The American King
Martin Luther King Jr.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
MLK.
We celebrate his titanic life tomorrow.
We remember what he did, what he stood for, and for what he was laid down in a casket at age 39 with a wife and four young children.
He is world famous and broadly revered, but he was reviled by most Americans while he lived.
That King was smeared as a “communist, a deviant, an agitator and a traitor” during his lifetime makes clear the “high court of history” renders its verdict far outside the lines of popular opinion and current events.
Like King, Abraham Lincoln faced similar scorn in his time.
Here was President Harding at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1923:
No leader was ever more unsparingly criticized or more bitterly assailed. He was lashed by angry tongues and ridiculed in press and speech until he drank from as bitter a cup as was ever put to human lips, but his faith was unshaken and his patience never exhausted. Some one sent me recently an illumined and framed quotation which fell from his lips when the storm of criticism was at its height:
“If I were trying to read,” he said, “much less answer all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the best I know how, the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing it to the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me will not amount to anything. If the end brings me out all wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”…
…Reflecting now on the lampooning and heedless attack and unjustifiable abuse which .bruised his heart and tested his patience, we may accept its expression as one of the abused privileges under popular government, when passion sways and bitterness inspires, but for which there is compensation in the assurance that when men have their feet firmly planted in the right, and do the very best they can and "keep on doing it", they come out all right in the end, and all the storm does not amount to anything.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American, a citizen of a nation that he loved enough to make better by dying for the most ephemeral of all things. Freedom.
Thomas Paine understood this.
Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
Martin Luther King was an American founding father as surely as George Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Madison.
He was a redeemer of the American Revolution as surely as Lincoln and Douglass. He was an American martyr like his peers John and Robert Kennedy, who were murdered by hatred, while leading the country over the next rise towards the place that Martin Luther King would see first.
What was that place?
It seems to me that Martin Luther King must either be believed or dismissed regarding what it is he told us he saw.
Was he a prophet or a charlatan?
There seems to me to be no middle ground, and so I choose to believe. It is from this belief that faith springs that no matter how dangerous and dire these days may feel they will yield because, in the end, I know where we are headed.
A great many Americans have dreamed of that place, but they couldn’t imagine it clearly enough to paint the dream so others could see things that did not yet seem possible.
They were guided towards a destination that was rooted in belief that the ideals of the country would prevail over the brutality of whatever moment of injustice temporarily prevailed.
This belief was rooted in the faith that American justice and progress march inexorably forward.
It is what Lafayette believed.
He believed that the American Revolution and the principles of American liberty would eventually end slavery, colonialism and repression because the power of liberty could not be contained. When independence was won he declared “humanity has its victory, Liberty has its country.” Lafayette was not naive nor was he a utopian.
What he foresaw was the unleashing of an unstoppable tide. He predicted the new world would be the salvation of the old and that in time it would save the world. He was right, but he also understood that saving America was a recurring obligation that would never fade.
Lincoln spoke of this at Gettysburg with a grim determination and resolve that the United States of America would be what it proclaimed itself to be:
…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Franklin Roosevelt talked about it when he delivered his epic speech on freedom that endures as the “Four Freedoms” speech:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
John Kennedy talked about it when he spoke before the Massachusetts legislature as president-elect:
History will not judge our endeavors--and a government cannot be selected--merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these.
For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us--recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state--our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions:
First, were we truly men of courage--with the courage to stand up to one's enemies--and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one's associates--the courage to resist public pressure, as well as private greed?
Secondly, were we truly men of judgment--with perceptive judgment of the future as well as the past--of our own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others--with enough wisdom to know that we did not know, and enough candor to admit it?
Third, were we truly men of integrity--men who never ran out on either the principles in which they believed or the people who believed in them--men who believed in us--men whom neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert from the fulfillment of our sacred trust?
Finally, were we truly men of dedication--with an honor mortgaged to no single individual or group, and compromised by no private obligation or aim, but devoted solely to serving the public good and the national interest.
John Winthrop talked about it in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but Martin Luther King of Atlanta, Georgia, born in 1929, was the first to see it clearly enough to tell us about it.
The speech was delivered on April 3, 1968. I would encourage you to listen to it today. It is a prophetic vision:
It is one of the most important speeches in American history.
It was Martin Luther King’s last sermon.
His hour of death was at hand, and there can be no doubt that he knew his fate as surely as did Christ 2,000 years before.
His speech straddled life and death as it moved through all time from antiquity to the present and into the undiscovered future.
At the climax of his prophesy, at the edge of his own mortality, he declares that he has seen the just America that exists from the mountain top from which he alone was allowed to paint the future.
He led his people to the edge of a new era during which the fulfillment of the American Revolution was at hand.
He speaks as a man with ambition, love and hopes for a long life.
He expresses his indifference towards all of the material things that fade away and mean nothing in the end because he declares his certainty that all of the sacrifices and deprivation will lead to the proverbial promised land, which is what the civil rights movement was about.
Dr. King is one of the greatest Americans who has ever lived. He is a champion of human rights, freedom, democracy and liberty.
His memory will endure as long as America does — and America will endure.
The celebration of Martin Luther King’s life is a day on which the sacrifices that expanded freedom are remembered.
Martin Luther King has taken his place on the National Mall, where he will stand for all time. He is the rock, and a reminder of the triumph of justice and love over oppression and hate.
Dr. King is an icon and a legend.
He was a black man from Atlanta. He was a preacher with a PhD. He was a Nobel laureate.
He was a husband and a father.
He was an American.
We should all be proud of that, and more importantly, we should choose to believe that what he was was more than words.
It was our destiny, and like King, we may not get there, but our children or their children will.
This is one of your best essays. It reminds us of the America we used to have and, god willing, will have again in the future. Not a perfect America but an America that is always striving towards a more perfect union. We are in a very dark place at the moment. For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that someday I can look back at this time nostalgically and say, " this was the time America lost its mind but we have regained our sanity and we are America again." Unlike Dr. King, I have not been to the mountain top and I cannot see the promised land. I can only hope its out there.
Great essay !!! Again !! There’s that saying “May you live in interesting times”. It’s true for me. When I was about 5 or 6 my mother graduated from Hofstra university. The speaker at the graduation was Dr King. Don’t ask me what he said . I was 5 or 6. But I do remember he wore a purple robe and he shook my hand as my mom graduated. No daycare . We were poor so I was there. Met Putin at a party in the 80’s living in Paris. He was likely KGB then but we just thought he was the goofy Russian guy trying to be cool and failing. Got a ton of those kind of stories. If I told you who I’m meeting later today you wouldn’t believe me. My life has been interesting and it’s still interesting and THAT is what gives me hope for the future of our country. One never knows what happens next and it turns on a dime .