask you: when was the last time you held hands with someone of a different skin color and sang “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

The dream will only be achieved after equality and justice have been established for all Americans. That was King’s point 57 years ago, and it’s even more powerful today.