Ex Libris by Michiko Kakutani

Author:Michiko Kakutani [Kakutani, Michiko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

A TESTAMENT OF HOPE

The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

(1986)

Edited by James M. Washington

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life was a testament to the power of one man to bend the arc of history toward justice. And more than half a century after his death, his speeches and writings not only stand as essential documents in the history of the American civil rights movement: they have inspired change—and continue to inspire change—around the world from eastern Europe to Soweto to Tiananmen Square to Hong Kong.

The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, King grew up in the church, and the sonorous cadences and ringing, metaphor-rich language of the King James Bible came instinctively to him. Quotations from the Bible, along with its vivid imagery, animated his writings, and he used them to situate the painful history of African Americans within the context of Scripture.

In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King referred to Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, in drawing a distinction between just and unjust laws. In “The Drum Major Instinct,” he used a passage from Saint Mark as a springboard by which to argue that the human craving for recognition—the “desire to lead the parade”—must be put in the service of justice, of fighting for the less fortunate. And in his “I Have a Dream” speech, he alluded to a well-known passage from Galatians, speaking of “that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands.”

The “Dream” speech also contains echoes of Shakespeare (“this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent”) and popular songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (“Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York,” “Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California”). Such references added amplification and depth of field to the speech and gave audiences touchstones that might resonate with their own lives.

King, who had a doctorate in theology and once contemplated a career in academia, was shaped by his childhood in his father’s church and by his later studies of thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, Gandhi, and Hegel. Along the way, he developed a gift for synthesizing disparate ideas and motifs and making them his own—a gift that enabled him to address many different audiences at once while taking ideas that some might find radical at first and making them feel accessible and familiar.

By nestling his arguments within a historical continuum, King was able to lend them the authority of tradition and the weight of association. For some in his audience, the articulation of his dream for America would have evoked conscious or unconscious memories of Langston Hughes’s call in a 1935 poem to “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of the “wonderful America, which the founding fathers dreamed.” His final lines in the March on Washington speech came from a Negro spiritual reminding listeners of slaves’ sustaining faith in the possibility of liberation: “Free at

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