remaining awake through a great revolution.

The first words of a Martin Luther King speech I learned is from a speech he gave the night before he was murdered. My father knew this speech from memory. And on one cloudy January Saturday afternoon in 1982, he wrote it down and made me sit with him to memorize it.

There’s always a story that comes with a gesture like that. This is my father’s: he was 14 years old in 1968 and lived in Memphis. He had joined the sanitation workers march earlier in the week. He heard MLK give this speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis.  The rest… is history. I can assure you at 7 I didn’t fully understand the weight of these words. I knew they were important. I knew my father’s story in relation to those words were important. My father tried to teach me MLK’s intonation and inflection in his turn of phrase. In my little person voice, he wanted to evoke as much as possible the language and moment. So some weeks later, LP recordings of Martin Luther King’s speeches surfaced. I remembering listening to The Drum Major Instinct often.

I haven’t thought about those lazy Saturday afternoons in years. Or even the essays and speeches I wrote from elementary to high school for the Milwaukee Public School’s annual MLK Speech and Essay contests (yeah, just when you think it couldn’t get any nerdier in my past, booyah). But today, I’ve read some great posts from other writers about the other words he said beyond I Have A Dream that you can read here, here and here.  I’d also point out that the arc of the I Have A Dream speech in our sanitized canonization of King ignores the a key detail about  the March on Washington. The 1963 March was called the March on Washington for JOBS and FREEDOM. That was not a mistake.  A. Philip Randolf, a prominent union leader, was also a keynote speaker that day as well (something I also learned from recorded LPs of great black men in history courtesy of dear old dad) and according to some stories I’ve heard, was a better speech than King’s.  Yet, in King’s speech, he also clearly made an argument that not only addressed racial inequality, but also quality of life for workers. Civil Rights and unions have long history in mobilization and action.  A fine detail one discovers in college seminars or documentaries.

I got the title of this post from a lesser known King speech given in the weeks before his death. It still carries a profound resonance today:

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

All of this is a longer way of saying, if you haven’t read his other speeches, please do. The social justice agenda is a common thread in all of his writings and speeches and worked  in concert with his philosophy regarding racial inequality and human rights. The call to action and the deep understanding that change takes great effort and perseverance.